Quick Summary: To scale customer onboarding without losing the human touch, segment customers early, define measurable milestones, strengthen sales handoffs, and look to standardize through configurations, tools, and automation.
Every customer onboarding is a make-or-break moment for your team.
Make it a great experience, says Emily Alexander, VP of customer success at WelcomeHome Software, and you earn trust, momentum, and a path to expansion. Execute poorly, and you can expect skepticism, disengagement, and, ultimately, churn.
These high stakes don’t get any lower when you scale your onboarding process. When you spread your resources thinner, there’s less room for error and less room for white-gloving, so it becomes even more essential to get the processes right.
At ZERO-IN 2025, Emily outlined a practical framework for building scalable onboarding that delivers like clockwork, removing work from the customer, using self-service where it makes sense, and using tech tools to extend the human touch.
Here are our seven top takeaways for building a scalable customer onboarding process that leaves no customer behind and reserves bespoke work for the moments where it really counts.
1: Segment your customers before you get overwhelmed.
Human resources are expensive, Emily points out. While it’s tempting to try to white-glove every customer, this approach will force you to take a lot of steps back once you start scaling.
It’s better to segment early so your most intensive onboarding resources go to the customers that produce the greatest return. You can segment by ARR, number of “billing units” (users, locations, licenses), sophistication level, and strategic value. Emily suggests starting with three broad segments:
Enterprise / strategic: High ARR, many locations or users, strong brand influence, or large upsell potential (for example, a pilot with major expansion upside).
Mid-market: The middle of your book, with moderate ARR and some self-service blended into a structured process.
Tech-touch: Smallest customers, lowest ARR, and the highest emphasis on self-service and automation.
You should also leave some room for flexibility, Emily says. If a small-ARR customer has outsized industry influence—or a high-complexity deployment—consider giving them a higher-tier experience.
2: Identify milestones, then use data to make timelines real.
Your customers don’t consider implementing your product to be their main job. As a result, it’ll take more than a vague checklist for your team to keep them on track. You’ll need a series of milestones, each with defined owners, timelines, and expectations by segment.
Every company’s milestones will differ. For Emily’s team at WelcomeHome (a CRM with heavy data and integration work), they include:
- Sales handoff
- Internal prep
- Kickoff
- Deliverable collection and configuration
- Data migration and integrations
- Testing and QA
- Training
- Go-live and early post-go-live support
Once you identify the most important ones, measure how long each milestone takes, for each segment. If this is new to you, start by tracking the time from contract signature to go-live date, then averaging it.
“You can’t decrease your time to first value if you don’t know what it is,” says Emily. Even a simple baseline will help you set realistic timelines per segment, establish internal SLAs for key milestones, and identify where projects consistently stall.
Related: How to turn implementation insights into a strategic advantage.
3: Build a robust sales handoff and don’t skip it.
If onboarding is your first impression, the sales handoff is the introduction before you walk into the room. Behind the scenes, it’s also the perfect opportunity to capture and align around key data points—so treat this handoff as a non-negotiable milestone, says Emily, especially for mid-market and enterprise customers.
Your handoff process should be:
Structured: Essential fields in your sales team’s CRM (like legacy system, number of units, desired go-live date, expected difficulty, key contacts, and potential points of contention) should be filled before a deal can be marked “Closed-Won”.
Leader-reviewed: At WelcomeHome, handoff emails go first to leadership. “If it’s not clear to me, it’s absolutely not going to be clear to that CSM,” says Emily. CSMs don’t get assignments until the handoff is usable.
More robust for larger deals. For enterprise and mid-market customers, WelcomeHome’s sales and CS leaders hold a live internal handoff to walk through the deal, assign roles, and draft the kickoff deck together.
One of Emily’s favorite fields is an expected difficulty score, ranging from 1 to 5.
“A score of one means: easy-peasy,” she says. “A score of five means: hunker down and get ready. It also signifies to our CSMs how to allocate resources, and allows us to anticipate client expectations.”
4: Introduce CSMs early in the process, not at the end.
“One of the best decisions I ever made was to introduce our CSMs earlier in the process,” says Emily.
“When I was an implementation specialist, nothing ground my gears more than being off the project for six weeks, but having the customer still messaging me, not their CSM.”
