At its core, Customer Onboarding is about giving your customer the ability to quickly get their organization setup and running with your software.
This usually involves you or your customer:
- Setting goals, expectations, and desired outcomes
- Sharing product configuration data
- Gathering signatures and access credentials
- Provisioning instances
- Coordinating with 3rd parties
- Configuring specific integrations
- Sharing call recordings
- Getting sign off on key architecture decisions
- Scheduling trainings with users
Multiple stakeholders need to be aligned, timelines and workflows need to be coordinated, and tasks need to be completed on both the vendor and customer side. This is impossible without a close collaborative effort between all stakeholders.
The primary metric that customer onboarding is usually measured by is time-to-value. Time-to-Value is best visualized as the time it takes between your customer signing the contract to the first time they realize value from your product.
Realizing value can take many different shapes and depends specifically on what your product does. For some companies, value realization occurs when their customers pull a report. For others, value realization occurs when the customer conducts their first transaction using your product. It’s important to keep this in mind when trying to measure your own time-to-value. There is no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all solution for driving down time-to-value.
