You’ve worked your butt off. You’ve created all of the processes and plans for your customer onboarding experience. The effort has been put in but for some reason the execution isn’t cutting it. Then you see it. Your disengaged team.

A checked-out group can completely derail your efforts. This can be brought on by a number of factors like trying to make a series of poor fit customers successful or constant firefighting over product issues. You can’t remove every problem, but there is one thing you can play with - team enthusiasm.

That’s our focus for this week. Your team of onboarding legends!

Let’s look at the idea of Social Contagion and a 5-step project to create a positive team dynamic that influences customers.

Grab a cuppa, let’s dive in.

🧠 The Theory: Social Contagion

Humans are wired to unconsciously pick up on and mirror the emotions, behaviours, and mindsets of those around us. It's a built-in tendency rooted in brain processes like empathy and social learning. We attune ourselves to the people we interact with frequently.

Because of this, the dispositions of just a few individuals in a team can rapidly colour and shape the overall group dynamic and atmosphere. Negative attitudes can breed more negativity, but positive mindsets and passion can be powerfully contagious.

If you understand these social contagion mechanics, you can be purposeful about the types of dynamics and atmospheres you want to create in your team. Negativity may spread quickly, but so can positivity. It's about being mindful of who and what we're allowing to 'infect' our environment.

👀 The Example: Peloton

Peloton, the high-end exercise bike company, has built a cult following. You may even be one of their loyal customers and already know what I’m about to say! Their success goes far beyond the actual product. It relies heavily on social contagion.

Peloton instructors are known for their energetic and motivating personalities. Their passion for fitness is contagious, drawing viewers in and making them want to participate. These Peloton instructors are incidentally now famous for it and are businesses in their own right.

Let’s be honest, would a lacklustre fitness instructor motivate you to get out of bed and smile through the pain? Your energy would be drained before you even started!

Customer onboarding needs Peloton level enthusiasm to build customer motivation and engagement.

🧪 The Project: Build a Buzz

This project uses social contagion theory to leverage a key asset, passion. Here's how to do it:

Step 1: Enthusiasm Audit

You’ll need a baseline for the team. Assess their enthusiasm levels. You can do this in a number of ways. Think about the personalities in your team. Some will prefer to talk face to face, others will prefer to anonymously offer their thoughts. If you want to get the most out of this audit, one size will not fit all.

Conduct anonymous surveys or hold focus groups to gauge onboarding manager sentiment towards the company and product.

Ask them:

• to rate their enthusiasm for their role - newer hires will likely be higher on the scale than longer term team members. Be aware of this.

• to rate their manager’s enthusiasm for onboarding - you should audit yourself as well as your team. How is your disposition impacting them?

• about their perceived impact of their role on the company - this has a strong impact on enthusiasm. The team want to feel like their work means something.

• what team do they see themselves being a part of in a year - if they say onboarding, great. If they are using the role as a stepping stone to another team. That’s okay, but important to be aware for the future. Just highlight to them what you need from them to get to that point.

This audit will give you valuable details. Not only on what is to be improved, but also where enthusiasm exists and can be amplified.

Step 2: Analyse the Energy

Identify any flags that come up. Someone could be very disillusioned with the role and haven’t felt comfortable saying so before. Has a team member highlighted a passion for a different role like sales or something technical? Dig into where the passion lies for each person.

This won’t all be negative. Be sure to identify the positives already existing. Are the enthusiasm levels already high? Dig into why that is. See what you can leverage to keep that momentum going.

Step 3: Give it a Boost

Now that you have the information from your team you can look to add to the enthusiasm. Get creative with how to do this. Here are some ideas:

• Product deep dives: Organise regular training sessions where managers learn advanced product features and success stories. This will give them new fodder for their customers calls and refreshes their talk tracks.

• Success sharing: Hold sessions where the team share positive customer experiences. Allow team members to put forward questions or challenges to solve as a group.

• Company wide shoutouts: Elevate the impact of Customer onboarding to the wider company. This not only helps with recognition but also with social contagion beyond the onboarding team themselves.

Step 4: Spread the Buzz to Customers

Encourage your team to add to their energy when working with customers. They don’t need to go over the top! The idea is to actively highlight customer wins, excitement for the improvements the product is making for them, and each value step along the way.

Examples:

• Enthusiastic Greetings: Develop a standard for enthusiastic onboarding greetings. Expand on the welcome email to insert more energy. Create a personalised video showing a smiling and enthusiastic onboarding manager.

• Passionate Trainings: Your team have done it hundreds of times. Your customer has never seen it before. Encourage the team to reset and see the experience from the customer’s eyes.

• Positive Reinforcement: Each win for the customer is a win for the team. Any time value has been realised through using the product is the time to enthusiastically reinforce the buying decision.

Step 5: Measure, Recognise, Repeat

Track the impact of increased team enthusiasm. Create or update customer satisfaction surveys to include questions about the onboarding manager's enthusiasm and its impact on the customer’s experience.

Track the time it takes customers to achieve key milestones and see if manager enthusiasm correlates with faster adoption. Take note of responses on calls and emails that show a customer is getting a taste of social contagion.

Aim to repeat this exercise every 6 months. New ideas will form in that time and you can build on the success achieved.

🤓 The Analysis: Catch the Bug

In my experience, onboarding managers care deeply about the success of their customers. I’ve been lucky enough to work with many of them over the years.

Teams that demonstrate genuine enthusiasm for the software can create a positive and contagious atmosphere. This excitement can rub off on new customers, making them more engaged and eager to learn about the product's benefits. The onboarding manager doesn't need to directly convince the customer; their own positivity "spreads" to the customer.

One more thing to note…

Can you name any Peloton competitors? I can’t. This small change of dialling up enthusiasm will set you apart from your competition.

What to expect from doing this project:

• Team satisfaction increases

• Higher customer engagement

• Create advocates from day one

• Stronger position within the company

• Faster product adoption from customers

If you have added gamification to your customer onboarding then try adding in some social contagion to the mix.

And because you made it this far…