Customer Onboarding Roundtable Insights: Building a Customer Experience Strategy

At the beginning of March, we held Customer Onboarding roundtables with over 20 Customer Success experts to discuss three important elements of customer onboarding:

1. 1.Driving Customer Engagement
2. 2.Building a Customer Experience Strategy
3. 3.Perfecting Customer Handoffs

In this blog post, we’re sharing the key insights from the sessions on building a successful customer experience strategy for Customer Onboarding.

Once your organization has decided to focus on Customer Onboarding, the question becomes: How do you design a strategy for moving your customer successfully through their first 90 days without breaking the bank?

Step 1: Segment Your Customers

To determine what type of onboarding experience to deliver to each customer, you need to create customer segments. Some possible segmentations:

• ​Level of Spend: Segmenting customers by their level of spend helps determine which type and how many resources to dedicate to different types of accounts.
• ​Complexity: Use pre-sale questionnaires to assess onboarding complexity. This helps set correct expectations and, if appropriate, offer paid onboarding packages.
• ​Customer Score: Develop an algorithm based on key business drivers to create a customer onboarding score, which can guide the onboarding strategy for each customer.

Many companies use a combination of these segmentation strategies. The key is to know what your customer needs before you start to onboard them.

Step 2: Design Your Customer Onboarding Strategies

Once you’ve decided how to segment your customers, consider how you want to interact with each in their first 90 days. This involves creating high, low, and tech touch strategies that can be used individually or in combination.

• ​High Touch: Requires dedicated resources acting as the main point of contact for the customer throughout their onboarding journey, involving a high level of one-on-one interaction (e.g., Zoom calls, site visits).
  • ​A common mistake is providing high touch onboarding at the start but tapering off before the customer reaches full adoption or value, especially with larger customers.
• ​Low Touch: Draws from a pool of onboarding resources and delivers service to one or many customers simultaneously. Communication may be through Slack, email, or webinars.
• ​Tech Touch: Involves automation at scale through self-serve services such as in-app suggestions, chatbots, and knowledge bases.

Determining which type of touch to use, and when, is critical in designing your customer onboarding strategy.

Step 3: Establish Clear Expectations and Conditions (and Consider Offering Incentives)

Best practices for creating a great customer experience during onboarding include:

• ​Establish your onboarding process for each customer segment and communicate expectations in writing, possibly using templates tailored to each segment.
• ​Set expectations around the amount of time your customer will need to dedicate during their first 90 days.
• ​Set prerequisite conditions (gates) that must be met to move to the next step, and clarify what happens if gates are not met.
• ​Consider offering incentives for completing milestones on time to foster joint accountability between your organization and your customer.

Step 4: Ask for Feedback

Every program improves as you continue to evolve it. By embracing a growth mindset, you can continuously improve your processes and grow your business.

• ​Survey your customers once onboarding is complete. This feedback is invaluable for iterating on your process, documentation, and training.
• ​Feedback also helps develop your Customer Onboarding Score criteria, enabling you to measure customer experience and predict business growth.

Conclusion

As you design your customer onboarding experience and develop your high-touch, low-touch, and tech-touch solutions:

1. 1.Determine your customer segmentations
2. 2.Design your Customer Onboarding strategies
3. 3.Establish expectations and conditions (and consider incentives)
4. 4.Ask for feedback

These best practices can help you design a world-class customer onboarding experience for your company.

Coming Next Week

In next week’s blog post, best practices for handoffs between Sales, Customer Onboarding/Implementation, and Customer Success will be shared.

Check Out Our Customer Onboarding Podcast

In the latest episode, TaskRay’s Chief of Staff Jamie Cole sits down with Gainsight’s Chief Evangelist Dan Steinman to discuss why 70% of churn happens because of the customer’s experience in the first 90 days, how to build a successful hand-off process, and more.