On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Chris Jones, Director of Customer Success at Enboarder, an experience-driven onboarding platform, about remote customer onboarding. Chris has worked in Customer Success for 6 years, having worked with both small to medium-sized businesses, through to global corporations rolling out SaaS solutions. Chris has been involved in developing a Customer Success team at LinkedIn, as well as building and growing a team in the fast-growing startup that is Enboarder.
The world we live in today is changing day by day and so is customer success. Due to the ongoing pandemic businesses are continuing to adapt and change, and how we interact with our customers is also adapting and changing. For the last 4 months, tech companies have started to onboard new customers remotely. For some companies, this is something that has never been done before and for others, it was natural to transition to remote onboarding, but now after 4 months of remote onboarding, is your method still working? Are you still able to keep your customers engaged and deliver a successful onboarding completely remotely? These types of questions and many more are the types of questions we will discuss today with Chris.
Customer Success emerged for him during his time at Linkedin where he was involved in creating the first small to medium business Customer Success function. Linkedin usually focused on enterprise companies, so for smaller customers, it meant support via online help which was very reactive. His time at Linkedin enabled him to see some great ways that worked and others that failed and after a few years a previous mentor reached out for him to join a new startup, Enboarder.
As the current economic situation has forced many to switch to remote working, this meant adapting the processes of onboarding. This new way of working meant there were significant ways in which they could scale and create more time efficiencies on how to onboard customers. The ability to cut down on dead time, like travel time between meetings, meant it was more efficient when booking in a meeting, especially with more senior members. The cost of traveling to meetings has also been reduced.
One of the key elements of remote onboarding is setting an agenda. It’s important to set the why. Why are they invited to the meeting? Explain the benefits of joining the meeting and the roles each member is to play. Having a strong agenda helps get senior members on the call. You can’t recreate what you were doing before with face-to-face meetings, they just don’t work online, nor do all-day workshops. You need to get new tools and adapt the process to make sure that you get the same outcomes and engagement from the stakeholders in the process.
In our discussion Chris helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to onboarding customers remotely:
- What’s changed in your onboarding process/workflow since the start of remote work?
- At what point should a CSM be introduced to the customer? What is the first step in onboarding?
- After almost 5 months of remote work, how are you continuing to make sure your customer, executive sponsors, and key users take part in the kickoff call and initial onboarding calls?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Try and get the participants to have their cameras on during the session, this face-to-face viewing enables more engagement and increases participation.
- Focus on the experiences you give customers. Previously they would celebrate the teams by sending cupcakes but have now adapted to each member filling out information about their hobbies and interests and sending e-vouchers as a congratulation
- Continue to evaluate your onboarding process. Processes and tools change, as do your customer expectations.
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!
