User Tips

Stakeholders make or break renewals. If you want to keep them happy during onboarding and create a neat experience for them, KEEP THEM IN THE LOOP!If you have a shorter onboarding experience (sub-90 days), weekly emails work great! If you have a longer onboarding experience (90 days plus), monthly works better!Things I like to put in my Stakeholder Update Emails:Highlights aka things accomplished. Get them excited to see what we’ve done! It’s nice for them to know how much work we’ve done for them! Next Steps aka how much we have left. Help keep those expectations in check by showing them what next steps are and which resources are needed to stay on track! Hurdles (help them see what roadblocks we’ve run into or could run into) This is a great place to call out unexpected things like “Customer Team Member A isn’t doing their tasks”What did I miss?

Over the past 10 years I’ve led Implementation and Onboarding team in Healthcare, Services, and SaaS companies and while each role was vastly different and had varying requirements for skills, I found there was an underlying set of skills and abilities that are core to the role.Fundamental project management skills Time management Communication Problem SolvingThere are others that will be role specific like technical skills or system or platform experience but for the most part, the above has served me well as a foundation. The problem I’ve found recently is looking at hiring requirements through the today vs tomorrow lens. I have been in my current role for about 7 months and there was a large hiring initiative just before I joined the company. What I’ve found was that a significant number of our recent hires were made because they had the skills, abilities, and experience we needed then, not what we would need in the next year or two. I’m in the process of hiring a new Implementation

I’d love to hear about how you take customers from sales to onboarding successfully. 

@Mark Mitchell has a saying that’s gotten popular around here. He says “If your process is set in stone, it may as well be your tombstone.”That’s why I love working with him, he’s got all sorts of nuggets of wisdom to share! I think that quote resonates strongly when talking about VOC (Voice of the customer). It’s so important to hear what customers are saying and also implement updates according to their feedback. So… please share what methods you’ve found most successful to capture/implement customer feedback! PS if you’re interested in chiming in on the topic, join our livestream!

It’s undeniable. The power of AI is here to stay and the question is how are you adapting to using AI in your onboarding/implementation experience?In case you haven’t heard, ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that was developed by OpenAI to handle conversations and answer queries from users in a human-like manner. Its potential is limitless, it’s been used to design apps to even passing medical school exams! I encourage everyone to sign up for a ChatGPT account and check it out! https://chat.openai.com/auth/login?next=%2F

At GUIDEcx, we quote the study mentioned in this video a lot, but it makes a huge difference and requires very little effort on your part. Take 3 minutes to review the video and let me know what you think. Is there anything else you would suggest that onboarders try that makes a large impact without requiring much lift?

THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE: cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with other individuals, assumes that other individuals have similar background and depth of knowledge to understand. ☝I’ve been thinking more and more about this and how it relates to onboarding and customer enablement.  How do you personally go about mitigating this risk?  What are ways we can constantly remind ourselves of this danger? Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts!  

We are driving towards more onsite kickoffs for our larger clients and I’m curious about who currently does that and what it looks like. For us our goal is to use the onsite kickoff for multiple factors to include configuring the integration, importing data, and providing a solid foundation for our implementation discovery. With these clients we will assign all resources immediately (rather than just in time) and work on several aspects of the project in parallel instead of consecutively.  What are your thoughts here?

I was just speaking with our leadership team and one topic brought something home I thought I would share. We have a very defined implementation process in which we work through three stages of implementation:PM Staging Integration ImplementationWe follow this process almost religiously where each step is followed so we know we have all the data, structure, and requirements for a successful implementation. Overall it works great but we occasionally need to deviate, especially for some of our larger customers. As we were talking we had to reiterate to some individuals when it is appropriate to make those modifications and why. For example, we normally won’t assign an Integration Consultant until PM Staging is complete and an Implementation Specialist isn’t assigned until Integration is complete. However there can be value, especially with a strategic client, to deviate and assign both the IC and IS early so progress can be made even though we are still gathering initial documentation. I

Anyone care to share their thoughts or experiences with self-serve client onboarding? Essentially, this entails creating a digital platform that allows the client (Emerging/SMB) to input much of the configuration items thru a guided module.  Pros:Frees up essential time and resources for onboarding team members Allows client to get familiar with self-serve platform Allows onboarding team members to devote time and effort to more complex task and take on other more demanding projectsCons:Limits client interaction Familiarity with client self-serve platform may be challenging based on technical proficiency of client Potential risk of error creation or inaccurate configuration due to lack of familiarity with self-serve platformUltimately, if layout is intuitive and helpful, this could be prove beneficial for both the client and the onboarding team.

A really good way to lose your customers’ engagement is to overwhelm them with information. Think back to your school days. The best professors never gave you the “fire hydrant” experience. They broke things down into easy to consume bits and they met you where you’re at. On the other hand, teachers who just recited information were more likely to lose your interest. Same rule applies for customers!So… question of the week is what are some techniques you employ to ensure your customer is getting enough value, but not too much where they get overwhelmed? Comment below with your thoughts and/or join us in our livestream to collaborate!

“How are you providing an integrated onboarding experience for your customers?”☝ This is a question I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. I thought it would be fun to brainstorm some different ideas for automation/integrations. What is everyone working on right now??I’ll start!Right now, I’m experimenting with slack bots that trigger recipes in our Workato account. For example, once an opportunity gets marked ‘closed won’, do the following: Create an onboarding project in GUIDEcx with a specific template Send a slack message to our director of CS, giving them a list of CSMs they can assign to the account. User then clicks a button to assign the CSM. Update the CSM assignment on the Salesforce account and related systems   What are you currently working on!

