Building a customer onboarding team? Start here

Being the first customer onboarding hire can be overwhelming. You are chasing every opportunity to reduce time to value and increase customer adoption. You try playbooks, tailor them to work for your business, and go through many iterations. Soon enough, you will need to answer questions like: 

1. What successful approaches can you take to ensure your team is doing what they should be doing?
2. How can we set KPIs that uniquely align with our goals?

Preflighters discuss the foundational building blocks that helped them build a successful customer onboarding org. 

Noah Chamberlain

We have a lengthy implementation and onboarding phase for our product, and we have been having a lot of discussions around KPIs and how we can measure success with our customer onboarding process. We are currently working on a customer survey to collect feedback that we will send out at the end of onboarding. It is an excellent place to start since it helps you understand what your customers think and iterate very quickly!

Katie Clark

When I started at my current company three years ago, I had exactly these questions. Here are a few things that are consistently tracked across most customer onboarding teams:

1. Volume driven per individual on your team (number of customer onboarding projects completed in X time frame)
2. CSAT scores sent out after customer onboarding has been completed
3. ACV of accounts moved through onboarding per individual
4. Time to complete onboarding (on average) per individual, per team, per department

Once you have a baseline of metrics you can track and measure, you can expand from there.

Anya Palisch

I recommend optimizing for two metrics that create a  system for checks and balances. I look at the throughput, i.e., pure output like the number of implementations completed each month + a customer sentiment metric. Post-implementation, it can be  Implementation-NPS/CSAT.

As the customer onboarding org matures, you can start to layer in more and dial in on behavior depending on your business needs. Here are really nuanced questions you answer when you layer in more between two metrics:

1. Should implementation for high ARR customers be longer and more in-depth because we can afford that?
2. Having your team track hours, even for a short period, will allow you to get to the granular details and make better-informed decisions.

More resources

1. Setting up your first customer onboarding team 
2. Remote Customer Onboarding: The New Bottleneck for Fast-Growing SaaS Companies
3. A 'Readiness Kit' for customer onboarding