Quick Summary: A strong customer onboarding strategy builds retention and growth. Learn how to ensure cross-functional collaboration, a structured framework, customer segmentation, goal-aligned metrics, phased adoption, and ongoing communication to accelerate value, improve adoption, and strengthen relationships from day one.
Your customer onboarding strategy is the foundation of your future retention and expansion revenue. Every task, meeting, and communication serves the ultimate goal of getting that customer to realize value. You aim to identify what’s important to the customer, set expectations, and measure success.
The right onboarding strategy means more than just getting a customer using your product. User adoption drives down user acquisition costs, stretches marketing resources, increases customer lifetime value, and brings flexibility to your team’s product resource investments.
But how do you know if your onboarding tactics really work? If your training and targets are falling short or too ambitious? You may already know what’s not working, but struggle to build in processes to evaluate and adjust your existing onboarding strategy.
We’ve outlined a six step onboarding checklist for your CS team to use, re-use, and keep as a reference. By regularly asking these questions and keeping your team accountable, your onboarding process will grow alongside your customers.
Our onboarding strategy evaluation checklist in a nutshell:
- 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 multi-phased? (deluge versus steady stream)
- Are you talking with your customer? (because perception is reality)
Let’s explore the details of each step.
1. Is your onboarding team cross-functional?
Bring customer success, sales, product, and executives together to build out a customer journey that incorporates different perspectives. Customer feedback changes depending on the lens you’re looking through (i.e. your team and its own goals). But it’s all helpful to define responsibilities and metrics, as well as to build and maintain efficient internal workflows.
Action items
- Nail the sales handoff and bring executives or product team members into the process immediately
- Create an onboarding roll call for kickoff with names, titles, and contact information
Related: How to turn your implementation handoffs into a strategic asset.
2. Is your onboarding process a framework or a free-for-all?
Is your onboarding process a well-oiled machine of timely tasks and thresholds, until a customer gets stuck with no clear steps for collecting or reviewing feedback?
While it’s likely any new customer may experience gaps in training or confusion at certain points, it’s pivotal that your CS team treats these as opportunities to check in and learn.
Whether check-in meetings, customer feedback surveys, automated workflows, or a bit of everything, ensure that your onboarding process has checkpoints for both accomplishments and review.
Action items
- Establish onboarding thresholds or milestones that estimate how long a task or set of tasks will take. Then adjust and set benchmarks as customers work through those tasks, creating baselines that are easy to review in the future
- Ask: Where are most customers getting stuck during onboarding? Where does your team spend the most time when onboarding a customer?
- Group tasks together and apply a percentage with that activity type – for example, what percentage of time do CSMs spend with reporting?
Learn to drive customers to value during onboarding at scale with ChurnZero and Donna Weber.
If you’re unsure where to begin—or suspect your current onboarding may be underperforming—start by reviewing the six dos and don’ts for improving your customer onboarding. Not sure if your onboarding process needs a rethink? Watch for five signs you may need to revamp your onboarding process, especially if customer engagement is inconsistent or your team is stretched thin across use cases. For a broader strategy view, these SaaS onboarding best practices offer benchmarks and tactics to align onboarding with long-term adoption and renewal goals.
3. Have you segmented your customers yet?
Without proper customer segmentation, there is no tracking. Use whatever system works best for your business – created terms like “decision makers and champions”, or based on customer maturity, industry, or other demographics. Along with focused data on the new customer, this will open up a world of comparative data and usage patterns that can inform how you adjust and improve onboarding.
Action items
- Compare a new customer’s time in app against customers in similar onboarding journeys (past and present)
- Mark a customer’s status (early adopter, lagger, on track)
- Identify early usage patterns and specific features among successful customers, then determine if other customers are meeting those thresholds
- Identify early usage patterns for customers who have churned
Related: How Woven reduced time to first value while growing its customer base by 40%.
4. Are your metrics aligned with your goals?
Don’t let a laundry list of metrics and KPIs distract your CS team from the real onboarding goal: making sure your product helps solve the problem that drove your customer to purchase the product in the first place.
Yes, tracking your onboarding performance is important – the first three items in this checklist are still integral and highly relevant. Common engagement expectations like CSM interactions (meetings, emails), support tickets and product questions (volume, frequency, topic), and access to resources (help guides, videos, courses) are part of keeping tabs on the efficacy of your onboarding process.
But the metrics that really matter tie back to your customer’s primary goal and time to value.
Action items
- Customer commitment metrics: spending time in the app, exploring features
- Customer engagement metrics: interacting with CSMs (high-touch), interacting with support and resources (low and tech-touch)
- Create a customer scorecard with all major KPIs, the starting baseline metric, and the desired goal to track results throughout the process
Related: How to set baseline SaaS onboarding metrics.
5. Is your onboarding process multi-phased? (deluge versus steady stream)
Onboarding is not a synonym for overloading, so don’t throw everything at your customers all at once. A multi-phased adoption plan lays out a clear path to value that continues long after the official “onboarding” phase is complete. Instead of a deluge of information that stops just as abruptly as it started, opt for a steady stream of training, resources and check-in’s.
If you’ve set up a team, built a framework with metrics that align with customer goals, and segmented your customers accordingly, then this step is a scheduled gut check.
Action items
- Assess onboarding strategy/framework and ensure continued check-in’s and communication is built into the customer’s journey
- Confirm customer feedback channels and process
6. Are you talking with your customer? (because perception is reality)
The flashiest, most organized, metrics-heavy onboarding is pointless if the customer doesn’t feel it was successful. Your structure and their progress should align, because ultimately the customer’s perception is the reality.
Action items
- Listen for major themes and summarize back to the customer to help identify quick wins and related issues that can be tackled together
- Share surveys (NPS, CES, CSAT) to confirm what customers tell you along the way
- Recognize, address, and follow-up on customer concerns (at an individual level)
Related: Three effective strategies for improving customer onboarding with AI.
