Customer onboarding challenges from Seed to Series B

Hiring

CS can be seen as a call center. But they are the ones helping retain customers who ultimately drive tonnes of revenue in the world of SaaS. Therefore, getting the hiring right is essential. Measure the number of hours it takes to onboard a customer, the number of customers you expect to close (when you are growing at a specific rate), and the time required to do other activities that you need to do to be a successful CSM team. These data points help you get your hiring formula right. It helps you calculate and justify to your executives the headcount you need to expand resources. And every CEO is going to want that growth. 

Thinking all customers are equal

This is similar to Donna Weber's special snowflake idea where you want to provide the very best service to all customers. It works well in the early stages when you don't have many customers. But it becomes tough to maintain and scale. Instead, create clear customer segments of SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers. And create different playbooks for them at all stages of their customer journey, particularly during onboarding. This allows you to scale while improving numbers.

Manually assigning onboardings

Always depending on a human to go about clicking buttons will not be fruitful. Instead, automate this within a few seconds of a closed opportunity. Bam! Everything's assigned, and it fires off an email to the CSM team and account managers. The aim is to let them know who to do a warm handoff introduction with and allow them to schedule their kickoff call. That's really what will help you speed up the onboarding and reduce human intervention with the stuff you automate.

Expecting to have high-value conversations during the kickoff call

This is something that anyone responsible for onboarding would like to have. But not everyone is necessarily prepared to have it; sometimes the customer is not in the right mindset to have that conversation. During the kickoff, customers just want to get started and get as many technical configurations done as possible. For instance, Chili Piper implemented a ‘Big Six Initiative’ across the company that ensured that they were capturing the six main reasons as to why a company chose Chili Piper in the pre-sales stage as early as possible. And they are ensuring that all that information comes into an automated handover to the CSM so that they do not have to ask the customer the big six questions, which are on:

• The customer’s business objectives
• Their user personas
• Their use cases
• Their KPIs
• The baselines of those KPIs
• Milestones they are trying to achieve

This ensured that they were kicking off equipped with the information and tailoring content that will get customers started as quickly as possible.

And, of course, if you need to verify anything or if something's changed, then you can have that conversation. But refrain from using the kickoff as a high-level scoping call because that's not what customers want to do during kickoff; they just want to get started.

Thinking self-serve onboarding is too complicated 

Sometimes, your offering might be complicated. But thinking it's too hard for customers to self-serve is not going to move the project along. Provide customers steps or help guides to take home and work on their own. Have playbooks instead of plain docs. Setting up video repositories also helps customers learn and do some of the setting up by themselves; you can then go to meetings with questions about what they've set up. This moves the ball quicker by speeding up the onboarding cycle.

Thinking onboarding ends with user training

Sometimes, the users attending these training sessions would only have their first view of the product. They wouldn't know why they are in training. They wouldn't have an incentive to adopt the product. They would feel like it was all the bells and whistles of what your offering could do for them, rather than being very specific to the reasons why it had been purchased and how it was going to make them more effective.

So rather than ending onboarding with end-user training, put in two new meeting types:

1. One is a launch meeting, which is technically the end of the onboarding. You have gone through all Q&A, all checks, and all user accounts are ready to go. A launch event, gamification, and incentivizing help get users to adopt it. Set targets to achieve and work towards them.
2. The second one is a successful meeting that happens 30 days after the launch meeting. At this point, you are assessing whether the licenses that have been purchased have been utilized, so we're truly taking the customer from onboarding to adoption. We're not leaving it to chance. This is also an opportunity to ensure that the onboarding has succeeded in its mission. You can now go into deeper use cases. Chili Piper has this concept of 'almost ever boarding customers', rather than just setting them up with the product and forgetting them at the point where the users have been trained.