Creating the Ultimate Client Onboarding Form
- A client onboarding form helps agencies streamline their operations by collecting contact information, brand details, billing preferences, and more in a single digital form.
- Use help text to guide clients through the process, keep forms concise and focused, and use conditional logic to show relevant questions based on client responses.
- With features like webhooks, custom status updates, and integrations with other platforms, agencies can automate tasks and create personalized experiences for their clients with SPP.
Client onboarding for agencies is an interesting topic a lot of people don’t dedicate enough time for. Instead, agency owners love obsessing over creating the perfect service, setting their prices correctly, and going all out on lead generation. Once the clients trickle in, though, they notice that they can’t can’t keep them for long.
One explanation is that they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their onboarding process, or that it’s simply not optimized enough. A key element when onboarding new clients should be the use of a client onboarding form. It allows you to get contact information from your clients, survey them about their brand, ensure that you know their preferred billing preferences, and ultimately they make project management easier.
Let’s take a closer look at these types of forms, and how they can help you streamline your agency operations.
What is a customer onboarding form?
A customer onboarding form is the perfect opportunity to gather client information easily. Think of it as a digital client onboarding questionnaire that you can make use of at key moments in the client onboarding journey.
An onboarding form for clients can be designed in multiple ways, be it with tools such as Monday.com, Google Sheets, or dedicated software such as SPP.co.
If you’re indeed using Service Provider Pro’s client portal software, there are multiple touch-points where it makes sense to use the onboarding form for your clients:
With our onboarding page builder, you can create a checklist and link to the form.
If you’re using service-specific project intake forms, you can assign onboarding forms.
Add the onboarding form to the sidebar and let clients access them at any time.
Send onboarding forms within your new client welcome email.
Client onboarding form design choices
The look and feel of your forms are one thing you should keep in mind when designing them. A new customer will most likely be unfamiliar with the agency tools you use, so ensure that everything in your form is either self-explanatory, or tell them what needs to be done.
In SPP’s form builder allows you to add help text to most of the elements, making the new client onboarding process a breeze. The help text section even supports HTML, so you can link to external resources if needed.
What I’ve noticed looking at hundreds of agency onboarding forms is that they are very long. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes they have to be, but don’t overwhelm your clients with a long one-pager. Most will simply abandon the form if they feel it’ll take them a long time to fill out.
Use SPP’s page break feature to create a multipage form, and ideally, tell your clients how long it takes to fill out the form (in minutes). You can even use Bootstrap’s progress bars if you feel really fancy.
Other things to keep in mind:
Use the right elements in the form: For instance, if clients should select multiple options, use the option group field instead of the drop-down.
Make it easy to reach out to you: Clients often struggle to complete a form, so make it easy to contact you, for instance via our Calendly integration.
Keep it focused for everyone: Use form rules to show questions based on your client’s responses with our conditional logic feature.
Questions to ask in your client onboarding forms
I know that it can be overwhelming to build your first onboarding form, so I’ve prepared a few questions that you can use as a template.
Company related
What are basic details about your company?
Do you need to upload brand assets?
Who is the main point of contact?
Who needs access to your invoices?
Project related
Where do you want deliverables to be stored?
Who needs access to your projects?
Will you invite third-party collaborators to the client portal?
Will you require a revision process for your projects?
Feedback related
How would you rate this onboarding form?
Is there any information that you couldn’t provide?
Did we ask any unnecessary information?
How could we improve our onboarding process?
How to make an onboarding form
When it comes to creating an onboarding form, many agencies rely on outdated tools such as Google Sheets or Typeform. Don’t get me wrong, they get the job done, but they are not designed for onboarding. There are more powerful form builders out there that help you improve your workflow. You can automate form submissions (with Zapier), embed videos, allow clients to upload files, and even personalize the onboarding forms.
Collect project information, client data, files, and more.
At Service Provider Pro, we’ve created a form builder for client onboarding that makes it easy to gather information—from contact details to brand assets.
Set up onboarding templates and use them for different client types, such as new clients, existing clients, or even leads who haven’t purchased anything yet.
Here’s how to customize an onboarding form in SPP:
go to Forms → Onboarding Forms
create a new form
pick different elements on the right side
drag them to the left side and arrange them
save your form and preview it
Every client onboarding form has a unique link that makes it publicly accessible. To make it easier to read, click on the slug and change it to something like “onboarding.”
Next, preview your form and go through it to see if you can identify any issues with it.
Automating client onboarding forms
With your form created, you’ll hopefully think about how to automate customer onboarding and improve the B2B customer journey.
Luckily, SPP has just the right features for you. For example, you could set up a form.onboarding.submitted webhook and trigger scenarios in Make.com:
Set up a custom Onboarded status in SPP. Catch the webhook and change the client status when the form is submitted.
Add the client’s email address to a sequence in MailChimp for onboarded clients. Send a target email campaign with more information and resources.
Update a CRM field in the client’s profile with a link to a Hubspot Meetings. Use the CRM field to display an Onboarding call button inside the portal.
These are just a few ideas that I can think of. We have a variety of integrations that allow you to improve the onboarding experience with automated workflows. And if you need any help setting them up (or coming up with different ones), check out our certified experts.
Gather important onboarding information easily
It’s clear that no agency wants to spend time to onboard every new client manually unless they bring in a significant amount of revenue. In every other case, it’s better to make use of tools, processes and automations to get the job done efficiently.
