The right tech stack for high-touch customer onboarding

In this session of Implementation Stories, we spoke to Tami Titheridge, Product Engagement & Support Lead at Kapiche, an analytics product that helps customers make sense of customer feedback data to improve decision-making and positively impact their bottom line.

Tami talked about: 

1. Kapiche’s customer onboarding methodology 
2. The journey to reducing TTV for customers 
3. The guiding approach to finding and using the right tools 
4. Exciting future challenges for the team

... and more. 

In the rest of this article, we share the key takeaways from the session. 

The current CS and customer onboarding model at Kapiche 

Kapiche is an AI-based analytics product that helps companies understand large volumes of unstructured customer feedback at scale. 

The CS team at Kapiche currently comprises three roles: a CS director, a product engagement and support role, and a technical account manager to handle technical consulting, analysis, etc. 

Customer onboarding at Kapiche is a high-touch process. It depends largely on the needs of each customer and the datasets each customer uses to collect feedback from their customers. 

Typically, the goal is to get a new customer up and running in 30 days (though some companies can complete onboarding in less than a week).

The three stages of a typical customer onboarding journey at Kapiche are:

• Kickoff: This involves an internal recap of the Sales-to-CS handover, discussion and alignment-building with the customer, and initial data preparation and loading.    
• Implementation and tech onboarding: This includes the actual onboarding and foundational training for the end user.
• Ramping: This stage is focused on understanding the customer’s reporting needs and helping them build out the right reporting workflows. 

Challenges faced while growing the team

The biggest challenge was navigating the different responsibilities within the team to maximize efficiency and avoid any overlaps. The best way to do this, Tami recommends, is by understanding the workflows and having different parameters for different responsibilities.

Knowing where each team member’s time is spent and identifying the areas that need specialization can help identify exactly how the team needs to grow.

Increasing adoption to enable shorter TTV

To dig deeper into adoption, the Kapiche team worked on developing a Product Engagement Score. To do this, they focused on:

1. Understanding (from the product team) the behavior expected from the most engaged users weekly
2. Mapping different behaviors and activities to the different features in the product
3. Assigning weightage to different behaviors to build a 100-point high-value user engagement score

For three months, Tami spent two hours every week manually validating users on a spreadsheet using the FullStory tool to pull the metrics of each customer and pop them into different elements of the product. 

This was later refined into a dashboard that pulls different metrics for each customer to analyze them at both company and user levels. 

Each analyst using the product at the customer end gets a score. The exercise also highlights the parts of the product that aren’t being utilized effectively.

It helps the team fill gaps by creating hyper-targeted messaging for users. For instance, a video informs them of the features they’re not using, what they can use them for, and how to use them.

Over time, this exercise has helped the CS team understand which accounts have account management issues beyond specific product area issues and need attention. 

Finding the right tools for the team 

An effective way to find the right tools for the job at hand is by focusing on identifying exactly why you're looking at a tool instead of looking at a tool and seeing where you can use it. 

Once you’ve had a look at the requirements, classify them as ‘must-have’, ‘nice-to-have’, and ‘can compromise’ before you look at tools. 

Next, understand the key tasks that team members are involved in, and specifically, are facing challenges with. This could help the team: 

a) Understand the roles they need to hire for
b) Find the right tools for themselves

Here’s what Tami recommends:

1. Understand exactly what every team member is working on (track time)
2. Identify everything that needs to be taken off a team member’s plate 
3. Find tools or hires that can help with these activities 
   

Lastly, Tami recommends applying the ‘hire slow, fire fast’ approach to tools. Don’t hesitate to get rid of a new tool if you don’t find that it works for you—even if you’ve done intensive due diligence before investing in it. 

4 Ways Rocketlane Makes Customer Onboarding Smoother, Simpler, Smarter

Tools used in customer onboarding and CS

1. Live Chat within the platform
2. Email, Google Drive, and HubSpot for day-to-day communication and storage 
3. Loom for creating video content
4. Zoom and Slack for internal communications and meetings with/training sessions for customers 
5. Spreadsheets for project management tools (now transitioning to experimenting with dedicated tools such as Rocketlane 
   

Challenges ahead

Besides scaling the team and making product changes to reduce the onboarding duration, the team also has some specific ideas on the challenges they want to address for customers. This includes building visibility to  understand:

1. If customers have the right workflows to start making decisions at the company level 
2. If and how C-suite members are deriving value from the product

Like what you read? Join our private, invite-only Slack community and attend the next Implementation Stories session. You will also gain access to peers and share knowledge on customer onboarding, implementation, and customer success.

More resources

1. Implementation Stories from Preflight
2. Customer onboarding resources from Rocketlane
3. The Launch Station - a podcast for all things customer onboarding