Uncomplicate- How to optimise your customer onboarding framework
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
When one thinks of customer onboarding, it is usually the image of an on-field customer success manager explaining the product, or a picture of a swanky app with pop-ups explaining the product. Almost always it is a one time showcase— help the customer understand the product once and you are done with onboarding.
Well, nothing can be farther from the truth. Customer onboarding is a continuous process, especially if your product features are growing at a rapid rate. To do that, you need to optimise your customer onboarding framework.
“One of the challenges I face as a leader is— how do I know that this is working… get real-time feedback?” asks Sherrod Patching, chief customer officer, Leadspace. “There are going to be things we could have missed, steps that make things unnecessarily complicated for the customer. How do we augment those and improve those in real time?”
To solve this, Sherrod built an onboarding task team comprising of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) who are currently onboarding customers. The thesis behind this task force is not to design how things should be, but to rather look and gather feedback on a joint forum. Often times, if you were to ask the CSM for feedback, the feedback just lives in silos and very rarely makes its way to the top so that proactive action can be taken.
“Their (task force) role is to not design how things should be, because we have already set the framework, but to rather look and gather feedback in a joint forum on what has worked well. Together they own the improvement of content, framework and measuring and the metrics around it,”says Sherrod.
The task force meets twice a week for 15 minutes and goes about brainstorming the hits and misses and also decides on individual responsibility— who will improve the deck, who will communicate the feedback to the upper management and so on.
“They are learning in a forum and then using the learning to enable the larger team on how we can improve the process and framework moving forward,” says Sherrod.
This simple process can help a company be agile and tweak frameworks to suit requirements.
Let us know if you have any ideas on how to optimise your customer onboarding framework in the comments below.
(This post was co-produced by Praveen Ramesh.)
