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Three Tips on Scaling Your Customer Onboarding Program – Part 2

The article emphasizes creating a prescriptive, step-by-step onboarding process tailored to both high-touch and low-touch engagement methods—such as structured training sessions and accessible onboarding materials—to accelerate customers' time-to-value and empower them for long-term success, thereby enhancing their overall value to the business.

So now that we’ve gone through the importance of onboarding and described approaches on how to scale it across your customer base, let’s review some best practices you can put in place and how you can leverage each engagement method to help improve your customer’s onboarding experience. This will ultimately help to increase their value to your business over time.

Onboarding Best Practice #1

Create a prescriptive setup and implementation process. When designing an onboarding program that will help your customer get started on the right path to be successful long-term, determine what the exact steps are that your customers need to take in order to ‘go live’ and realize time-to-value as quickly as possible with your product. Be prescriptive about what steps and actions need to be completed. Once you have those steps outlined, put them in a customer-facing format and share with all of the appropriate stakeholders within your customer’s organization that are involved in the onboarding process.

High Touch

  • Create pre-defined onboarding calls and training sessions designed to get your customers set up and using the product properly.
  • These sessions should all move the needle towards getting your client to the first time to value.
  • Provide setup assistance and training sessions on your platform that include best practice tips.
  • Educate the customer on both product and industry best practices to set them up for long-term success.
  • Ensure training empowers the customer to use the product themselves; avoid scenarios where the CSM does all the work, as this is not scalable.

Low Touch

  • Combine tech touches and 1:1 interaction.
  • Provide helpful onboarding collateral such as a ‘Getting Started’ kit.
  • Offer content in easily digestible chunks for each stage of setup and learning.
  • Inform customers of all available resources and clarify when to use each (e.g., Support vs. Customer Success Management team).
  • Adjust the level of low touch based on product complexity and customer segmentation.

Tech Touch

  • Use contextual guides and in-app tutorials to educate customers based on where they are in your platform.
  • If resources are limited, use automated email journeys triggered by product usage or time frames.
  • Include a full onboarding guide with the welcome email so users can go at their own pace.

Onboarding Best Practice #2

Establish milestones that you know the customer must achieve in order to be successful. The prescriptive steps mentioned above should lead customers to these milestones. For example, if you are setting up a CRM, an important milestone would be adding customer data. Ensure your prescriptive steps lead to milestones and your milestones result in your customer achieving their first point of value.

High Touch

  • Have your CSM set up regular calls with the customer (weekly or bi-weekly during onboarding).
  • Create agendas centered around milestones that lead to first time to value.
  • Work with customers to establish measurable goals, timelines, and additional milestones as required.
  • Align outcomes from your solution with their goals.

Low Touch

  • Include some human interaction (monthly or quarterly calls).
  • Supplement onboarding with technology, such as product usage alerts for low or inactive users.
  • Use campaigns through email or messaging platforms for 1:Many communication, which can become 1:1 when customers respond.
  • Leverage webinars, training sessions, or user communities for education.

Tech Touch

  • Ensure you have relevant content to serve to customers, leading them down a prescriptive path to milestones.
  • Content should:
    1. 1.Educate customers with prescriptive content on exact steps and actions.
    2. 2.Provide milestones and goals to visualize progress.
    3. 3.Promote product adoption.
  • Use tools such as chat systems, in-app messaging, customer success platforms, and email automation.

Onboarding Best Practice #3

Have a variety of training resources that both your customers and CSMs can leverage. Customers have different learning preferences, so offer multiple options:

  1. 1.In-app tutorials
  2. 2.Contextual Guides
  3. 3.Live Training Sessions for prospects and customers
  4. 4.Recorded Training sessions
  5. 5.A YouTube channel with training videos
  6. 6.Quickstart Guides
  7. 7.Knowledge Base Articles and ‘How To’ Guides
  8. 8.Paid Professional Services Offering
  9. 9.Onboarding email journey
  10. 10.Customer community monitored by a Customer Success Manager or Support team member

High Touch

  • Training resources supplement 1:1 communications and are part of the overall customer engagement framework.

Low Touch

  • 1:1 interaction focuses on providing the most appropriate training resources for each customer.
  • Resources enable customers to self-onboard and allow CSMs to manage larger portfolios and operate more proactively.

Tech Touch

  • The customer education list above forms your tech touch strategy.
  • Use 1:Many reach outs and the listed tools to provide customers with all the resources needed for successful setup and achievement of first time to value.

To implement these best practices, you need a solid understanding of your customer base. Complete a customer firmographic analysis to create an onboarding process that incorporates high, low, and tech touches.

Not sure where to start or have questions on implementing this model? Comment below or contact us for help.