Quick summary: SaaS companies face pressure to accelerate customer onboarding, but it’s important to balance automation with a personalized experience. Keeping AI behind the scenes and automating strategically helps teams work more efficiently while delivering value to the customer.
SaaS businesses have a lot of incentive to streamline and automate their customer onboarding. Many companies are shifting to a consumption-based pricing model where they invoice their clients based on how much they use the platform – which means SaaS providers are financially motivated to get customers onto their platform faster.
But at the same time, customers expect personalized service that addresses their specific needs. And if you rush to automate your whole onboarding process, you risk missing important details that separate a finished onboarding from one that actually delivers value.
As the VP of Customer Experience Delivery at ChurnZero, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to streamline the customer experience without sacrificing the personal touch that makes a big difference for our clients. Let’s get into the risks of automating, along with ways to strategically improve your customer onboarding without fumbling your first impression.
The risks of automating customer onboarding.
There are some trade-offs that happen when you automate onboarding tasks that human beings used to do:
- Business context: B2B implementations require a lot of contextual information about how the customer wants to use the software. Generic AI tools often lack the ability to process these details and see the big picture.
- Repeatability: B2B implementations have stages and steps that repeat, but the way each customer gets there almost never does. Their internal processes, their data structure, and the way their accounts and contacts are organized all feed into the build, and none of it looks the same twice. Outside of the repeatable parts, it’s kind of the Wild West, and that’s where automation struggles.
- Performance measurement: Automation is supposed to enable teams to work faster. But time spent onboarding is only one piece of the puzzle, and businesses should be tracking other metrics that predict a customer’s long-term success.
How to automate onboarding while delivering value to the customer.
Onboarding teams can roll out automation tools to work more efficiently without sacrificing the customer experience. It just requires some strategic planning around where and how to automate:
Define success by more than just time-to-value.
Onboarding teams want to move faster because it frees up resources and helps the bottom line. But strict timelines (like a mandatory 45-day, 60-day, or 90-day setup) put the focus on the date instead of on what the customer can actually do when you’re finished.
In the B2B world, timing is a dangerous primary indicator. It matters to me as a leader for staffing and capacity, but we very rarely talk about it with customers beyond setting goals and making sure we’re aligned on what they want to do. Instead of just focusing on how fast you get through onboarding, you should measure if the onboarding actually delivered value and set your customer up for success:
- Customer satisfaction scores: Conducting surveys at key points of the journey can help you determine your customer’s satisfaction and find areas for improvement.
- Use case deployment: Confirm if your customers are using your product for the specific use cases they presented during the onboarding process.
- Adoption of what you built: Are customers actually using the configurations you built for them during implementation? When they aren’t, there’s sometimes a good reason, like priorities or processes changing. Dig in and find out why.
Maintain a personal connection.
SaaS implementations require many touch points with the customer. At ChurnZero, we’re dealing with customer experience professionals all day, every day, so their bar is higher. They know the game and they know what we’re trying to do, which means we have to be really good at it. We’ve been deliberate about not asking customers to interact with AI tools in place of those conversations, and about not losing the context those conversations give us.
The implementation process involves highly complex information. We build a lot of AI into our own platform, and we use all of it. The tooling on the market for running an implementation team is a different story: most of what I’ve demoed is designed for B2C, so in the B2B world it either does too little to be worth the effort or takes so much customization that you’re better off with your own approach. That’s changing fast, and a couple of tools are starting to look interesting. In the meantime, you can roll out automation strategically behind the scenes to maintain a personal connection and control over the onboarding:
- Automate manual tasks. One of the best uses for AI is automating administrative and repetitive tasks like data collection and data entry, turning whatever process documentation a customer sends over into a starting point for their configuration, and the low-value setup work your team repeats on every build.
- Maintain human understanding: Human beings are still better at understanding customer requirements and providing guidance. While AI can gather information and provide advice behind the scenes, the onboarding team should be front-and-center making recommendations to the customer.
- Avoid AI on top of AI: Every stage of the customer journey has a meaningful amount of AI in it now. Sales uses it to summarize meetings and pull pipeline information, the SDR team runs AI outbound, and by the time any of that reaches your onboarding team, the inputs you’re analyzing were themselves generated by another AI tool. Each layer takes you one step further from reality because you’re looking at a summary of a summary.
Use onboarding to drive future customer value.
You can also drive value in the future by positioning the onboarding journey as the first step in an ongoing relationship with your customer. During onboarding, you can set your customer up for long-term success, which is what keeps the renewal conversation from being a battle.
Take the information gathered during onboarding, like the use cases they came to you for and the goals they set, and carry it into the business reviews your CSMs run. Three months in, you can look at what the metrics say, whether they’ve reached those goals, and what needs adjusting as you iterate.
Ideally, you can show that you had a plan in place from day one. And your customer success teams can look back at the customer’s journey and say, “Here’s what we accomplished.”
Experiment with limited customer groups.
Keep in mind, you don’t have to use automation to overhaul every aspect of the onboarding process right out of the gate. Onboarding teams can test new workflows or automate certain processes with a limited group of customers. Successful tests can be expanded, while unsuccessful tests can be abandoned or tweaked and re-tested.
Don’t feel like you have to fully commit to any approach. At ChurnZero, we like to try little experiments with a small number of customers to see how it goes. In my mind, there’s no bad experiment because every test teaches you something.
Customer onboarding should enable customer success.
As SaaS companies update their pricing models and manage client expectations, they should build an onboarding process that blends automation with personalized customer service. Relying on rigid implementation timelines puts the focus on a date instead of on what the customer can actually do with your product. And when you put AI front and center, you lose the context that makes an implementation work.
Keeping AI behind the scenes to handle repetitive tasks frees your onboarding team to work more strategically and handle personal interactions with customers. Measuring the value you bring, looking for opportunities to drive future renewals and experimenting with automated tasks can help onboarding teams work more efficiently but still set their customers up for long-term success.
