If customers want to self-onboard, what do you do to ensure they implement your solution successfully?

This become highly complex based on the user persona, the complexity, of the product, and the time to adoption, among other things. However, a few things to consider are:

1. Knowledge Base: Do you have a solid, robust knowledge base? Is that knowledge base actively referenced in your product, website, by Support, by Sales, etc.?

2. Identify the ideal path: If you could meet with a user face-to-face and walk them through that adoption, what would that look like? What does it look like currently for self-serve? What is the delta between the two?

3. Identify 1-3 critical use cases: After identifying your top use cases, what does "great adoption" look like? Then build analytics, documentation, training guides and videos, and other content around ensuring those use cases are clear, capable of being easily adopted, and aligned with Marketing. Then track their adoption to ensure what you designed is, in fact, working in the world.

4. Support team: Does your Support team engage with self-serve customers? What is their process? Are they geared and ready for a high volume? Are they well-trained to respond with a friendly, thoughtful approach?

5. Insights to drive product improvements: Do you have analytics and insights on what customers are doing so you can improve the experience for the next cohort of onboarding customers?

6. Executive buy-in: This is off the beaten path, but are your executives bought into self-serve AND the support and onboarding required?

Self-onboarding is becoming an increasingly popular approach for SaaS products. Follows are some strategies that can help ensure customers achieve successful implementation even without direct CSM engagement:

Product Complexity: Recognize that self-onboarding success hinges on product complexity. For simpler products, robust on boarding and implementation resources can suffice. However more complex solutions may still require direct engagement. Note: It is important to understand the underlying reason as to why the customer wants to self-onboard.

It is also important to create resources tailored to different user personas (e.g., beginner to advanced). This ensures users find content relevant to their needs and skill level.

Before allowing customers to self-onboard it is important to have a strong foundation of self help resources in place.

• Comprehensive Knowledge Base: Create a well-organized and searchable knowledge base with clear step-by-step guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting articles.

• Interactive Tutorials and Onboarding Flows: Develop interactive tutorials and in-app onboarding flows that guide users through initial setup and core features.

• Video Resources: Offer video tutorials and explainer videos to cater to visual learners and provide alternative learning methods.

• Community Forums: Foster a vibrant online community forum where users can ask questions, share best practices, and support each other.
  

Proactive Customer Health Monitoring: It is important to have a mechanism to track customers that are self-onboarding. Here are some of the methods we use at Sitecore.

• Product Telemetry: We leverage product telemetry data to track user engagement and feature adoption. We identify users who might be struggling and proactively reach out with targeted support.

• Warning Triggers: We set up automated warning triggers based on key adoption metrics. These alerts flag potential customer health issues and allow for early intervention.
  Provide Options: For customers that want to self on-board - we can give them options to do otherwise if needed, while at the same time clearly communicate self-onboarding expectations. We clearly outline the available resources and support options.

• Follow Up: We will then follow up and check in with customers as needed.

I'm not directly facing that at the moment, but I do have some thoughts. Self-led onboarding is amazing if it's likely to succeed. Let's maximize your changes of that.

Here are some things you can explore:

• Is the person doing the onboarding highly motivated to get it done quickly?

  • If the buyer is delegating to someone else to implement, how can you set expectations for their effort and get the buyer to keep pressure on?

  • Consider aligning on the process and expectations in the sales process while you still have their attention. Provide the checklist/plan then and make sure the buyer sees it.

  • Provide progress reports to the buyer during the onboarding so they can keep pressure on and unblock issues

  • Bonus Points: Gamify the onboarding experience for the person doing it. Add little celebrations of confetti in your app, give them points toward something, give certificates or possibly even swag when they hit major milestones.

• Does the customer have a high likelihood of success implementing themselves? If no, why not?

  • Product experience not intuitive enough: What in-app changes or guidance can be provided? Can you also provide short videos to help?

  • Customers have lots of questions: Can you educate them through online courses and/or a mix of live office hours or webinars. You can also have dedicated parts of your online community for this.

  • Can you offer a mix of self-led and moments where they really need a human to help? Give them a scheduling link for those human sessions to allow them to book at their own pace.

  • Consider using a customer portal to prescribe the steps they need to take, content they need to learn, and any important meetings they should book with you.

• Consider formalizing self-led onboarding. If it works, put some resource behind making it more viable. You could also explore monetizing the higher-touch onboarding offerings.

As your products scale in popularity, it is inevitable that you will see more and more customers adopt your product without the support of your orgnization or the partners in your eco-system. I have found two good practice to address potential issues with ease at scale:

A) Build in Health-checks into your products

B) Reference architectures

Let me expand on what I mean by build in a Health check:

1) It should part of the price of your product or in other words not required for the customer to pay extra to get at least the basic part of it. A more advanced and deeper dive version could be available for sell by your Services organization

2) Automated as much as possible and leveraging telemetry so that this Health Check can be delivered at scale across big number of customers with limited efforts. This clearly requires an effort from your engineering teams to instrument your product

3) Benchmarking against the remaining customers or similar size customers, similar industry customers, can also provide interesting feedback and ways to assure proper

Reference architectures is something many people overlook in favor of "reference customers". The reference architecture could very often be a combination of the experience of multiple customers and point to what good looks like and what delivers most of the potential included in your product.
A good Health Check would point out of the box to applicable reference architectures.