Who should own customer onboarding?

You want to ensure that your customers see value in your product or service. Who would you assign this mighty task to?

July 4, 2022

Author

Usha Kalva

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illustrator

Sivaprakash

Your company has created the best product or service out there! You want to ensure that your customers see value in your product or service. Who would you assign this mighty task to? Which team is trained to handle the specific use-cases for your customers?

Here are snippets of the conversations on Preflight and what our community has to say about this.

Filip Rodnic, Customer Success Deployment Manager - Parkour Inc.

We have the “CS Deployment Manager” role, an onboarding specialist within the CS organization. The CS Deployment Manager’s responsibility ends when the customer goes live in the production environment. However, our customers are classified as high-touch within the B2B model; hence they require a fair amount of attention and technical platform knowledge from the person who does the onboarding.

Piyush Wason

Our product is enterprise-level, so we have a dedicated onboarding team divided further into four teams:

Project Managers
PMO
Implementation Specialists
Solution Consultants - Enablement

Maeve Murphy, Customer Success Associate - Chronus

We have a hybrid model. We have implementation specialists, but our CSMs are also responsible for some implementations. CSMs are generally assigned more straightforward implementations and are in charge of expansion implementations. We can reach out to CS Ops for backup/implementation assistance. We are trying to move away from CSMs taking on implementation as we grow our implementation team.

Greg Maynes, Manager - Client Services IBISWorld

In my experience, clients in the mid to enterprise markets warrant onboarding by their client success representatives as it helps build rapport and ensure that clients see the value. In smaller markets, CS usually has less bandwidth for onboarding, as it dilutes service for legacy clients and clients in onboarding.

When making a good impression, the earlier, the better! Make sure you equip your team with the right tools to give your customers a stellar onboarding experience.