Customer Onboarding: What’s in your Tech Stack?

With the explosive growth of customer success and customer implementation teams, customer onboarding - the process by which customers get up and running with their new product is critical. Companies know that they can’t simply sell a product and then walk away. The first 90 days will determine if a customer stays or churns. 

There are lots of tools available for companies as they onboard a new customer. We covered quite a few of these tools in a previous post 28 Onboarding Tools for Delighting New Users. 

When it comes to your customer onboarding tech stack, these are the tools you need in place: 

Data onboarding tools: Your customer can’t use your product if they don’t actually have their data migrated over into it. Typically data onboarding is an overlooked process where companies provide customers with FAQ and tutorial docs and expect them to import their own data and do it successfully. Many companies also go the custom data importer route where they build an in-house tool. Unfortunately these data importers are often thrown together without much thought since data onboarding is peripheral to the product itself. Don’t kick off your new customer’s experience with a poor data import process. Ensure you’re using a third-party data onboarding platform like Flatfile to handle the heavy lifting here. 

Conversation intelligence tools: Hopefully (fingers crossed) your sales team is recording each and every sales call. There are tools such as Gong and Chorus where you can listen to relevant prospect and customer conversations. Before any kick-off and roadmap calls, customer success and onboarding teams should check out these critical conversations so that they have background related to how this new customer chose their company and product. Showing up prepared for the kick-off by fully understanding the customer’s use case makes an impactful first impression. 

User onboarding and workflow tools: Companies like Onboard provide solutions to help new customers get on the right track by providing automated personalized plans and workflows. User onboarding tools like Chameleon are designed for self-serve, improving product adoption. Onboarding a new customer and getting them into your product is no longer a manual effort.   

Video training tools: The Zoom era means that video is expected. An easily digestible format, providing training videos to new customers ensures they can interact on their own time. Creating videos has never been easier so it’s an absolute must for your onboarding process. And the options here are plentiful. BombBomb and Loom are great options for a quick video send, for example a personalized welcome from the customer success rep.  

User experience tools: Once a customer is up and running - quickly - teams need to review the product experience from the customer’s point of view. Tools like Pendo and FullStory should be part of your onboarding tech stack as they can show teams what the user experience is like at the beginning. As users log in the first few times, are they getting stuck in certain spots? Are there certain areas of the product that are confusing them? These tools are tremendously useful for product feedback because when you’re onboarding new users, you have a fresh pair of eyes on your product. With little to no experience, these new customers can point out functionality that might need an update or change...for the better. 

There you have it, the ideal customer onboarding tech stack. While you may need additional tools in your toolkit for long term customer success, these suggestions can help ensure that you start the relationship off right, reduce any potential churn and generally provide the best onboarding experience possible for your new customers!