3 Ways To Drive Customer Onboarding Toward Completion

  Ross Palley

We invited three B2B tech startups in the Venture Lane community to participate in our Customer Onboarding Lab. Founders worked directly with a Mentor Committee of seasoned customer success leaders in Boston tech to optimize their customer onboarding processes for speed and product adoption.

On the Mentor Committee, we welcomed Erica Ayotte (VP of Customer Success @ Privy),Ashley Paradela (Head of Customer Success, North America @ Funnel), and Lauren Sickel (Assoc Director of Customer Success - Onboarding @ WordStream). Check out their key takeaways below!

Customer ROI is your best friend for getting folks to the finish line…

• Highlight your star pupils. If you have customers that fly through onboarding and get tons of immediate ROI from your product, package that story into a case study and share with new customers as their onboarding begins.
  
  

• Communicate lost ROI if onboarding stalls. When customers fall behind on their onboarding to-do's, quantify & communicate the foregone ROI. Lost value can often be a bigger motivator than value gained.

• Report ROI differently to buyers vs end users. Buyers/decision makers at your customers likely use different ROI models than their end user counterparts. Account for these differences when reporting value gained by completing onboarding steps or, as mentioned above, value lost when onboarding lags.

Longer onboarding processes warrant smarter design…

• Front-load onboarding with quick wins. If your onboarding process is on the 'robust' side, make sure the first wave of customer to-do's deliver immediate value. Early rewards motivate customers to see onboarding through to the end.

• Give customers a full calendar view at the start. Make sure your point person for the implementation knows which departments/individuals need to be activated at each stage of onboarding. Getting calendar invites out to key players ahead of time is simple but effective.

• Not sure if your heavy onboarding can be scaled down? Make a list of everything your team controls during the implementation vs everything the customer controls. If the customer list is relatively short, then there's room for making efficiency gains. 

Get midstream feedback on the process & optimize…

• Bake feedback requests into the product. In-app queries get much higher response rates than asking for feedback via email, Slack, or other outside channels. 

• Satisfaction is good; opinions are better. Folks generally like to be asked for their opinion. Satisfaction scores make for decent marketing material, but asking for customers' opinions on specific parts of their onboarding experience will give you the details you need to really iron out the kinks. 

• Customers should love your product more than your CS team. If you're getting glowing reviews of your customer success & support teams that outshine any feedback you've been getting on the product, this is likely an indicator that your cost to serve is too high. Try to scale down some of the high-touch implementation support and scale up self-service motions.   
  
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