Revolutionize Your Customer Onboarding
Your playbook to get customers to value quickly.
Member Challenge
Onboarding is no easy feat. With many different internal functions involved and so many customer touchpoints, there's plenty of room for error, including:
- Mismatched expectations about responsibilities, timelines, and outcomes.
- Underwhelming customers by overpromising and underdelivering on product experience and value.
- Poor project management, resulting in missed milestones and delayed time to value (TTV).
- Overservicing or underservicing customers.
- Lack of processes and documents, resulting in delays and inconsistent experiences and outcomes.
- Confusion around when onboarding starts, when it stops, and who is ultimately accountable.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- View onboarding as one step in a broader process that involves many functions across the organization. Onboarding is the most important step to ensuring successful long-term customer relationships next to sales. Working together to succeed in the early stages of the customer relationship is critical for retention and account growth.
- Onboarding starts before the sale. Expectations for onboarding and outcomes of using the solution are set during the sales process before onboarding takes place.
- Connect value delivery with customer goals. Planning value delivery linked to the reasons the customer purchased is the essence of strong onboarding.
- Internal alignment and coordination is the absolute critical success factor of seamless onboarding.
Impact and Result
- Understand current maturity, high-priority paint points, and opportunities for growth.
- Improve internal processes, communication, and process efficiency and effectiveness.
- Know where resources are needed to improve the onboarding process.
- Develop recommendations for executable onboarding improvement initiatives.
- Develop a target customer onboarding journey and executable process improvement initiatives that address top pain points and gaps.
Research & Tools
| Name | Actions |
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1. Revolutionize Your Customer Onboarding Storyboard – A step-by-step overview of how to benchmark new customer onboarding performance, develop a target customer onboarding journey, and develop initiatives and recommendations for improved business outcomes.
Make meaningful improvements to your new customer onboarding journey. This storyboard will help you understand current onboarding maturity and performance benchmarks, identify top pain points and critical gaps, and develop process improvements for a stronger customer onboarding experience.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Revolutionize Your Customer Onboarding Storyboard
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2. Onboarding Diagnostic – Assess and benchmark your current onboarding performance and maturity.
This worksheet will help you assess your current customer onboarding performance and maturity and identify initial recommendations for improvement.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Onboarding Diagnostic
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3. Onboarding RACI – Align on onboarding roles and responsibilities.
This worksheet will help you assign tasks and responsibilities for strong internal collaboration and coordination.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Onboarding RACI
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4. Onboarding Executive Presentation Template – Make the case for meaningful onboarding program improvements.
Use this presentation to present your findings and recommendations to executives.
| Name | Actions |
|---|---|
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Onboarding Executive Presentation Template
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Onsite Workshop: Revolutionize Your Customer Onboarding
Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Do-It-Yourself Implementation
The slides in this Best Practice Blueprint will walk you step-by-step through every phase of your project with supporting tools and templates ready for you to use.
Project Accelerator Workshop
You can also use this Best Practice Blueprint to facilitate your own project accelerator workshop within your organization using the workshop slides and facilitation instructions provided in the Appendix.
Module 1: Assess the Onboarding Current State
The Purpose
- Assess your current onboarding maturity.
- Map current onboarding process and customer journeys; identify pain points.
- Gather feedback from internal teams and customers.
- Summarize overall themes, major pain points, and challenges of the current process.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Performance and maturity benchmarks
- Documented pain points, issues, and barriers to success
- Comprehensive view of current onboarding performance
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 1.1 Discuss and document reasons for changing onboarding. |
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| 1.2 Assess onboarding maturity using Info-Tech’s Onboarding Diagnostic. |
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| 1.3 Map out the current onboarding process. |
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| 1.4 Document current pain points experienced across functions and their root causes. |
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Module 2: Assess the Onboarding Current State (cont’d.)
The Purpose
- Assess your current onboarding maturity.
- Map current onboarding process and customer journeys; identify pain points.
- Gather feedback from internal teams and customers.
- Summarize overall themes, major pain points, and challenges of the current process.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Performance and maturity benchmarks
- Documented pain points, issues, and barriers to success
- Comprehensive view of current onboarding performance
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 2.1 Map out current key customer journey. |
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| 2.2 Document pain points along customer journey and their root causes. |
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| 2.3 Assess onboarding maturity using Info-Tech’s Onboarding Diagnostic. |
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| 2.4 Review and discuss the Onboarding Diagnostic results. |
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Module 3: Define the Onboarding Target State
The Purpose
- Design target onboarding process.
- Define resource and tool requirements.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Clear objectives
- Target-state journey map/process
- Key initiatives
- Clear roles and responsibilities
- Understanding of required resources
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 3.1 Discuss best practices for onboarding. |
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| 3.2 Indicate the target-state onboarding maturity. |
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| 3.3 Define onboarding goals based on recommendations from diagnostic and identified pains and opportunities from process and customer journey-mapping exercises. |
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| 3.4 Map out target-state process. |
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| 3.5 Map out target customer journey. |
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Module 4: Bridge the Gap and Create the Strategy
The Purpose
- Develop executive presentation.
- Communicate to key stakeholders, functions, and team members and gain buy-in.
- Plan for project launch and ongoing communication.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Onboarding improvement recommendations
- Executive and team buy-in
- Improved coordination between teams; greater functional alignment
| Activities | Outputs |
|---|---|
| 4.1 Assess the gaps between current and target states. |
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| 4.2 Brainstorm initiatives and actions to address gaps. |
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| 4.3 Discuss any challenges and obstacles to reaching these goals. Consider impacts on product, sales, IT, and customer success. |
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| 4.4 Determine metrics to be measured. |
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| 4.5 Develop and finalize project plan to achieve target onboarding process. |
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