Client Onboarding

Client Onboarding for Professional Services

When a new client signs up, it’s not enough to leave them alone to jump into your service by themselves – you’ve got to have a clearly written process to make sure they know they’ve made the right choice.

Settling a new client into your business and establishing a good relationship is one of the best ways to reduce churn.

‘If you hold a customer’s hand for 90 days, they’ll be loyal for life’. – John Jantsch

The process of perfect onboarding differs depending on your business, but the essence is the same. Of course, you’re updating your CRM and complying with legal regulation, but that’s not going to make the customer think you’re the best choice and quell the buyer’s remorse. You’ve also got to build a relationship, get to know the customer’s individual needs (once they’ve signed up, they’re not just a vague profile or target audience) then integrate them into your existing business process.

Bonus: Looking for a real example use case from the super-successful DoubleDutch team? Click HERE to unlock it.

At Process Street, we’ve put together 14 templates you can use to get new clients settled in with minimal hassle. The templates include sample documents, ready-to-send emails and industry-specific advice for criminal lawyers, marketing agencies, and financial planners.

Want to get straight to the checklists? No problem! Here they are:

Client Onboarding Process for Financial Planners

A solid client onboarding process always important, but for financial planners it could mean the difference between a great working relationship and a compliance lawsuit. A new sign-on agrees to trust your decisions and considers you competent enough to handle the whole of their financial life.

This checklist guides you through the process of collecting contracts, arranging meetings, deciding when to review your progress and covering the legal side of what you do.

Client Onboarding Process for a Marketing Agency

Marketing agencies, while trying to strike the balance between art and science, already have their work cut out.

To scale, and get your new clients set up properly, you’ll want to follow a concise and clear-cut process that covers all the bases. What do you include in your welcome package? What questions should you ask in the questionnaire? This guide will answer these questions so you can concentrate on getting the best results for your clients and leave the details to us.

This checklist is a watertight guide to the process of introducing yourself to new clients, conducting meetings and leaving the best possible impression.

Client Onboarding Process for Criminal Law Firms

The client onboarding process for lawyers contains vital steps to ensure you comply with law when taking on a new case. With a 4-17% chance of being sued for malpractice each year, lawyers have to be especially cautious to stay away from trouble, especially considering that client onboarding itself can be a legal minefield.

While you might know a lot of the process already, human beings are prone to error, so following the steps outline here is a solid way to minimize risk.

High Touch Client Onboarding for SaaS Companies

Alongside a full guide to customer success for SaaS companies, this checklist is a great resource for SaaS owners looking to set up a high-touch process and get their customers to fall in love with their product just as much as they should.

You’ve got a great product, right? Well, if you don’t have the systems in place to convey that to your customers, it will make it hard for them to tell. Use this process for new customers to get them up and running with your SaaS as fast as you can, making sure the process is suited to their individual high-touch needs.

Website Design Client Onboarding Template

Making sure you get everything you need from your client during the onboarding process, and leading up to project start can be frustrating; you may find yourself wasting both time and resources chasing up your clients for specification documents and questionnaires.

You can save yourself a headache by automating many of those manual tasks with this checklist designed to get the most out of the onboarding process for your new website design clients.

Landlord Onboarding Checklist

As an estate agent, taking on new landlords is an involved process that requires you to be as efficient and respectful of your client’s time and resources as possible.

Basically, a highly competitive market, your onboarding process needs to be as streamlined and frictionless as possible. Landlords who feel the initial experience is too complicated, time-consuming or unnecessarily drawn-out are likely to walk out on you, preferring to go with a competitor with a more well-designed onboarding process.

Client Onboarding Checklist for an Accounting Firm

A successful onboarding process begins with understanding your customer’s needs.

Once you understand that, the next step is a solid process, and there is strength in standardization. You must consider each client’s individual requirements, but the core of your onboarding process will be a consistent, recurring process that applies to all new clients.

Having this whole process mapped out helps you to understand what needs to happen, and when, and ensures that everyone involves has a plan to follow.

