How an Agile Mindset Helped Review Biz Slash Time to Onboard by 56%

A Case Study in Transforming Customer Experience With an Iterative, Feedback Driven Approach. 

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In the ever-changing SaaS landscape, new customers can often feel like they’re navigating uncharted waters when making the journey from onboarding through adoption and expansion. 

In 2021, ReviewBiz faced challenges with their new customer onboarding process: inconsistency and a lack of measurability hindered progress. Without clear metrics or systematic ways to identify areas for improvement, delivering an optimized customer experience was difficult.

To address this, ReviewBiz decided to undertake a transformative project to redefine their customer onboarding approach. The outcome? An optimized process, improved customer experience, and a significant reduction in time to complete by 56%!

Spanning 64 new customer onboarding events between November 2021 through 2023, this is how I helped improve ReviewBiz’s Customer Onboarding Process.

Setting Expectations & Milestones.

Milestone planning became crucial to our success once I understood the project’s depth. Immersed in the intricacies of milestone planning, I knew this would not be a project with a traditional ‘done’ aspect. 

This would be the development of a workstream that would need to be specific to its platform and flexible to the business's evolving objectives.

The following key milestones were defined:

1. Validate new customer communication assets
2. Build the Customer Account Creation (CAC) SOP
3. Orchestrate post onboarding call activities 
4. Ensure the final handoff to the success team. 

Pro tip: SIPOC tables are effective in helping define deliverables and to understand the various scenarios, and platforms required to achieve the primary jobs to be done(JTBD) at each step of the journey.

Validate new customer communication assets.

Central to the project's success was the developing tangible assets designed to streamline the onboarding process.

These assets, from the ReviewBiz Guide to Customer Onboarding to messaging templates and call agendas, aimed to enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

They were built to be actively used and updated regularly. As such, keeping them relevant to the organization’s day to day operations and customer goals would be a team effort. 

That said, onboarding would be established as a workstream for the customer success team and its assets, managed by that team.

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Build the Customer Account Creation (CAC) SOP.

Initial versions of key deliverables were developed over the course of the first 4 weeks, with the understanding that they were 'ready for use' rather than 'done.' 

‘Ready for use’ means the asset is completed to a reasonable degree such that using it does not hinder, but helps in the successful execution of the process it is an asset to. 

While ‘done’ may work in many contexts, in the case of process development, it can often confuse the team into thinking that the process does not need to be reviewed and improved.

This mindset shift becomes all the more relevant for process development projects when you consider how valuable feedback is to improving processes. 

With onboardings, your best opportunity to collect meaningful feedback from, either fellow team members or customers, is limited to when new customers actually need to be onboarded.

That’s why the outcomes for this project are measured over the course of 64 new customer onboarding events giving us enough opportunity to collect meaningful feedback and ensure the process serves real life needs. 

Orchestrate post onboarding call activities.

• Communication templates to streamline communication and keep our language consistent.
• Call agendas to ensure every customer call have actionable outcomes
• Profile checklist to make sure profiles met a minimum standard that ensured customer adoption.
• Education sequence to help customers continue their adoption journey beyond onboarding. 

Ensuring a seamless final success handoff to the success team

Defining ‘done’ for the onboarding stage is something unique to every service. 

For ReviewBiz, 'done' means the conclusion of the initial two weeks of activity, marked by a success call transitioning from onboarding to success, ensuring customer feedback and goal alignment.

This defined our project goal to ensuring a new customer onboarding be completed in three calendar weeks (21 days including weekends, allowing for scheduling flexibility and an initial profile campaign launch period of two weeks).

Outcome

In total, 112 new profiles in 64 new customer onboardings events.

*In measuring the success of our efforts, I made the strategic decision to focus on the median over the mean. This choice was for accuracy and reliability. By honing in on central tendency, we gained valuable insights into the typical time taken for onboarding tasks, laying the groundwork for continuous improvement and innovation.

The results speak volumes. By adopting a feedback driven approach to onboarding over the course of 64 new customer onboarding events (equal to 112 new profiles), ReviewBiz had successfully slashed onboarding time from a staggering 50 median days towards the end 2021 to a remarkable 22 median days by the end of 2023, a 56% improvement!

This wasn't just about numbers; it was about revolutionizing the customer experience. With a focus on streamlining post-deal communication, increasing customer buy-in, and reducing time to live for all accounts, ReviewBiz had set a new standard for onboarding excellence.

Want to replicate ReviewBiz's success? Here are three key takeaways:

- Embrace Feedback-Driven Onboarding: Continuously gather and implement customer feedback to optimize your onboarding process.
- Focus on Customer Experience: Streamline communication, increase buy-in, and get customers up and running quickly.
- Maintain a Growth Mindset: Regularly review and improve your onboarding process to stay ahead of the curve. 

Implementing these strategies, can dramatically improve your customer onboarding experience, leading to increased satisfaction, reduced churn, and higher customer lifetime value.

Thanks for reading, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Steve Jobs

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains”.

I’m an agile project manager specializing in Hubspot Sales and Marketing campaigns for start-ups. From project based initiatives to fractional roles with revops teams.

If you’d like to connect and see how I can help optimize your team's way of working, click the button below to book a short scoping call. Let's get to work.