After signing a contract there are lots of things running through a customer’s mind. Things like: “Did I just make a big financial mistake?”“Should I have signed up with a different vendor?” The list goes on. Fear, remorse, and regret are some of the most common feelings new clients experience post-signature. This is a totally natural thing that humans experience. It’s a mental process called, “prospection.” Your brain conjures up best case and worst-case scenarios of what your life will be like with the new product/service. The longer time goes by without a kickoff call scheduled, the worse those worst-case scenarios become.The best way to stop that post-purchase anxiety is to provide a clear ending of the buyer journey and a clear beginning of the customer journey. You can do this by scheduling and conducting a kick off call.I recommend measuring and reducing that TTKO (Time to Kick Off). The worst onboarding experiences (low CSAT scores) will have a high TTKO. It’s common that the b

The exact opposite question to someone else’s post this week - focusing on our larger enterprise clients and wanting to provide a little more consistency in the delivery of our Kickoff Meetings. They are a necessity due to number of players and complexity of work to be completed.Curious how you’re handling this part of the process?How long is your kickoff meeting? How far “in the weeds” do you take the conversation? What tool(s) are you using to get things going? Power Point / Prezi / other? Strictly the GuideCX Gantt Both? Something else? (I’d love to bring us into the 21st century but not going to get more software spend for 2023 so free tools are always appreciated.)

It’s an analogy that has been made more than once. You have a new customer, you want to wow them so they stay with you long-term. What have you done or seen happen where someone tried to wow their date? There’s a lot of parallels that can be drawn. So….Comment below with some funny dating stories that relate to onboarding! 

Howdy! Long time listener, first time caller 👋 We’re currently nearing the completion of our implementation of GuideCX (super stoked to go fully live btw) and I wanted to see how everyone else setup their `Status Change Reasons`. In our previous solution, we didn’t have as much granularity available.  For example, we only the following:Cancellation Client not ready Construction Delay Data Migration Issue Earlier Date Requested Internal Mistake UnresponsiveI’m hoping to gain some inspiration from the community in seeing what everyone else has in place. 

Q: I no longer wish to receive certain reports scheduled previously for delivery to my inbox; how do I unsubscribe from those reports that arrive from LOOKER?A: Depending on your license type, there are different steps you can take:If you are the person who scheduled the report for delivery to yourself and/or others, you can terminate the scheduled delivery for all recipients as follows:   Go to the Report in question in GUIDEcx, and click on the vertical ellipsis in the upper right corner. Any scheduled reports will now show up in a pop-up menu where you can choose to cancel (Delete) them for all recipients. Please see image the image below for details:   Image 1: Deleting a scheduled report for all recipients  If you are the recipient of the scheduled LOOKER report, and no longer wish to receive it, you can directly unsubscribe from that report by clicking on the Unsubscribe link provided within the email itself! Please see the image below for details:   Image 2: Unsubscribi

Our company is getting ready to roll out a new implementation/onboarding plan for our smaller customers. Because our product (SaaS) can be set up in just a couple of weeks with standard tools, features, and industry best practice material, it seems like the right way to go to pull our teams into a more ‘hands off’ approach to onboarding in these instances.What this means for us is:No kickoff call! Are we nuts? 😬  The call will be replaced by a kickoff email. All of our ‘to do tasks’ are going to be housed in GCX which will be sent to the customer team. All account set up to be done by one of our implementation specialists and information collected from customer would be done via a form/checklist sent out via GCX. All back and forth communication/questions would be handled via GCX. The final sign off for account go live may include an actual final wrap up call just to be sure we have all our ducks in a row for flipping the ON switch but we are trying to automate this completely so th

Every company should know how much their implementations/customer onboardings are costing them.Here’s why: Budgeting and Resource Allocation: By understanding the cost of conducting an onboarding experience, you can allocate your resources and budget more effectively. You can determine how much money and time you need to invest in onboarding new customers. Customer Lifetime Value: Knowing the cost of onboarding a new client can help you determine the lifetime value of that client. By understanding how much you need to spend to acquire and retain customers, you can make informed decisions about pricing and customer retention efforts. Process Improvement: Knowing the cost of onboarding a client can help companies identify inefficiencies in their onboarding process. If you or your team is spending an exorbitant amount of time on the same task then you can look at ways to streamline it! We talked about why it matters, now I want to hear from you on HOW you measure it! It’s definitely e

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?

You should always have at least 2-4 key contacts on the customer’s team. It’s a massive risk if you only have one point of contact (what if they go on vacation, what if they leave the company, etc). You definitely never want to have all your eggs in one basket. The more you do that the bigger risk you run of having to start over. Whenever I do an onboarding I always request that sales provides 3 points of contact from the customer. One is the executive sponsor (person who signed the contract), the app owner (person who I will work the most with), and a power user/champion (an end user that will champion the adoption of the product). If you have those three invited, your chance of completing your onboarding on time goes up significantly.

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. 

Q: I’ve reset my password and still cannot login to GUIDEcx.A: Ask your Admin to ensure your userid is ACTIVE in the GUIDEcx User Administration page.  If your userid is deactivated, attempts to change your password still won’t allow you to log in.  Make sure you are logging in with an active userid, and from there, change your password with Forgot Password at the login prompt if required.