Patient Intake Checklist for a Dental Clinic

The first actions you take in your onboarding process will have a lasting impact on your whole relationship with the patient. To say that onboarding is important would be an understatement – it is an essential process.

As someone who oversees onboarding for a dental clinic, you may be wondering the best way to implement a structured onboarding process. If that’s the case, we have something to help you out. In this checklist, the entire process is clearly outlined, making it easier than ever for you to get the job done in the best way possible without wasting time and energy with old, broken systems that pre-date recent advancements in technology.

You’ll wish you’d found this checklist sooner, for your own sake and your patients’!

Patient Intake Checklist for a Medical Clinic

In the healthcare industry, perhaps more than any other, first impressions are vital. Your prospective patient’s initial encounter with you and your clinic can be the deciding factor in their decision whether or not to go with you.

Whatever you can do to ease your patient’s burden and make them feel more comfortable is a must, and this often begins with the onboarding process.

Client Onboarding Checklist for Real Estate Sales

‘Client onboarding’ may sound like a separate part of business, but it is one of the most important elements along the road to long-term retention. Especially for a real estate agent, preparing a sound onboarding process that offers new clients value and makes them feel like going with you was a good decision, it can be a world of difference.

Consider, for example, the fact that most real estate clients sell, on average, once every seven years! That fact alone should be enough to convince you that your onboarding process is an invaluable opportunity to make a good impression and build the foundation for a lasting relationship.

Client Onboarding Checklist for a Managed Service Provider

It doesn’t matter what type of managed services you provide, simplifying the onboarding process for your new clients is mission-critical.

Your first priority as an MSP will be to understand your client’s business needs, as well as the context within which they are requesting your services. Each of your customers is unique, and especially when it comes to IT configurations, specifications can be wildly different.

Thus, it’s important that your onboarding process is robust enough to deal with the individual needs of each of your clients.

Client Onboarding Checklist for a Software Development Company

At the start of your working relationship, your customers will expect a lot from you. They will be needy, confused, and generally uncertain about the future – so it’s your job to educate them and make them feel comfortable from the very beginning of the onboarding process.

For a software design team, the onboarding process is intense as your clients will expect an easily customizable, high quality product, often with many revisions and a high degree of communication.

Making sure the onboarding process is as painless for them as possible helps you to focus on what matters – making a great product. You can save time on many manual tasks by using a checklist like the one we’ve prepared for you, and you’ll be able to rest assured you’ve done the best job possible in hand-holding your client through the entire onboarding process.

Client Onboarding Checklist for Management Consulting

Crafting a positive experience for your client at the start of the onboarding process will positively impact factors such as retention, customer lifetime value and profitability.

What’s more, the importance of a solid employee onboarding process for wealth management firms is well established. That initial period sets the tone for the remainder of the working relationship and, when done right, can help to bolster profitability for all parties involved.

Client Onboarding Checklist for an Insurance Broker

In real estate, it can be tough to hold on to long-term customers. The truth is, the average real estate client sells once every seven years, which means it’s easy for working relationships to fade out and for retention to be poor in the long-term.

In light of the fact that it costs on average five times more to obtain a new customer than it does to retain an old one, the importance of a good onboarding process for new real estate sales customers becomes clearer than ever.

With a solid process for onboarding your new clients, you’ll be able to automate and streamline the task of preparing new clients to work with you in full capacity; gathering their information, answering common questions, giving them “homework” to bring to your next meeting, and ultimately keep the momentum going from their initial decision to work with your real estate agency.

Automate your client onboarding process

At Process Street, we love helping you and your company tighten up your workflow and get the best results possible.

Whilst this is an extensive list of client onboarding checklists, Process Street helps with documentation of much more, from employee onboarding to content marketing, sales process, customer success and more.

Check out this video to learn more about how you can automate your client onboarding with Process Street:

If you thought this template pack was useful…

Then you might want to take a look at some of our other related packs:

Looking for other onboarding checklists? Let us know in the comments and we will do our best to write them for you.

14 Client Onboarding Checklists for Finance, IT, Medical, SaaS, Real Estate…