3 Things To Keep In Mind When Building Your High-Touch Onboarding Program

In order to truly help your customers use, know, and love your product, you need to think strategically about your company’s onboarding program. There are three specific areas to consider in order to build a successful high-touch onboarding experience that will scale as your business grows.

Is High-Touch Onboarding a Project or a Program?

When setting up a high-touch onboarding program, it's important to think of it as a "program" rather than just a collection of projects. While you may have many customer success projects happening simultaneously, these should all roll up to an overall onboarding program.

A program has metrics, a strategy, and projects assigned to it that support its objectives. Onboarding as a program is a product offering at the highest level.

Don’t Go Checklist Blind

If your onboarding program only focuses on individual customer checklists, it will fall short. Tracking activities at the one-to-one customer level doesn’t guarantee overall program success. While checklists help track individual projects, you need to understand performance across all customers to determine if your onboarding program is effective. Use software that tracks both individual commitments and all projects within the program.

Your onboarding program should be consistent across customers but flexible enough to accommodate those who need customization (think of the 80/20 rule). To scale, you must be able to repeat a similar customer journey for most customers by following a template.

Processes vs Templates

People often confuse "Process Doc" and "Template" when planning onboarding. It's important to define these terms:

• ​Onboarding Process Doc: Internal, in-depth instructions for your team on how the high-touch onboarding process works. It outlines the entire process and is what you would give a new team member to explain your approach to onboarding.
• ​Template: A high-level version of the process intended to help track project progress and program effectiveness. It is not a replacement for the process doc.

When creating your template, use your process documentation as a guide, but don’t copy it word for word. Including every step in the template can overwhelm your team. Instead, translate your program into a template that helps map where the customer is in the process and feeds metrics to measure program success.

For example, track how often kickoff calls happen on time (e.g., within 10 days of the close date). The goal is to add value to your program and your customer, not to create unnecessary complexity.

Avoid over-focusing on task completion. Instead, ask questions like, “By close date + 10, what does the customer need to be aware of?” or “By close date + 30, what do we need to know to determine if onboarding was successful?” Build these answers into your system and hold your team accountable for them.

At TaskRay, we use a high-touch onboarding playbook as our process document. It sets expectations for meetings and outlines pre-work and goals at a high level. Good process documentation helps create a consistent experience, but tools alone can't replace understanding your own process.

Automating Onboarding

Many executives believe automating customer onboarding will save time and money, and it can—by freeing up human resources. However, if you automate everything, even perfectly, it can backfire. Automation that doesn’t align with user needs can create a poor experience.

Automation makes things faster, not necessarily better. If you automate a great process, you deliver value faster. If you automate a bad process, problems escalate quickly.

Start with the template. Consider the purpose of each onboarding activity, then decide if it should be automated or handled by a person. Always involve your users in this decision.

When’s the Right Time To Automate?

Limit automation at first. While it saves time, it can add complexity when you need to tweak the program—which you will, especially early on. As your team becomes comfortable and confident in the template, gradually add automation.

Automating tasks can "cement" processes, making them harder to change. Early on, keep things flexible. This also sets good expectations with your team, allowing them to provide input and guide where automation adds the most value. If you automate everything from the start, your team loses flexibility to improve the process.

If you’d like to learn more about weaving Customer Onboarding success into your organization’s DNA, consider signing up for related webinars or resources.