A Customer Onboarding Checklist for Successful CS Teams

A lot goes into crafting the ideal onboarding process for SaaS products. You need to clearly demonstrate the ins and outs of your software to ensure your customers not only know how to use it, but how to employ it effectively in the pursuit of their enterprise’s unique needs and goals. At the same time, you need to minimize time to value (TTV) to ensure customers see the benefits of your product as soon as possible.

One way to tackle both of these challenges at once is to utilize a customer onboarding checklist for your CS team that clearly delineates all of the targets that need to be hit during this stage of the customer journey.

A Comprehensive SaaS Customer Onboarding Checklist

Whether you are onboarding a completely new customer or simply introducing a new version of your product to a returning customer, it is important to check all of the boxes in the customer onboarding checklist below every time. Doing so ensures the best possible onboarding experience for your customers—and the best possible business outcomes for your enterprise.

Customer Success Team Checklist for Onboarding

• Define your goals and KPIs. Track KPIs that let you determine when milestones have been reached so that customers see the value your product delivers.
• Invest in customer success software to optimize your customer success workflow.
• Design and implement a digital engagement strategy that allows for personalized messages to be sent at scale using automation. Provide value to the customer based on where they are in their journey. 
• Set up an early warning system that will identify red flags, such as inactivity or too many support tickets, and automatically notify Customer Success Managers and provide proactive next steps for them to take.
• Segment customers to look for common issues and bottlenecks among different customer groups; use these insights to continually update and improve your onboarding process.
• Determine best practices for addressing common onboarding challenges ahead of time, so that your team can proactively take action to prevent churn.
• Provide detailed training and access to a community forum to discuss issues with customers.
• Monitor customer data at scale to ensure that customers are progressing through the stages of onboarding and have not lost interest or become stuck.
• Provide an onboarding survey after the customer completes their journey. Review and make necessary changes to your onboarding process to ensure the experience is seamless and positive.

You may need to add a few entries to your own CS team’s customer onboarding checklist in order to address objectives unique to your enterprise. As long as it includes the points above, however, your Customer Success Managers will be well-prepared to deliver an onboarding experience that provides a smooth segue into regular, successful use of your product.

Why Optimizing Your SaaS Onboarding Matters

Optimizing your customer onboarding may not be your only priority, but it should definitely be high on your list. How quickly and clearly you can demonstrate the value of your product during the onboarding stage has a direct effect on customer retention and churn. Retention rates affect overall revenue and sales growth as well as your projected brand image.

Implementing a customer onboarding checklist for your Customer Success team can seem a bit daunting when your team already has a lot on their plate; however, consider that your CS team is likely doing one or more of these steps already. The purpose of a checklist is not to increase your team’s workload, but rather to ensure that your customers’ onboarding experience is consistently positive. Happily onboarded customers are more likely to renew their subscriptions, recommend your software to others, and even increase their spending, than those who are less impressed with their experience.

An Innovative Approach to Onboarding Optimization

The best way to encourage rapid results, customer engagement, and internal collaboration is to utilize a Customer Success platform that facilitates all three. A customizable, intuitively designed solution can be key to perfecting your internal workflow while enabling your team to provide customers with exactly what they need during (and after) onboarding. Look for a platform that focuses on quantifiable goals and results to help you deliver business results to your customers.

Finally, ensure that your platform of choice is scalable so that it can grow and evolve alongside your enterprise. The better your onboarding process becomes, the more customer-centric growth you will enjoy.

In these challenging times, you need a solution that helps you deliver results quickly and pivot when needed. Get started for free today with our Onboarding SuccessBLOC to find out what an outcomes-based approach to Customer Success can do for you.