An onboarding process can quickly go off the rails if there are multiple stakeholders on the customer’s side. Especially so when they’re not on the same page about what onboarding tasks need to get completed and who is in charge of getting them done.

We’ve seen companies run into issues with customers of all types and sizes. For example, when dealing with schools there are often siloed departments and layers of bureaucracy. With larger enterprises, the person in charge of purchasing is often different from the person who needs to pull the data or graphics to get the product running. And ultimately, that person (or team) is often not who will end up using the product.

To make sure your success manager doesn’t have to track down all of those stakeholders individually when a task is overdue, it’s important to designate a person on the customer’s end who will be the single point of contact during onboarding. That person will be the champion for your product on the customer’s team, and we often call them the “point person”.

Reserve time on the kick-off call agenda to designate a point person. You can do this as simply as asking them to choose someone on the call, making sure there’s total agreement from everyone on the customer’s team. Appointing a point person from the customer is possibly the most important objective during kickoff, since it ensures everything else continues running smoothly into the future.

The point person needs to be someone who feels a sense of ownership over the project. Ideally, the point person is someone whose job depends on launching this product (to be blunt). They will need a strong incentive to coordinate all of the players on the customer’s side to get the product running.

If you’re using a project management tool or a B2B onboarding tool like Arrows to share the onboarding task list with your customer, you (or the point person) should assign tasks directly to the people on the customer’s team who need to accomplish them. Then you can set up automated reminder emails around the due date for that task so there’s no chance of confusion about who is supposed to do what.

Emails get lost like it’s their job.

Email was not built for sharing information that needs to be referenced over and over again. But too often, companies rely on email for sharing their success plans and next steps with customers. It’s no surprise that customers are often unable to find the information they need to understand what happens next during onboarding!

How many times received an email from a customer asking “Where are we on this?” Usually this email arrives because you’re waiting on the customer to do something, but they lost track of what they were supposed to do next.

To avoid communication problems during onboarding, make sure any resource your customer will need to reference in the future is stored at a website they can bookmark. This could be a Google Doc, a Trello board, or a custom onboarding plan in Arrows. Having that information in a link will prevent you and the customer from digging through old emails to figure out what information has been shared.

The ideal success plan lets you manage the whole onboarding process without using email at all—except for automated alerts. To do this, you need a plan that’s stored in an editable format so that the customer can automatically update the plan as they check off tasks.

It’s also helpful to be able to add comments to each item of the plan so that any notes discussed during your calls or any discussion about an item can be added directly to the relevant task. And to make sure your success manager doesn’t have to send reminder emails, your plan should be able to assign tasks and due dates to individuals and send automated reminders. (p.s. did we mention Arrows helps with this? 👀)

A good success plan provides accountability for you and the customer without the need for a ton of back-and-forth via email. If the onboarding process slows down, it should be easy for both parties to figure out why and get back on track.

That said, when you do use onboarding emails, make sure they’re great emails and help keep things moving.

When you start onboarding multiple customers at a time, it’s important to be able to quickly assess where each one is at in the process. That’s why you need high-level visibility into the status of all of your customers’ onboarding processes.

We see it all the time: every CSM on a team has their own ad hoc processes or tools, and the only way see status across all customers is to call a meeting or have everyone manually update a shared document. But meetings are time-consuming and gathering the info to fill out an update takes time too (and, let’s be honest, is likely out of date).

Gaining visibility into the status of each customer in real-time is a crucial step to improving your onboarding process. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. And if you don’t know where your customers are at in the onboarding process without checking on each one individually, you won’t be able to measure any data about your onboarding process.

When you can see all of your customers’ statuses at once, you can gather a lot of data about your onboarding process. That data can help you quickly triage which customers need the most help. It can help success managers direct their energy toward the customers who are closest to hitting an “aha moment” or a milestone, especially if it’s tied to a bonus.

If your team has multiple success managers, they can use the data to benchmark themselves against their peers and learn from the team members who are completing onboardings the fastest.

And when you have high-level visibility into each customer’s onboarding journey, you can begin to notice patterns of where customers get stuck and why some customers churn before they’ve even finished onboarding.

How do you keep a customer on-task during high-touch SaaS onboarding?

One of the most frustrating experiences for a CSM is when a customer drags their feet on the tasks necessary to move to the next step in the onboarding process.

There are two big reasons why customers stall out during onboarding:

1. They lose momentum
2. The onboarding tasks are too complicated

It’s a simple rule:

Customers lose momentum when they lose track of the end goal of integrating the new product they just bought.

Everyone has a natural resistance to change and learning new processes, so it’s important to keep the “why” behind a customer’s investment front-and-center. We recommend including a visual reminder of the end-goal of the onboarding process on the success plan.

In Arrows, all onboarding plan templates include a space to write a summary of the customer’s goals next to the task list. We’ve also noticed that it’s important to start every onboarding meeting by re-emphasizing the outcome you’re working toward. This keeps the customer focused and motivated and also provides a chance for the customer to let you know if their goals have changed.

How do you know when a task is too complicated?

An onboarding task might be too complicated when you notice many of your customers getting stuck in the same place.

You also need to have visibility into how often tasks are overdue to recognize this in the first place. But when it happens, it’s time to dig into that task and find ways to simplify it (or maybe move it to a different point in the process).

Maybe you’re asking too much too early. Find the most essential part of a task, and save the other elements for later on in their onboarding journey. Your customer needs to have multiple “aha moments” on the way to experiencing the full value of your product in order to stay motivated.

This actually happened to us at Arrows with some of our earliest customers. We noticed customers were getting stuck when we asked them to tell us their current onboarding process. In our minds, that meant “tell us whatever you’re doing now, even if it’s kind of a mess.” But many customers thought we were asking for their ideal onboarding process, and they felt like they needed to do a strategic planning session before they could even use our tool.

But the goal of Arrows is to help customers build and improve that process over time, so we had to make a change. We shifted the task to say “Gather your existing onboarding documents.” This simple prompt allowed customers to quickly grab whatever onboarding checklists or templates they already had. It gave us a place to start because we realized as they got more familiar with the tool, they would discover ways to improve their onboarding process organically.

The goal of onboarding for SaaS companies is to get the customer using the product and seeing its value as fast as possible.

If your company serves a wide variety of customers, the onboarding process can become bloated with tasks that are only relevant to some customers. Eventually, most SaaS companies will need to break their customers into segments and create separate onboarding processes for each segment.

But it’s not always obvious how to segment your customers. A three-person team and a 300-person team might need to go through the same process if their use-case is the same, so company size isn’t always the right metric. And two companies in completely different industries might still share a common problem that they’re solving with your product. There’s no need to create separate templates if the use-case is the same.

We recommend that companies start with one comprehensive onboarding template. Then customize the template for each customer before starting them on the journey, removing any irrelevant tasks and adding anything that’s missing. This adds some work before you send out each success plan, but it will streamline the process for the customer, which can get them to value faster.

If you find yourself needing to frequently edit your template in similar ways, try to find the commonalities across those companies (e.g. the product they bought, their timelines, their goals, etc).

Do the same for any tasks you frequently add or remove. Eventually, you’ll have enough data to break your customers into segments, and create separate onboarding templates for each segment.

In our experience, the segments usually end up being determined by things like the combination of products purchased, the number of custom features requested, or back-end details related to your B2B product.

We’ve also seen many mature customer success teams use the Jobs To Be Done framework to segment customers throughout their entire lifecycle and build onboarding templates specific to each job. We hope to dive in deeper to this subject in future guides, as it’s one of the things all scaling success teams start dealing with.