Generally, the customer handoff process from deals to customer onboarding can be turbulent and quite confounding. Onboarding is the first and most important phase in your customer success journey, and the main genuine experience a customer has working and first interacting with your team, to build the knowledge and gain experience on how best they can use and utilize your product as well start building the understanding on how the working relation/partnership can be formed and functioning between the two teams.

Both teams need onboarding to go as flawlessly as could really be expected. Keep in mind that there is no ‘one size fits all’ customer, workflow, processes, playbooks, and repeatable plays of work processes that make it simple to offer every client a similar degree of consideration and support during the onboarding phase.

To-Do list

Once a new deal landing, there are a few steps you need to consider to start planning your customer onboarding journey in order to bring them up to speed with your product and drive the value to achieve the customer desired outcomes.

Here is a list of significant steps for a smooth onboarding:

Sales – CSM handoff call/meeting:

At this stage sales team has invested significant time and effort to know the customer, grasp their requirements, and objectives, and land the deal. Plan this internal meeting to capture as much information as you could to understand the customer environment, needs, challenges, and desired outcomes and goals to align your solution, and delivery planning with their desired outcomes.

Successful handoff between sales and customer success is a complete transition of all knowledge from sales to customer success so no surprises in the future.

Prepare your playbooks and processes

As a CS team, you should a well-prepared library of playbooks and processes ready for use. For the onboarding kick-off and based on the sales handoff meeting outcomes you should be able to select the set of playbooks and processes that are appropriate for the customer needs and desired outcomes.

Schedule your first meeting with the customer

The soonest the better, don’t let this slip between the cracks of internal preparation. You can hit the first step by introducing the team and a high-level plan and timeline. Try to identify the stakeholders at this stage and schedule a few informal meetings with the customer champion before you schedule the onboarding kick-off meeting to dive into the implementation process.

Build the customer lifecycle

Customer lifecycle follows the customer journey from onboarding to retention and renewal. The customer should be involved in this planning and play a part in this preparation, so as you are preparing your onboarding plan, ensure you are likewise looking forward to development and growth down the road.

Set your measurements and KPIs

Start defining your metrics and KPIs as soon as you start this engagement, it is never too early to tie your strategy with numbers. Put your start on the right track by setting up metrics and KPIs and start tracking on the very first moment of onboarding. Time to value, time to implementation, engagement rate, adoption rate, usage rate, number of onboarding support tickets per day, and CSM sentiment are some of the metrics you and your team should track and measure as soon as you start to ensure you are moving in the right path.

Customer onboarding is the first part of your customer success journey and a very critical part of the customer lifecycle and heavily impacts the customer relationship. Do it right and you set the relationship for many years to come. Keep in mind, there is no second chance for the first impression.