Customer Onboarding Roundtable Insights: Perfecting Customer Handoffs

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 perfecting customer handoffs between Sales, Customer Onboarding, and Customer Success teams.

The key to accelerating time-to-value and creating lifelong customers is to put systems and processes into place that will enable your teams to handle multiple customer touch points and transfer valuable customer information seamlessly between departments (and people) at the different stages of your customer lifecycle.

1. Define Your Post-Sale Customer Journey

First, you need to understand your current process and identify opportunities for improvement. Gather your teams, use post-it notes and whiteboards, and:

1. 1.Document your customer personas, recognizing that you may have different ones based on deal size, involved stakeholders, etc.
2. 2.Map out your post-sale customer journey step-by-step using one color of sticky notes.
3. 3.Use a different color sticky note to highlight challenges throughout the process.
4. 4.Overlay an “Empathy Map” to show how a customer feels (e.g., anxious, stressed, excited) at each stage. This helps you customize touchpoints to meet customers where they are.

Once you’ve mapped out your journey, you can:

• ​Identify and fix process problems.
• ​Establish responsibilities and goals for each department.
• ​Determine where and when to set customer expectations.
• ​Identify what customer information to capture at different points and create a central place to store it for relevant team members (and customers, when applicable).

2. Leverage the Relationship Established by Your Sales Team

Your sales rep likely has developed a relationship with the customer during the sales cycle, gaining insights into their business drivers, needs, key stakeholders, and priorities.

To ensure customer needs are successfully translated from Sales to Customer Onboarding and Customer Success:

• ​Develop a standard customer profile accessible by sales, onboarding, and post-sale departments.
• ​Host a handoff meeting with the Customer, Sales, and Customer Onboarding teams, allowing Sales to articulate their understanding of needs and success criteria.
• ​Capture key customer data in a tool accessible throughout the customer’s journey.

3. Set Customer Expectations Early and Often

Customer onboarding should start before the deal is closed. Post-sale expectations for onboarding should be set during the sales process. Ways to do this include:

• ​Develop predetermined onboarding packages so sales can make onboarding part of the sales conversation, setting expectations before the handoff.
• ​Include a customer onboarding representative in the pre-sales cycle to help scope the right onboarding package and introduce the onboarding team early.
• ​Host an initial onboarding kickoff call that includes the sales rep, allowing them to articulate their understanding of the customer’s needs and ensure a smooth handoff.

4. Offer a High-Touch Onboarding Add-On

Some customers may need more support during onboarding. A red flag is when a customer lacks a documented onboarding process or is trying to establish an onboarding department. While it’s best to identify this during sales, sometimes it becomes clear only after the handoff.

If a customer needs more dedicated time, offer the option to purchase a higher-touch package. This helps set appropriate expectations for the onboarding process and the number of touchpoints.

5. Focus on Change Management and End-User Adoption

Make change management and end-user adoption a key focus of your onboarding process. Help customers develop messaging that articulates the importance of your solution to their organization.

Start by helping customers identify what’s in it for the end user (WIFM—what’s in it for me?), providing them with selling points to advocate for the change. Understanding end-user needs makes adoption easier.

Enable customers to create training materials for onboarding all users of your solution. This accelerates end-user adoption and serves as a knowledge transfer tool between onboarding and success/support teams during handoff.

Conclusion

By making handoffs a critical part of your customer’s post-sales journey, you ensure customers feel heard and build their confidence in your organization’s ability to deliver value quickly.

We hope these best practices help you design a world-class customer onboarding experience.