Onboarding Tips

Emails are a dime a dozen these days. If that were true I’d be a millionaire because I am swamped in emails. Take a moment to imagine with me, you just caught wind of a new customer signing up to use your product/service! You’ve been selected to be their onboarder! You need to introduce yourself and get the ball rolling on their implementation.What is your secret secret to making your welcome email stand out to your new customer?

As you may already know, I’m trying to grow the Onboarding Network to 500 community members before the end of August! To help, I dropped an incentive where between July 10 - 23, every 5 new community members I randomly select a winner. That winner can choose between a random prize or an "Elan Dare." This winner chose a dare. And the dare was a rap. Check out the Onboarding Anthem!

I’m revamping our onboarding strategy to blend both implementation and onboarding - here is a visual to help the team with our new process. Anything I’m missing?   

Hey everyone, Once a customer completes Onboarding, we transition them to working with a CSM or our Support Team. I’m curious what this process looks like at other businesses… What does your agenda look like? Do you provide any visuals to the customer? How do you use GuideCx specifically to showcase the customer’s accomplishments and what’s pending? We do general intros between the customer and their new POC, review what the customer accomplished, future goals, and let them know they’ll be getting some cool swag from us. 

I work for a proptech SAAS company and I am working on a project to improve our implementation process. We would like to take the loose internal phases that we use, and create/define some client facing verbiage around them to use as a tool to help mitigate confusion and keep timelines in tact. Implementation - The priorities bucket, the main pain points and the why behind the contract. Once these items are completed, we are ready for go live. Onboarding - After go live, when we have the software in the hands of end users, we can continue to add items and tweak what we already have in place. Partnership - The ongoing relationship - software enhancements, new integration opportunities, etc. The goal here is to emphasize the fluidity of the software over time and help to keep clients focused on their main priorities during implementation, while also maximizing their ROI. This way, when new ideas come up during implementation we can say “absolutely, lets add that to Phase 2” and the client

Nothing throws an onboarding project’s momentum off like losing your main point of contact. While the reasons are endless for them leaving, I’d love to hear what tips and tricks you’ve learned to navigating this situation!

In today's competitive business landscape, on-time delivery is a critical factor in building customer trust and driving growth. How do you measure if you’re running late? How do you identify common themes? How do you address what’s slowing you down?

What’s your favorite part of being in the onboarding/implementation space??Is it the relationship building? Perhaps you love seeing someone’s eyes light up as they realize the value they’ll get from your product/service. Or is there something magical as you set up a new account?Comment below and let the world know why customer onboarding and implementations are the best!

At my company (proptech SaaS) we use a Client Attributes form to gather needed information about the customer prior to kick-off so that we can suggest the right features and obtain essential data for setting up their account with us. We have a very similarly named form for the client’s individual locations so it makes it very confusing for our customers.I’m wondering if anyone else out there has a better name for a “client intake form” so that we don’t run into a) being boring, and b) confusing our customers with what the form is intended to do. Appreciate the feedback! 

In case you missed the webinar with GUIDEcx’s BI team where they shared 5 strategies for transforming client onboarding for the best outcomes you can watch the replay here. You’re not going to want to miss strategy #3: Implementing Real-Time Data alerts.Comment below on which strategy was your favorite! 

It’s common for customers to get upset during onboarding (we won’t dive into the many reasons why), but it’s easier than you think to turn an irate customer into a loyal brand advocate. Problems inevitably arise, it’s how you solve them that makes all the difference. Please share a story of when you had an upset customer and how you turned the situation around!

These are two very different beasts to onboard. What are some key differences and approaches to onboarding an enterprise vs. SMB account?Drop your thoughts below!👇👇👇

Who has the best training experience for their customers? Do you have a team dedicated to training your new customers? Do you have your onboarding team conduct those trainings? We’d love to hear about it and how your organization approaches training and adoption! 

This one goes out to everyone building a customer onboarding team and everyone looking to level themselves up! In your opinion, what are skills that every customer onboarder/implementations manager should have? What are red flags? What are green flags? Let’s get a conversation going around what makes a customer onboarding manager successful!Comment below 👇👇👇

Starting off on the right foot is important to maintain momentum. What are some things that must happen in a kickoff call to mitigate complications down the road? 

Friction is often thought of as a negative force that inhibits movement or progress. However, in certain situations, friction can be beneficial and even necessary. For example, bald tires on your car could be dangerous. If you tried to slow down or turn you would slide off the road without that friction!There’s a lot of speculation on creating a frictionless onboarding process where the customer does as little as possible. A worthy goal for sure, but is it possible to design your OX to have intentional and good friction?Comment your thoughts below and we’ll talk about it in our livestream on Thursday!

