🏄Building Your Onboarding Process
Operationalize your approach to handling new customer onboarding
About
This use case walks through how to build your onboarding process in Vitally. There will be nuances specific to you, but there are foundational approaches and best practices you will want to apply.
User Case Overview
At a high level, an onboarding process should look to accomplish the following:
Initial activation of the tool (i.e. get the lights turned on)
Speed up Time to Live (i.e. how long it takes to get the lights turned on)
Enablement for core administrators (i.e. training on how to keep the lights on)
Watch the video below to see the entire build-out:
How to Build It
Step 1: Define your Audience
The first step is to identify who needs to be involved internally (i.e. who will own onboarding) and externally (i.e. which accounts are in onboarding). To simplify this, we will create an onboarding Segment to track accounts going through onboarding and set up a Key Role to identify who owns onboarding.
Segmentation
Create an account-level Segment called "Onboarding" (or something similar) to group customers in this stage together. If you haven't already, you can also add additional segments for your other stage in the customer journey or to signify the plan or tier of a customer.
You can also create User Segments - a common use case is to group users by persona (Director, VP, C-Suite) or permission level (admin, team member, observer).
Key Roles
If the individuals on your team who onboard customers are not called CSMs (i.e., Implementation Specialists, Onboarding Managers, etc.), we recommend creating a custom key role. This allows you to set up a more seamless assignment strategy.
There are multiple ways to assign key roles, but there are two primary strategies:
Assign via Trait Mapping - use this when you have already assigned the key role in another system like your CRM
Assign via Playbook automation- use this when you want Vitally to assign
Step 2: Collect the Datapoints
You will need several data points to apply the onboarding process to accounts. Most of them should already be in the system, as they likely come from your connected integrations. However, some may not be so you'll want to create a custom trait for those.
Below are examples of what you will need to access that may likely already be integrated:
CRM Data: Anything that indicates who to bring into onboarding & when to bring them in (Ex. Closed Won Date, Plan Type, Service Model)
Revenue Data: Anything to indicate what path to send them down based on value (Ex. ARR, Total Spend)
Product Data: Anything that tracks the key milestones and product events that need to be activated during onboarding
The following are traits you will likely need to create in Vitally if you have not already:
| Datapoints | Use |
|---|---|
Onboarding Completion Date | Updated with the day onboarding is completed |
Customer Journey Stage | String trait with "Onboarding" as option for reporting |
Step 3: Create Templates for Your Activities
Any onboarding process requires some type of cyclical engagement, whether that is in a scaled motion that relies on asynchronous & automated messaging or in a high-touch motion that requires many 1:1 interactions. In either case, it is important to define and templatize those touch-points.
Below are the typical activity templates we recommend creating:
Projects - what work needs to be executed
Create an onboarding project template to make the repeatable and prescriptive tasks that are required more accessible. This should include the activities the team is driving, but you may also create a milestone and tasks related to the product achievements the customer needs to experience throughout onboarding for your team to easily identify where a customer is. You can also create playbook automation to auto-complete those tasks once the required criteria has been met.
We recommend creating an "Onboarding" project category to house all of your project templates related to onboarding.
Conversations - what needs to be communicated
Create conversation templates for messaging that you need throughout the onboarding process. Typically, we see three types of conversation templates use in the onboarding process:
Kickoff / Call Followup messaging
Un-engagement & unresponsive followup messaging
Product education messaging
Docs - what needs to be shared
If you need to share any info with the customer throughout the onboarding process you will want to create an "Onboarding" doc template. You can even embed your onboarding project template to the doc if you wish to give customers visibility into their progress and collaborate better.
Notes - what engagements need to take place
For any calls you conduct throughout the onboarding process you will want to create note templates to capture that those calls took place and provide a summary of what occurred.
Step 4: Automating Your Process with Playbooks
The process can now be automated with playbook automation now that templates have been created and data has been identified. Below are the steps to follow to build the playbook automation as well as additional complexities you can add to your process.
Triggers
First, choose if the playbook automation trigger should be at the Account or Organization level. Next, build your trigger criteria to enroll accounts into the playbook automation.
The trigger logic may be unique to you, but we recommend using the "Onboarding Completed Date" trait you created earlier. You can retroactively set a date for all customers that have already completed onboarding and leave it blank for anyone that hasn't. This way, your playbook automation trigger logic can simply be: "Onboarding Completed Date" = is not set.
Critical Actions to Add
Below are key action items you will likely want to add (in order) to your playbook automation:
3. Optional Complexities to Add
Split - create separate onboarding paths by tier or plan
Wait - until product events have taken place or based on conversation engagements.
4. Auto-Complete Tasks via Playbook Automation
If you are tracking product events as milestones within a project, you can create playbook automation to auto-complete those tasks once the criteria are met.
Step 5: Report & Visualize
The last step is providing visibility into progress and performance throughout onboarding. There are several things to consider:
Hubs
Many customers choose to create an "Onboarding" Hub to house key views and dashboards related to Onboarding.
Dashboards
Regardless of how you track onboarding progress, you will want to report on performance and Time To Value with Dashboards. If you are tracking onboarding via projects, we recommend building widgets using projects as the data object.
Cards & Decks
Lastly, consider creating a custom Deck for key onboarding activities and data. After building the deck, you can tie it to the onboarding segment.
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