Internal metrics to track for customer onboarding teams

Internal data and metrics are critical for the success of any org in post-sales. As a key decision maker, you need to know the right metrics that will help your team and enable them to help your customers in the best way possible. 

An excellent place to start is measuring utilization. It is the core data you can use to understand billable work for the respective billable resources. Utilization metrics are tracked using your capacity planning data. What other metrics can you track to improve the efficiency of your team members? The answer to this question starts with how onboarding orgs are structured. 

Here is a typical onboarding org structure:

1. Project Manager - Drives the actual project regarding billable hours and value
2. Solution Consultants - The enablement team helps customers train and support their adoption.
3. Technical Consultants - The implementation team works to implement the software and resolves any issues during implementation.

While you can tweak the metrics to fit your company's customer onboarding and implementation functions, here is what Preflighters have to say about more internal metrics you can track.

Brittany Preseau (Yandura), Director of Customer Success, Fieldguide

An important internal metric we track during the first leg of our post-sale customer journey is the time to implement by customer segment, Onboarding CSAT,  NPS post-onboarding, and usage/pacing once they start using the program. In terms of driving the efficiency of individuals, we ask ourselves the following questions:

1. Have we recently reviewed our onboarding content?  
2. Is there too much information given or other common pitfalls that make onboarding less efficient?

For your leadership team:

1. what is their perspective on onboarding?
2. Are you looking for metrics to justify why onboarding is essential? 
3. Do they understand that and just want to see highlights of onboarding performance?

Shawn Riedel, Freelance CS Strategist

Start with a proper Customer Journey Mapping exercise. You’d have developed personas, understood their needs, and identified moments of truth, proof, awe, power, and connection. Then, create playbooks around those moments.

This exercise will help you truly understand the critical moments in your onboarding process where you need to execute flawlessly. Building on this, you can get your roles and how they impact the momentum of onboarding. A swimlane diagram and a RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) will help you quickly see who is doing what and the value that brings. By value, I mean how it is reducing customer effort required to adopt your solution because that should be the ultimate goal. Customer effort is the leading indicator of future churn. If they have to expend a ton of effort onboarding your solution, you are already starting to dilute your value by withdrawing from the ‘customer effort bank.’

Bharath Jagannath, Senior Manager - Customer Success at Xoxoday  

Here are some things we actively track: 

**This is subjective to products with multiple modules. 

1. Feature adoption by module (10-20-30 days)- Overall user activation score. E.g., If the customer has opted for ten users, then we track the number of user accounts created and what their user adoption looks like on an individual level. 
2. The time it has taken for a customer to go live
3. Onboarding CSAT
4. The number of feature requests or issues raised at the time of customer onboarding. It is essential to track this metric when the customers might not be 100% aligned with the SOW, especially in products with a comprehensive offering. It could help to take a moment to realign the expectations and move forward. 

If you have more ideas, suggestions, and questions you want to share with the larger customer onboarding, implementation, and CS community, we’d love to have you join Preflight Community and share it with our members!

 More resources

1. Top customer onboarding metrics to track
2. Four customer onboarding strategies for happy end users
3. All about the Net Promoter Score (NPS)