A disengaged client is at a much higher risk than an engaged client is. I know I was surprised when I saw data on how a client that that submits more support tickets is less likely to churn than one who doesn’t submit any. It goes back to usage. If a customer is using your product/service and needing support’s help then that’s better than a customer who doesn’t show any signs of activity.I know in my experience that a customer that never has questions when we meet is a red flag! What I do to address that is assign them homework and that helps me gauge exactly how engaged they are!I’d love to hear from you what is a red flag and how you address it early on!

If you say yes to any of these, it may be time to invest in an onboarding software that can help you improve your OX: Manual onboarding processes are taking up too much time: If you find that your team is spending a significant amount of time manually onboarding clients, it may be time to consider a client onboarding platform. Automating certain aspects of the process can save your team time and make the process more efficient. Your onboarding process is inconsistent: If your team is struggling to provide a consistent onboarding experience for clients, a client onboarding platform can help standardize the process. You're losing clients during the onboarding process: If you're experiencing high churn rates during the onboarding process, it may be a sign that your onboarding process needs improvement. A client onboarding platform can help streamline the process and provide a better experience for your clients. You're scaling your business: If you're expanding your business and brin

Happy Monday everyone! Let’s talk about clients who go dark! While there are several factors that may play into the client disengaging, I’d love to hear your thoughts and strategies on getting those clients back on track!Comment below!

Onboarding is the process in which you help new users get familiar with your software/service/product. Many companies and teams are focused on the first AHA moment or initial time to value. However, in order to drive renewals you need to set the customer up for continual success. That’s where adoption is the name of the game! When users don’t adopt your software, service, or product the chances of renewal drop significantly.What are some of your tips and tricks for ensuring your product is installed correctly and users know how to use it so it doesn’t become shelfware?Comment below! 👇👇👇 

DID YOU KNOW? First impressions are made in a matter of seconds.DID YOU ALSO KNOW? It can take around 7 good impressions to change someone’s perception of you if you started off on the wrong foot. Imagine someone was rude to you when you first met them, but every time after you interacted with them they were very nice. What thoughts would go through your head? I know I’d be thinking - “what is this person’s alterior motive???”It would take, on average, seven positive experiences with that person for your brain to be open to changing it’s perception of that person.Brains are efficient. Changing a perception of someone takes a lot of mental energy. It’s a defense mechanism. Imagine how exhausted you would be if you were constantly changing perceptions of people because of how they treated you that day! When onboarding a new customer - they are making first impressions of you (their guide, confidant, trusted advisor) and the software/service they just signed up for. Luckily their cognitiv

I shared the 10 commandments of #clientonboarding #customeronboarding #implementations yesterday. Here is a tip to living the first commandment, Thou shalt have a clear and defined onboarding process: Make sure your process is documented. Whether that's in Notion, Lucid, Canva, or even on sticky notes on a whiteboard. Here are my TOP 3 benefits to having the onboarding ✨experience✨ documented:1️⃣ Seeing it in writing helps you identify inefficiencies and redundancies.2️⃣ It ensures consistency and helps all team members follow the same steps3️⃣ It helps you see where customers could get stuck/lost CTA: Take a minute to write out your onboarding process and see if it's clear and defined. What parts could a 5 year old understand? What parts are extremely confusing?

As someone who understands the importance of client onboarding, you may have noticed that during these economic times companies may reduce their investment in client onboarding. Investing more resources into customer onboarding could lead to improved customer success/satisfaction, retention, and ultimately, revenue. However, convincing your higher-ups to allocate more resources to this area may be a challenge.What are ways that you help them understand the value of this team? Specific examples or statistics to support are encouraged!

Completing Onboarding for our team is making sure the customer is comfortable with the product and knows all the product functions available to them.  Sometimes the customer is working with a partner and onboarding becomes more of a facilitator than a technical role and if the project is long term, the onboarding team may hand it off with the offer to come back into the picture when it is time to provide operational enablement.  When handing off, a discussion takes place of who the next contact will be and what information is required for them.  Sometimes the next contact is not technical and only needs information regarding the customer contacts, best times to connect, and high overviews of environment and product features.  Other times, the customer is transitioning to an ongoing technical resource that may want a deeper dive into the environment.  I always try to end the onboarding sessions with a configuration review and summary of the environment.  I’m curious what others do for p