On enterprise and mid-market projects, Welcome Home CSMs join from the kickoff onwards, where they’re positioned as part of the implementation team and will often lead training. This smooths the transition after go-live, and prevents lingering reliance on implementation specialists.
5: Invest in building default configurations and training programs.
A key scalability unlock for WelcomeHome was default configuration.
“We asked our development team to create standards by which all of our drop-downs are populated when we create an account,” Emily explains. “All our templates are populated, and those are based on our industry. Default configuration saves so much time and allows your implementation team to create an account and then just redline it.”
On top of that, Emily tailors the configuration and training experience according to her segments.
Enterprise segment:
Configuration: Live working sessions where the implementation specialist acts as a consultant, plus a post-configuration walkthrough and multi-layer QA with peer review, director review, and customer QA.
Training: Often two sessions, instead of one 90-minute block, and, when possible, in-person.
Mid-market segment:
Configuration: Based on forms and standard options, followed by a walkthrough call to validate and tweak.
Training: Shorter virtual sessions with strong self-service follow-up.
Tech touch segment:
Configuration: Customers complete forms; the team configures and notifies them when it’s ready.
Training: Leans heavily on LMS, webinars, and in-app guidance. If adoption lags, there is targeted intervention from Emily’s team.
At every level, Emily emphasizes balance. “You need to make sure that you’re not self-servicing to the detriment of your client experience,” she says. The goal is to scale without losing the human touch where it matters, and never to degrade the customer experience.
6: Invest in the tools to make onboarding truly scalable
Scalable onboarding is as much about tooling and templates as it is about headcount. Emily’s philosophy is to take as much work off the customer as possible, standardize wherever you can, and reserve bespoke work for the customers and moments where it really counts.
To achieve this at scale, you’ll need some essential technological capabilities.
Project management: Customer success platform (e.g. ChurnZero), Monday.com, Asana, Basecamp, or more technical tools if needed. Requirements: due dates, clear task descriptions, dependencies, and visible timelines so leaders can answer the “what’s the status?” question instantly.
Deliverable collection: Secure file storage such as Dropbox, Box, or SharePoint to avoid buried email attachments and maintain one internal source of truth for all project assets.
Forms: Robust form tools (Google Forms, Formstack, FormAssembly, Typeform) that allow customers to save and return; this is critical if your onfiguration form is pages long.
Surveys and automation: Customer Effort Score (CES), NPS, and automated workflows through your CSP/CRM to trigger surveys and transitions at the right time.
7: Use surveys and retrospectives to keep improving.
Building a scalable customer onboarding process is never “done”, says Emily: you’ll likely tweak the process a thousand times and then a thousand times more. To keep this under control, you’ll need to collect feedback carefully and act on it systematically.
On the customer side, Emily’s team uses a Customer Effort Score at the end of implementation:
“A Customer Effort Score is one through seven,” says Emily. “We want customers to say their onboarding was easy and they felt supported, and our team works to a goal of 6.5 or higher. Every single time an implementation project is closed, the survey goes out, and we hold our implementation team to that metric.”
They pair that with clear rules for how long implementation remains engaged post-go-live, and a catch-all board for any lingering implementation tasks so no CSM is left holding the bag alone.
On the internal side, Emily is a strong advocate for retrospectives.
“It’s human nature that some implementations don’t go well,” she says. “It can be a people issue; it could be a process issue, but you need to get to the bottom of it.”
Emily suggests a one-hour meeting with a pre-filled template from the contributors. Avoid blaming and naming to keep the focus on processes, departments, and solutions. Over time, this will build your team’s trust in the process enough for them to self-identify where a retrospective is needed.
Scalable customer onboarding is a marathon, not a launch event
Emily’s ZERO-IN session was a reminder that scalable onboarding is less about a single big-bang redesign and more about steady, data-informed iteration. Start by segmenting customers and right-sizing their journeys, then build out milestones, tools, and roles that reduce friction for both your team and your customers.
Along the way, keep asking hard questions:
- Are you focusing your most expensive resources where ROI is highest?
- Do you know how long it really takes to get customers to first value?
- Are you asking enough of the customer to keep things moving?
- Are we willing to push timelines when customers miss their deadlines?
- Are we listening when customers and internal teams tell us what’s not working?
As Emily puts it, your onboarding process is never finished. But with the right segmentation, milestones, tools, and feedback loops in place, you can build an onboarding engine that scales with your business and still feels human to your customers.
