Why invest in customer onboarding?

Our recent Series A funding, though a huge milestone for us as a company, is also special because it is a sign that customer onboarding is finally getting the attention it needs. To help onboarding/implementation folks build a stronger case for customer onboarding within their companies, we took this opportunity to get a C-level perspective on onboarding from our customer community. 

Shekar Murthy, CCO of Yellow.AI, Tommy McClung, CEO of Release, and Deepak Kumar, CCO at ContractPodAi joined Srikrishnan Ganesan, Co-founder & CEO @ Rocketlane, to share why onboarding matters in the context of their company’s growth journey and how you can make a case for investing in customer onboarding.  

Here are the takeaways from the session. 

The top 3 reasons to invest in customer onboarding 

Shekar Murthy, CCO, Yellow.AI 

Yellow.AI is a next-gen total experience automation platform that helps companies provide delightful and hyper-personalized interactions with their customers. Yellow serves over 1000 customers across 50 countries in over 80 languages. 

Here are Shekar’s top reasons why Yellow.AI invested in customer onboarding.

1. Improving customer experience 

Yellow.AI aims to help its customers deliver consistent on-brand experiences to their customers. This makes it more critical to ensure that they orchestrate delightful experiences for their customers.
Investing in a purpose-built onboarding tool like Rocketlane helps them focus on customer experience at a critical stage like onboarding. They continue to stay true to their brand promise. 

2. Accelerating time to go-live 

Onboarding is a critical step in ensuring faster go-lives. Onboarding at Yellow.AI has seen a 10-15% reduction in time to go-live in just four months of using Rocketlane.  

3. Ensuring transparency and performance for each account/client

Transparency and tracking performance across each client is critical to supporting the company’s current growth rate. Having a dedicated tool ensures that the onboarding team, as well as the leadership team, can get visibility into each account and every project. 

How Yellow.ai saves over 50,000 hours every year with Rocketlane

Tommy McClung, Co-founder & CEO, Release 

Release provides on-demand environments for development, staging, and production to help companies streamline their development process so they can build better software faster.

Here’s why Tommy chose to invest in a customer onboarding tool at the Series A funding stage of Release’s journey.

1. Retaining trust and sustaining the momentum from the sales stage

The period after the sale can be make-or-break. Customer onboarding is the best way to retain the goodwill earned during sales and use that to build momentum to grow the account. 

2. Preparing for scale  

Investing in a purpose-built customer onboarding tool means that you can design your customer onboarding process in a way that lets you run future implementation/onboarding journeys at scale. 

3. Enabling expectation setting and collaboration on both sides 

A two-way process like customer onboarding relies heavily on ensuring consistent collaboration, communication, and expectation setting across two organizations. Most project management tools do not lend themselves to this use case. Having a unified platform helps hold both sides involved and accountable in the onboarding journey. 

Deepak Kumar, CCO, ContractPodAi

ContractPodAi simplifies the complexities of contract management by automating mundane tasks and reinventing complicated workflows for better resource utilization and efficiency. 

Here are Deepak’s top reasons for choosing to invest in customer onboarding.

1. Having a common platform for stakeholder alignment (enterprise clients)

Since ContractPodAi works primarily with enterprise customers, each onboarding project invariably involves multiple departments, stakeholders, and external partners. The success of a customer onboarding project thus relies heavily on getting all the stakeholders on the same page. This makes having a common collaboration platform for alignment a fundamental requirement. 

2. Ensuring customers get the actual value your product delivers 

Effective onboarding means that your customers derive the value promised to them during sales. Ineffective customer onboarding deprives you of an opportunity to set your customers up for success. 

3. Expansion within accounts 

Getting customer onboarding right ensures growth within an account on two counts. One, it ensures that customers are satisfied with the delivered experience. Secondly and more importantly, it ensures that they are equipped to use the product effectively, making it easy to grow the account. 

Making a business case for customer onboarding

Drawing from their experiences using Rocketlane, here’s what Shekar, Tommy, and Deepak said when asked why a business should invest in customer onboarding. 

Shekar Murthy, Yellow.AI 

1. Improved delivery costs due to people and process efficiency 

With a large CS team, improved collaboration and efficiency significantly impact Yellow.AI’s delivery costs as they look to onboard thousands of customers. Having a dedicated customer onboarding tool ensures that they can take transparency and project collaboration to the next level. 

2. Faster revenues thanks to faster activations

By accelerating go-lives, it is easy to justify the investment in customer onboarding by considering the additional ARR that was being activated. 

Tommy McClung, Release

1. Getting control of the chaos before it becomes a limiter to scale

For early-stage companies, implementation/customer onboarding lies at the intersection of multiple functions and teams. Customer onboarding is a potential bottleneck, given how challenging it can be to keep track of everything. Ensuring transparency and visibility is the only way to avoid this. 

2. Handling the two-sided nature of customer onboarding projects

Onboarding projects aren’t one-sided, and ensuring customer involvement and visibility is critical. Tools like Asana, JIRA, GitHub, etc., are not designed for onboarding and the challenges that come with it.

Even tools like Slack for customer communication are ineffective given their synchronous nature and the issue of data and updates being buried and lost in the history of conversations. 

3. Codifying customer onboarding to make it repeatable 

The ability to codify the onboarding process with different inputs from different customers is a big part of making onboarding repeatable. Having a purpose-built tool ensures that you’re able to codify all the steps and processes involved, so you’re building a consistent yet improving process. 

Deepak Kumar, ContractBotAi

1. Shorter customer implementation cycles and faster revenues

By shaving off a week or two of the customer implementation cycle, you can pull forward revenues and start making money faster since billing typically starts after go-live. Any company at the Series A stage or beyond needs to look critically for the dollar value return they can get by shortening customer onboarding. 

2. Downstream impact on NRR and account expansion

The positive impact on the customer experience metric has a substantial downstream impact on NRR and account expansion. 

3. Meeting the RFP qualifying criteria for large enterprises 

A visibility tool is a requirement that many large enterprises have right at the RFP (Request For Proposal) stage. A tool like Rocketlane can help companies pitch a robust and competitive offering as part of customer onboarding.

Try Rocketlane

Rocketlane is a collaborative platform purpose-built for customer onboarding that allows for creating and assigning tasks and checklists to the individuals concerned. You can collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and files from within the app. You can also invite your customers to your Rocketlane workspace and get them to collaborate with you to make the customer onboarding journey a success. Sign up for a free trial today!

Read more

1. 4 Ways Rocketlane Makes Onboarding Smoother, Simpler, Smarter
2. ‍The Right Time to Invest in Customer Onboarding Software
3. How to Pick the Right Customer Onboarding Software [Free RFP]
4. Top 5 benefits to having a dedicated customer onboarding platform