Customer success onboarding: Keep new customers happy

Customer success onboarding is necessary for all customers’ journeys. If not done appropriately, you can lose your customers before your strategy even begins.

What Is Customer Success Onboarding?

Customer success onboarding is the process new customers go through when they initially start using your product or service, which includes making sure they're happy with the product or service so they can continue to use it.

A successful onboarding program includes step-by-step tutorials, ongoing guidance and support, and milestone celebrations when consumers are successful with your solution.

However, onboarding isn’t just about teaching new customers how to use your product or service. The onboarding strategy puts your customers' goals at the center of the process. You need to figure out what they need to achieve and what success looks like to them.

Typically the customer success manager is in charge of onboarding new customers. As a customer success team grows, a dedicated onboarding specialist role can be added to the team.

Onboarding Playbook

An onboarding playbook can help you do everything you can to ensure your customers are happy. A playbook is a framework that consists of the steps your customer success manager should take to reach a set goal and which customers they should focus their proactive efforts on.

A playbook is important because it offers a repeatable process that your team can follow to deliver a consistent and ideal experience for every new customer. The goal of the playbook is to ensure that each customer is set up and see the value in your product as quickly as possible.

Benefits of the Customer Onboarding Process

The onboarding process is the most important stage of the customer life cycle. Coming at the beginning of the customer journey, it sets the tone for your customers' relationships with your company.

Onboarding has a major effect on whether a consumer continues using your product long term or churns after only a few months. If you do it right, onboarding sets up your customers to be successful and demonstrates the value of your product. If you don't do it right, your customers will wonder why they bought your product in the first place.

Benefits of the onboarding process include the following:

• Increased revenue: If you onboard your customers properly, they'll continue to use your service or product for a long time, increasing your revenue.

• Repeat business: Customers who are onboarded properly are more likely to stay with your company and won't want to churn.

• Word-of-mouth referrals: Customers who are satisfied with what you have to offer are more likely to tell their friends, family, and co-workers about it. Referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations can bring in more revenue.

• Reduces customer service load: If you educate your customers properly about how to use your product or service during the onboarding process, they'll be less likely to call customer service with questions.

• Full use of functionality: A well-executed onboarding process can lead to your customer discovering even more possibilities with your software, thereby improving their actual usage.

• Broader adoption: Look beyond CS, and try to invite more people from other departments to parts of the onboarding process.

Other departments could bring other questions to the table, but if handled correctly, you will get an adoption across several departments. And the bigger the adoption is, the stickier your product.

Building Your Customer Success Onboarding Process

Let’s explore what a customer success onboarding process would look like for a typical software-as-a-service company. Keep in mind this process is flexible and should be adjusted to cater to your customers and how your product works.

For example, if an interactive walk-through is too much for a simple tool, consider a short video or quick interactive demo.

1. Welcome email:

This is the moment for your first written impression, make sure it counts! Start with a positive note: congratulate them on their purchase and let them know how excited you are to help drive value for them. If your welcome email comes after a handover meeting (e.g., from sales), make sure you share any relevant notes from the meeting.

2. First login:

The welcome email is a good start but you also want to make sure your new customer feels welcome the first time they are using your product. This can be done via prompting a welcome video or an in-app welcome message encouraging them to take a first step in setting up or personalizing their account.

For example, ask the user to change their password, configure notification settings, or upload an avatar. You can also make callouts for any important features they should know about.

3. Product tutorial:

Recommend (don’t force) a certain setup via a guided tutorial or wizard to take your customers through the rest of the setup process. Make sure these steps are clear to avoid missing any important steps, and they’re off to a flying start!

4. Interactive walk-through:

Regardless of the intuitiveness or complexity of your platform, make sure to have a moment where you can go through it together. By using the platform together, you will better understand their perspective and have the opportunity to give quick tips and tricks.

Set an agenda so you don’t get lost in any rabbit holes and you can show progress in their environment, which is also likely to boost their confidence with you and your platform!

5. Knowledge base:

Once the setup is complete, reference your knowledge base or community to allow users to solve any problems or educate themselves quickly. Make sure your customers can easily find your knowledge base, e.g.,, in app or via a chatbot. (Tip: don’t forget to optimize it for Google!)

6. Check-up calls:

Show that you care by checking in to see if they’re progressing or stuck. Check if they are getting the value they were expecting and ask if they need help with anything. Begin with frequent check-ins related to your agreed onboarding timeline and then scale down according to their expectations.

7. Notifications:

Notifications can be based on warning signals or achievements. Either way, it’s important to notify them about certain concerns and progress to make them feel that you’re invested in their success. In time, they’ll give this back to you by investing in your solution!

8. Celebrations:

Everybody loves a reason to celebrate! Once those mutually agreed milestones are met, make sure you acknowledge and celebrate the progress. It will make both of you excited for the next step to get the most out of your solution and partnership.

You can automate it with a notification or an email, or you can make it more personal with a phone call. This can also stimulate ambitious behavior and openness to keep setting higher expectations.

