Customer-Centric Framework For Onboarding New Clients

The B2B SaaS industry struggles from being unable to set the right “customer-centric” framework for their new client onboarding process. Numerous industry reports on client churn stats have shown that seeds of a client renewal or SaaS churn are actually sown during the client onboarding stage in most cases (excluding the cases when churn happens because of external/client org issues).

So the next question is, where do things go wrong during this ‘new client onboarding process’ – do we understand the root causes? And is there a pattern to the underlying process issues across companies?

Let’s start with the basics first.

What Is Client Onboarding?

Client onboarding is a simple process of getting your customers acquainted with your product. In retrospect, it is not just about teaching your customers how to use your product. In fact, client onboarding, especially in SaaS, is all about aligning your customer’s goals with your product.

When onboarding a new client, it becomes imperative that your onboarding team ensures that the customer realizes the value of your product. If a customer fails to do so, there is a high chance that your new customer onboarding has failed & they will be churning soon.  

What Seems To Be The Issue With The New Client Onboarding Process?

Based on my experience and conversations with several other SaaS industry leaders, and a focused market survey we had done recently on this topic, I was able to put a pin on this issue.

It seems that while Sales, Marketing, Product, and Account Management (with a new incarnation of ‘Customer Success’) have evolved (to a good extent) from the legacy ‘upfront license+AMC’ model to the SaaS model, the current client onboarding process and rest of post-sales processes in many B2B SaaS companies are still done the same way as it was done even a decade earlier.

And this is not really ‘customer-centric.’

It is, of course, well known that while SaaS software vendors got away with this during the legacy model, it is not sustainable in the SaaS model not to have a ‘customer-centric’ onboarding and post-sales process.

Traditional Pattern Across New Client Onboarding In B2B SaaS

One broad pattern seen across companies is that the new client onboarding happens in silos, with different pieces of the ‘client onboarding action plan’ passed mostly sequentially across cross-functional teams (Sales, CS, Product, Tech, and QA teams involved in the customer onboarding) via proposal docs, meetings, email chains, chat channels, onboarding meeting notes, various excel, CRM, some product centric tools and interestingly some key information about customer onboarding next steps stay in Sales/CSMs’ heads as there is no structured way to document in a central platform currently!

The challenge starts when some surprises show up further down the customer journey when some team misses addressing a new use case or test scenario (which gets reported as a bug in production later on), or a new feature delivery is delayed (which blocks the client from getting full value as promised by Sales/CS!).

This happens because different functional teams are simply not aware of each client’s each use case (hard to keep track in silos when there are hundreds of clients, and each client has a bunch of use cases across multiple products – so it’s a multi-dimensional problem!) or the teams couldn’t prioritize something appropriately (with so many items/client requests, etc.) as there is no single source of truth!

Customer-Centric Framework For New Client Onboarding

Now that the issues of new client onboarding processes in enterprise SaaS have been established, it is easier to create a framework for New Client Onboarding that is customer-centric in nature.

Addressing these onboarding challenges effectively; would require a ‘centralized customer centric’ framework to:

• Track customer objectives to the level of each use case for every client, the priority of each use case, and critical dates by when clients need certain use cases delivered.
• Assess the current internal readiness status for enabling each of those use cases for each client.
• Enable internal cross-functional collaboration (among Sales, CS, Product, Tech, and QA) on a common platform to prioritize, close any gaps, and minimize ‘time to value’ for high-priority use cases (critical for retention) of every client.

This new approach would help establish a strong ‘data-driven’ foundation for what follows next in the client journey – product usage, value realization by the client, churn/renewal, and expansion.

The Synergy between Customer-Centric Onboarding Framework and Customer Success Tools

This approach also complements existing ‘Customer Success Management’ tools available in the market by giving visibility of ‘Account Health’ during the onboarding stage itself for the SaaS provider and faster ‘time to value’ for their client.

For example, the existing ‘Customer Success Management’ tools focus on monitoring product usage as a leading indicator of churn. While it is certainly valuable to see a product usage dashboard to determine if the client is getting value from the engagement – but usage is not always a leading indicator when something else went wrong way earlier in the customer journey!

In fact, the real leading indicator of customer churn can be seen in the ‘client onboarding status’ report, which is the output of the above-mentioned onboarding framework.

So How Can A SaaS Company Use This Framework As Part Of Their ‘customer Success’ Playbook?

The “customer-centric” framework for new client onboarding can be used to answer the most crucial question – How to measure the ‘value realized’ by the client?

The right way to measure the ‘value realized’ would be to review the delta of this ‘client onboarding status’ report (covering all the use cases promised during the pre-sales/onboarding stage) and ‘product usage status’ report (covering the use cases actually delivered to the client).

This review should be done on an ongoing basis internally (e.g., in monthly Key Account reviews) and externally (in QBRs and monthly reviews with key clients) to close any gaps from both sides.

This would make renewal an obvious (and data-driven) choice for the ‘Key Decision Maker’ in the client organization, rather than them wondering, “I am not sure what value did we get from this tool last year compared to what was agreed 12 months back?

And even though I think we got some value, how can I show clear evidence of this (without building another ppt deck!) to my management for approval?”

Conclusion

To conclude, this new customer onboarding framework would not only solve the SaaS customer onboarding and churn challenges but also, in the future, this sort of approach would become a ‘competitive advantage’ for a B2B SaaS company as it empowers the entire post-sales operations to be true ‘customer centric’ and ‘data-driven.’ The information presented in this blog has been sourced from the blog by Rupesh Rao at the following link.