Everboarding explained: how to drive continuous growth with continuous onboarding

Quick summary: Everboarding is a continuous, adaptive approach to customer engagement that extends onboarding across the full customer journey. By personalizing support and education over time, everboarding helps CS teams increase retention, reduce churn, and deliver ongoing value.

A comprehensive onboarding strategy is still at the top of any customer success team’s list. But as you focus on personalization, renewal strategies, and how to perfect the customer journey, it’s possible to miss the forest for the trees.

It’s easy to forget that you have everything you need to build a continuous, iterative customer experience, and to keep the components chopped up and siloed instead.

Connect it all, and you arrive at a process that’s gaining a lot of traction: everboarding.

What is everboarding—and how is it different from onboarding?

The idea of everboarding has been floating around HR and sales teams for a while now—it encompassed continuous training programs and cyclical courses for internal teams. More recently, sales enablement teams have touted it as a premier method for boosting win rates and improving product training.

The concept of everboarding simply combines and extends best practices in onboarding and customer engagement. In it, CS tactics work concurrently within one continuous loop. It includes all the big stuff we should already be providing: customer journey segmentation, health metrics, onboarding goals and training, personalized outreach, and product education.

Logistically, this is a big lift on the front end. But with integrated systems, cross-functional collaboration, and AI tools at the ready, everboarding can be a reliable, adjustable strategy for CS teams.

So what’s the biggest shift from what you’re already doing in onboarding to an everboarding mindset? Time to value. Everboarding takes the focus away from tracking a singular event, because customer goals can (and should) change as relationships and products evolve. A top-notch onboarding experience won’t mean a thing if you’re building for static behavior, because a customer will never act the same on days 1, 30, and 100.

Why everboarding matters: the ROI of continuous engagement in customer success

Everboarding as a concept is on the rise because of industry shifts we’ve already adjusted to:

Complex SaaS environments: Today’s SaaS platforms (ChurnZero included) aren’t single-feature tools. They’re robust, interconnected ecosystems. No customer learns everything in the first 30/60/90 days.

Customer expectations: Customers expect support and value delivery to be proactive and personalized. If they hit a wall or can’t see the value quickly, churn is inevitable.
Evolving use cases: Businesses change. So do their use cases. And your product probably isn’t standing still either. Customers need continued support to keep up with both.

In short: If your customer engagement strategy doesn’t evolve alongside your product and your customer’s needs, you’re inviting churn. Everboarding is your insurance against that.

Everboarding’s biggest advantage for CS teams is also the trickiest component: it’s always changing.

A bespoke approach to training (and retraining) customers—layered with continuous outreach and updated options based on their goals and behaviors—is what will keep customers focused, productive, and happy.

Last year, we outlined the concept of “minimalist onboarding,” which may sound contradictory to everboarding—but hear us out:

“[At ChurnZero], we tailor the onboarding process to each client’s unique needs and adjust their experience accordingly, with a dedicated CSM assigned early in the customer journey to provide clear and actionable onboarding steps, interactive training sessions, and more. While more complex, our process ensures that customers don’t get lost in unnecessary steps and can focus on what’s most important to them.”

We’ve been calling it onboarding, but that’s not entirely true. It’s the early stage of everboarding, and we’re learning how to build out that process of ongoing learning for our customer journeys, too.

And the concept of a strong implementation or onboarding experience is still table stakes—according to recent industry research, more than 60% of customers consider onboarding when making a purchasing decision, and over 90% say companies could improve their onboarding experience.

How to build an everboarding strategy for your customer team

We believe there are two avenues to level up your onboarding strategy to an everboarding methodology: AI tools and customer journey continuity.

The first sounds trendy, but for good reason: AI supports personalization at scale, which can help us build tailored learning experiences for customers with shifting needs.

There’s enough out there on the benefits of AI that we won’t belabor the point:

Even if we’re flush with AI tools, the top issue with traditional onboarding is our own hubris: we assume we are the most important thing customers have going on. It’s most likely the exact opposite—and it should be! Think about everything we manage day to day. How can we adjust our outlook to maintain an everboarding frame of mind?

Don’t assume customers retain everything (or really, anything). Information retention gets harder every day. If we provide a central hub (e.g., an in-app help center or online community), customers will be able to refer back to it for a range of resources.
Don’t assume customers’ jobs and priorities are static. If we highlight a variety of product features and use cases, customers won’t be in the lurch when their goals inevitably shift.
Don’t assume customers have an eidetic memory. Do you remember everything the first time you hear, see, or learn it? We didn’t think so. If we automate and organize our library of courses and product training, customers will have easy access to refresh, relearn, and reengage.
Don’t assume products are the same as onboarding day 1. It’s a safe bet that the product your customers are using today is different from what they used during onboarding—SaaS is predictably always changing, and that’s a good thing. Improved products and features mean ongoing education is a strategic advantage for everyone.

When to use everboarding: Real-world customer success applications

Everboarding isn’t reinventing the onboarding wheel—it’s fixing it up to be a smoother, more efficient ride.

How should you get started? Our onboarding strategy checklist is still relevant here. The list is a great way to start reevaluating how to create a continuous customer engagement cycle (aka, everboarding):

Is your onboarding team cross-functional?
Is your onboarding process a framework or a free-for-all?
Have you segmented your customers yet?
Are your metrics aligned with your goals?
Is your onboarding process multiphased (deluge versus steady stream)?
Are you talking with your customer (because perception is reality)?

If your CS team is starting from scratch or planning a more robust rebuild, we recommend breaking up the everboarding process into four main buckets:

(And kudos to The Clueless Company for their recent article on everboarding tips.)

Personalize your customer journeys

Base journeys on customer roles, behaviors, and goals
Each journey type needs its own set of tools, tips, and walkthroughs
Don’t forget personalized outreach (email, newsletters, webinars, meetings, etc.)

Segment and track beyond initial onboarding

Personalization doesn’t matter if you’re sharing the right content at the wrong time
Try applying lifecycle stages (new, advanced, ready for renewal, at risk, etc.)
Review metrics regularly—this will never not be a priority

Provide a knowledge hub

This can live entirely in your CS platform or be built into a community or resource hub on your website
Resources vary depending on need: chat support and help center articles for quick questions; messaging aligned with customer goals and milestones; CSM meetings and interactive product trainings for deeper, more hands-on support.