Customer onboarding is arguably the most important customer phase of all as it sets the pace and expectations for the entire customer journey. If done well, it builds the foundation for long-term satisfaction, retention, and advocacy with your customers. But how do you know if you've done a good job? Once you get to renewal, it may be too late. But don't fret, Startdeliver will support you along the way! ☀️

Let's first have a look a few factors that signify a successful customer onboarding:

Now we can dive into how Startdeliver can help you to achieve these outcomes!

Startdeliver will support you in tracking the different goals and milestones of your customer onboarding. So what could be considered progress in onboardings? A common example of some steps can be found below, and can be expanded on to be as granular as you wish. The steps may also come in different order, run parallelly, or even return depending on your use cases.

Create project templates / playbooks

Now that you have an onboarding structure, you are able to set up tasks and projects in Startdeliver to support your progress. Tasks are the same as actions in Startdeliver, and projects are quite simply a bundle of tasks. To further deep-dive, you are able to create project templates, with tasks relating to onboarding, that you can then quickly apply as a playbook to each new customer. Startdeliver also integrates to your calendar and email inbox so that you can keep track of meetings, follow-ups and more as part of the playbook.

Check out below video on how you can set up an onboarding template in Startdeliver.

Share your onboarding project with your customer

Once you've set up your onboarding project, you can share it with your customer in your own dedicated, branded space. Great, right? Sharing a project with your customer will enable you to invite users from that customer to the project to share tasks, files, project updates etc. This is great for driving customer collaboration and will help you to follow up on the project progress together with your customer.

You can find a practical guide on how to share your onboarding project with your customer by following this link.

Most within SaaS would agree that a major part of the onboarding process is to enable your customer to start working in your platform as soon as possible. But one question remains - how do you know that this is actually happening? One way is to ask your customer directly, either in meetings or through other communication channels. While it's always desirable to be meeting with your customers, it may be difficult to get constant syncs into everyone's schedules. Insights from your customer's side alone may also not aid you in taking the appropriate actions.

Startdeliver enables you to gain insight into your customer's product usage in real time and allows you to take action accordingly.

Setting up products

A first step is to think through the different products that you would like to be tracking. Usually, this is connected to your business model. Are you charging your customers based on the features they use? Then it could be an idea to add those features as products individually or in their respective bundles. Are you charging based on the type and/or number of users that are on your platform? Perhaps adding those users types as products could be an idea. You get the drift!

If you are pondering on the difference between customer types and user types, below chart may help.

For more detailed instructions on the goal setup, have a look here.

Once the onboarding milestones are complete, it is time to start looking into the first value realization for your customer. The time it takes for a customer to start realizing value is a significant measure of a successful onboarding process. Have you been able to complete all onboarding steps in due time, and can you see proof for product adoption?

A few signs that you can look out for to understand if your customer is deriving value out of your platform can be found below.