“We must fit within how our clients operate, not make them fit to us.”
Doug Berkson, VP of client engagement at healthtech company Wellframe, summarizes one of the most important aspects of customer onboarding: solving buyer-specific problems. Onboarding sets the tone for a customer’s relationship with a company. If the partnership doesn’t solve their unique challenges, that relationship may be short-lived.
Driving value early is key to building loyalty. Klaviyo VP of Customer Success Kate Walsh said the first 30 days of the partnership are a crucial period where retention is established. Walsh’s team at the marketing company developed a milestone-based method to fast-track the value they provide during that time. The team builds an onboarding plan where clients progress through milestones that help them achieve their goals using the product.
Detailed plans help teams fine-tune their personalized programs and give customers an idea of what to expect. Joe Scurio, a CS team lead at business collaboration platform Fuze, recommends teams plan who is responsible for each part of an onboarding project.
“When there are too many company resources reaching out to the customer for different reasons, a team can appear disjointed or confuse the customer,” Scurio said.
Confusion or a lack of transparency can decrease engagement. So customers should have insight into the who, what, where, when and why behind how their onboarding process will play out.
Learn more about how these three Boston teams build their retainment-driven onboarding programs below.
Quick, effective onboarding strategies:
- Offer ongoing customer training, not just at the start of onboarding.
- Personalize onboarding to create client-specific solutions.
- Be available across a variety of channels.
- Re-emphasize the value of the product.
- Create and track measurements of success during onboarding.
- Celebrate milestones in onboarding and continued product usage.
- Be ready to adjust onboarding strategies to evolving customer needs.
Joe Scurio said onboarding success lies in the details. Fuze’s North American CS team lead said customers should be aware of the minutia of their onboarding program so they know what to expect and remain fully engaged throughout.
Keys to an engaging customer onboarding program: Consistently setting expectations is arguably the most critical element to building an effective customer onboarding program. Successfully setting expectations early in the partnership will quickly build trust and prove that you are the advocate the customer hopes you will be.
After the initial sale of a product or service, the customer should have complete clarity as to how and when a company will communicate with them and what documentation and deliverables they will be receiving. They should know the tasks they will need to perform in order to move the project forward. Once those initial expectations are set, it’s important that companies stay proactive in notifying the customer of their progress to avoid potential surprises later if a delay occurs that pushes the initial timeline back.
Successfully setting expectations early in the partnership will quickly build trust.”
Improvements made to Fuze’s program: To be successful in a customer-facing role, people will inevitably push to help their customers whenever possible. However, this idea can pose a challenge to the customer experience when dealing with large and complex deployments during the onboarding stage. When there are too many resources reaching out to the customer for different reasons, a team can appear disjointed or confuse the customer.
Before introducing the team members who will be working with the customer during onboarding, it is important to align internally first to define each person’s role and responsibilities throughout onboarding. Once those definitions are set, it is equally important to maintain a cadence with the account team and internal stakeholders to regularly review how the project is moving along and if adjustments are necessary to continue seeing success.
How to generate excitement through onboarding: Customers who recently purchased a product or service have almost certainly gone through a thorough process to determine the best vendor for their organization. Not only has the customer invested in your company financially, but they also invested emotionally in the successful outcome of this new partnership. This period is almost like a honeymoon phase for clients and key stakeholders. They want the partnership to work out just as much as you do and are almost always going to be fully bought into mutual success.
An effective onboarding process is the most important tool an organization can leverage to maintain that excitement and keep the customer engaged. With consistent messaging and showing progress toward the customer’s defined goals, teams can continue the momentum of that initial honeymoon phase; they can turn clients into public references and advocates for their organization.
“Onboarding is the most crucial part of the customer lifecycle,” said Klaviyo VP of Customer Success and Support Kate Walsh.
Walsh’s team sees the first month of the customer relationship as make-or-break, and they work to highlight the value of the communication platform as early and often as possible.
Keys to an engaging customer onboarding program: The most important piece of onboarding is to understand the customer goals, defining what success means to them. Leverage those goals to create a success plan with the customer to achieve those results.
When building out the success plan, it’s important to define potential roadblocks upfront, like resourcing constraints or team prioritization. The plan should include ways around those obstacles with a clear and agreed upon timeline.
Customers are won for life — and brand advocates are created — within the first 30 days.”
Improvements made to Klaviyo’s program: We want to ensure customers see immediate value within the first couple of weeks. Once that initial value is realized, it’s easier for customers to invest resources toward driving more value with a tool, making it irreplaceable.
To improve our initial time to value, we created customer milestones based on two aspects: customer goals and the steps needed to drive revenue with Klaviyo. Ensuring each customer is tracking along those milestones in a timely manner allows us to improve the onboarding process. It identifies where customers are getting stuck so we can quickly iterate and improve. This initiative accelerated time to value, led to higher Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) and improved retention.
How to generate excitement through onboarding: Customers are won for life — and brand advocates are created — within the first 30 days. Through achieving their goals and driving revenue for their business, these advocates then become the customer stories and case studies. Those case studies and stories become a foundation for our marketing strategy, helping the business grow.
Metrics help VP of Client Engagement Doug Berkson and his team at Wellframe not only gauge the success of their onboarding programs but replicate it. The leaders said the healthtech software provider recently implemented a replicable framework for measuring how clients are engaging with the company’s tech.
Keys to an engaging customer onboarding program: There are two efforts Wellframe undertakes to build effective and engaging onboarding programs. First, it is critical that we build relationships with varied stakeholders within our client base, which tends to be large and complex organizations. We must also do assessment work to ensure we understand our clients and build an onboarding program tailored to them and their constructs. We must fit within how our clients operate, not make them fit to us.
It takes discipline and constant attention to ensure positive engagement.”
Improvements made to Wellframe’s program: We recently created a role within our client services organization responsible for ensuring onboarding success for our clients. We also established a scalable and replicable framework that allows us to deliver assessments in a way that not only positively impacts our clients but also allows us to benchmark critical metrics across customers. We measure success by monitoring staff adoption of our technology as well as member engagement and their longitudinal utilization of that technology.
How to generate excitement through onboarding: Through a combination of our varied stakeholder relationship development and an expectation that our framework is constantly iterative, we are able to engage our clients throughout the lifecycle. However, it takes discipline and constant attention to ensure positive engagement because the work is never easy.
