What strategies have you found effective for ensuring smooth customer onboarding?

The key to ensuring smooth customer onboarding are simple, powerful and sometimes hard to achieve:

1) Setting clear expectations on the path with milestones and timelines, and then get customer sponsor buy in: you will fail if you don't have a counterpart on the customer side that is equally invested in onboarding.

2) Meet users where they are: in this digital and high speed world, you have to have an offering that is on-demand and ideally in-product. Even your largest enterprise customer spending bazillion dollars with you does not want to have staff all have to find a time to meet live. It is inefficient and unnecessary.

3) Establish key knowledge check points that are supported by live office hours with an expert. This can be a combination of a video call or a Slack channel. For every question one person asks, 20 people have the same question.

4) Circle back mid process to understand what users have been most successful so far and make some spot videos with them. Other users seeing their successful peer who likely has a reputation as a leader or top performer succeed on your onboarding path will help pull all the users through the back half of onboarding.

5) Celebrate completion and then set expectations for the value period! Don't just say goodbye or have the customer and users think that the journey is over. It has just begun!