How to Measure Customer Onboarding

Onboarding is one of the first true steps in building trust and rapport with your customers. A weak or inconsistent onboarding process can lead to increased churn and low retention rates. By measuring the metrics below, you can monitor the overall performance of your onboarding process.

Time to Value

TTV is the time it takes for a customer to first see your product's value. During the onboarding process, it's important to measure how long it takes for consumers to realize the value of your offering. This can be tricky at first, but by understanding your customer’s goals during each stage of their journey, TTV becomes much easier to identify.

Customer Progress

It's important to divide your training into different modules, then measure the time it takes for a customer to complete each one. This could be across multiple resources, such as a product demo, email sequence, or video training. Each resource can be measured through unique actions, such as demo progress, email opens, and minutes watched.

By monitoring this data you can quickly identify customers who are struggling and offer one-on-one support. An overall lack in customer progress can also signal a problem with the resource. Maybe training emails are going to spam, or the video tutorials aren’t loading on specific browsers.

Feature Adoption Rate

Feature adoption describes how quickly your customers begin using a feature in your product. Ideally businesses want higher adoption rates in shorter amounts of time. A low adoption rate could signal a few problems.

If a feature isn’t well documented in a demo or training, users may not even know that feature is there. Poor UX design can also be to blame for features getting lost or buried. Lastly, some features might not be helpful or relevant to that particular customer.

Customer data, past support tickets, and surveys can help you uncover which issue is lowering your feature adoption rate.

Customer Response Rate

Conduct surveys regularly and collect feedback from customers, log all the commonly raised issues in your customer platform, and then measure how long it took you to respond to each person to resolve their issues. Measuring customer response rates can help you determine the effectiveness of your customer success processes.

Customer Success Onboarding Best Practices

The following best practices will help you create a robust onboarding experience:

Understand Your Customer Through Data

Using a data-driven approach takes the guesswork out of understanding your customer’s goals and unique challenges. While we may think we know what our customers want, the data often provides new insights into their challenges.

Set Clear Expectations

Explain the value your product or service offers your customers and prepare them for potential snags, so if they encounter any setbacks, they’ll be better prepared to deal with them and not give up.

Continue to Communicate

After your initial welcome email, continue using email to supplement any in-app tutorials and guides. Using your customer health score and product usage data can help you time your communication in a meaningful way that isn’t overbearing.

Outside of email, understand what platforms and channels your audience uses and establish a presence there. For example, if a large number of your users are on Facebook, consider creating a Facebook group for additional support. You’re much more likely to engage your customers when you meet them where they already are.

Create goals unique to your customers

Enable your customers to define success, then assist them in creating milestones to achieve that success, giving them benchmarks to accomplish along the way. Many times customers have a goal but no plan to get there with your product. This is the opportunity to go above and beyond product support to help them create a unique action plan based on their goals and your product.

While this can seem time-consuming, it will be worth it in the long run. As you repeat this process you’ll find many of your customers have similar goals. You can use playbooks and detailed notes to make this process more efficient over time.

Show Value

There’s a lot you can do to show value to your customer, but it all starts with listening. Listen to your customer directly through correspondence and surveys, and listen to the data they generate across your product.

Give customers specific examples of how your product will deal with their pain points, and offer customized solutions to help them achieve their goals. In a world of automation and templates, taking the time to really understand your client’s needs and design solutions for them makes you stand out leagues ahead of your competitors.

Measure your success

For many businesses your customer’s success is your success. Use health scores and data collection to continuously monitor your clients, as well as your own internal service-level agreements and metrics. It’s important to stay on top of these numbers as well as change what you measure based on the goals of your customer and your company.

Gather consumer feedback, identify issues, and track the important metrics, so you know what’s working and what you have to improve. Quarterly or semiannual surveys provide a great point to “temperature check” how far you’ve come and what direction you’re going.

How can Planhat help me with Customer Success Onboarding?

By now, you are hopefully as convinced as we are that the onboarding process is a very important part of you and your customers' long journey together. Therefore, we have created several functions within Planhat that help you make the onboarding process as clear and seamless as possible for your customers:

• Playbooks: Create pre-defined, repeatable processes to efficiently onboard new customers.

• Portals: Let´s you collaborate with your customers to drive adoption, show transparency, share success plans and build trust.e

• Unlimited seating: With Planhats pricing model of unlimited users, no matter what tier you are on, you can expand your team (without any added costs).

Planhat connects all the customer data, gets actionable insights, and drives actions to manage renewals, reduce churn, and boost expansion.

Planhat also provides a unified view of your customers all in one place, identifies risks and opportunities, creates clear, repeatable processes through the customer life cycle, and offers multi-channel communication as well as customized inboxes for teams.

Altogether, Planhat is a complete customer platform that lets you track the key performance indicators that matter the most for the future growth of your business.

To take your onboarding process to the next level check our webinar: The ROI of a Human-First Approach to Customer Onboarding. Or test out Planhat yourself through our free demo.