Top 5 trends from The 2025 State of Customer Onboarding Report

For the past four years, we’ve published the State of Customer Onboarding Report—the only dedicated industry report of its kind. Each year, we engage with onboarding and implementation professionals to uncover what’s working, what’s not, and where the field is headed.

For the 2025 edition, we surveyed over 950 leaders and practitioners from companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, and ZoomInfo to explore the biggest themes, challenges, and priorities shaping customer onboarding in 2025.

In a recent webinar, Srikrishnan Ganesan, CEO and Co-founder of Rocketlane, got together with Mark Sloan, Founder & MD of Asaph Advisors, and PJ Deadman, Product Delivery Strategy Lead at Moody’s, to unpack the report.

Read on for a summary of the session and insights that will help you refine your strategies and set your team up for success in the year ahead.

Rethinking the role of customer onboarding in 2025

Onboarding has always been crucial, but as businesses and technology evolve, it’s worth revisiting why it remains essential. It’s the first real post-sale partnership that customers experience, setting the tone for their long-term relationship with your product. A well-executed onboarding program directly impacts churn reduction, customer advocacy, and expansion opportunities.

When customers invest in a solution, they aim to solve a specific problem and drive transformation within their company. To achieve that, they also expect:

• Move quickly and see early value: Customers are managing multiple SaaS solutions at once. They expect a structured, repeatable process to implement and use the product effectively. This makes time-to-launch and time-to-value top customer concerns.
• Avoid excessive customization: Unlike in the past, mid-market and enterprise customers increasingly prefer expert recommendations over extensive customizations. They seek best practices that ensure long-term scalability and maintainability.
• Trust their partner: The best onboarding experiences come from teams that set the pace, provide guidance, and actively drive the customer toward success. If the approach feels reactive rather than strategic, trust in the partnership quickly erodes.

Key shifts redefining customer onboarding

Before we dive into the findings of the survey, let’s take a step back and look at how customer onboarding is evolving. Shifts in technology, changing buyer expectations, and economic pressures are reshaping how companies approach implementation.

Here’s what’s driving these changes:

• AI is adding complexity: Nearly every software company is incorporating AI capabilities, requiring additional setup, training, and configuration to unlock full value.
• Customers are more cautious about shelfware: As many companies recover from the SaaS downturn in 2023-24, they are focused on ensuring that every tool they purchase gets fully adopted, which means they evaluate vendors more closely on their ability to drive successful onboarding.
• Time-to-value remains critical:  Customers want a structured, guided implementation that gets them up and running quickly, rather than a drawn-out, highly customized process.
• CFOs are driving radical efficiency: As Srikrishnan notes, CFOs have gained even more influence over purchasing decisions. They aren’t just looking for incremental efficiency gains but are pushing teams to achieve 2x the output with the same resources.
• Charging for onboarding is becoming the norm: In the past, onboarding was often included for free. Now, more companies are monetizing onboarding, and customers increasingly recognize its value.

Common customer onboarding challenges

Our 2025 State of Customer Onboarding Survey reveals four recurring obstacles that continue to impact the effectiveness of onboarding.

1. Misaligned expectations: A lack of alignment on key details remains a major source of friction. The survey found that common issues include unclear sales expectations, decision-makers changing post-sale, vague documentation, and customers not fully assessing the solution before purchasing.

To mitigate this, Srikrishnan shared an example: requiring that any new requests outside the agreed scope be approved by the Steering Committee (SteerCo). This helps prevent ad hoc changes from derailing the project and keeps teams focused on what truly matters.

2. Resource bandwidth issues: Teams are being asked to do more with less, whether due to hiring freezes, backfill gaps, or efficiency mandates. The survey indicates that more companies now recognize the value of charging for onboarding, ensuring they have the right people in place to deliver a smooth experience.

3. Siloed tools and information: This has been a persistent issue across multiple years of the survey. 45% of teams still struggle with scattered information across various tools, making it difficult to track progress, collaborate, and maintain visibility into onboarding milestones.

4. Lack of clear ownership: Customers often expect vendors to lead the onboarding process, but onboarding teams frequently find themselves stuck—waiting for approvals, unsure how aggressively to push, and questioning whether follow-ups might frustrate the customer. The key to overcoming this challenge is ensuring ongoing alignment so both sides stay accountable and engaged throughout the process. 

You might like: 5 ways to hold clients accountable during customer onboarding.

5 major trends shaping customer onboarding

1. #1 trend in customer onboarding: Turning onboarding into a revenue driver

Our survey found that over 50% of companies plan to generate additional revenue in 2025 through advanced onboarding packages.

As SaaS products become more complex—requiring deeper integrations and more customer decisions—the limitations of free onboarding have become evident. Companies that don’t charge often struggle with misaligned expectations, longer time-to-value, and lower customer accountability.

To address this, many organizations now offer tiered onboarding packages. A basic, free (often self-serve) option lets customers get started independently, while higher-tier packages provide dedicated resources, project management, and expert guidance. As PJ notes, “The larger customers want us to do it. They almost feel you get what you pay for.” This structured approach ensures faster adoption and better outcomes.

Beyond improving implementation quality, paid onboarding also benefits internal teams. It helps prioritize efforts. As Mark explains, “If no one’s paying, it can be hard to prioritize. When there are paying customers, you know where your time is going.” Additionally, making onboarding a contractual line item ensures clear expectations from the start, reducing misalignment and surprises down the road.

‍2. AI and automation in customer onboarding

When asked about their top priorities for onboarding, survey respondents overwhelmingly pointed to AI and automation. Nearly 90% of organizations plan to leverage AI in 2025 for predictive insights and personalized customer journeys.

Some key ways companies are leveraging AI to improve customer onboarding include:

• AI-driven efficiency: Companies are already experimenting with AI to streamline processes and reduce manual effort. Even simple AI-powered capabilities like automated note-taking can drive significant efficiency—automatically capturing meeting notes, summarizing key points, and sending action items to customers in real time. While these may seem like small gains, the gains compound across multiple meetings and customer interactions. 
• Personalization and unlocking tribal knowledge: Beyond administrative efficiencies, AI is also impacting how companies personalize onboarding. Instead of relying solely on human experts, AI-driven knowledge repositories help teams access critical information instantly. 

As Mark notes, “AI is freeing up the knowledge locked in experts’ heads and buried in old documents, accelerating onboarding and reducing the cost to serve.” As Srikrishnan notes, the most effective teams use AI collaboratively, iterating, refining, and prompting tools like ChatGPT and Claude for deeper insights. 

• SMB onboarding, risk assessment, and compliance: For SMBs, AI is streamlining requirements gathering, pre-kickoff goal alignment, and stakeholder coordination. Instead of scheduling multiple calls, AI automates these steps to minimize manual effort and improve efficiency.
  Other areas where AI is being applied include configuration work, scripting, requirements-gathering meetings, and follow-ups. AI can identify risks, opportunities, and sentiment, making it easier for leadership to assess key issues. It also supports playbook compliance, quality control, and risk assessment. For quality assurance, AI can assist in document reviews by identifying errors that might be overlooked in manual checks. This reduces the need for repeated human review while ensuring accuracy.
• Documentation and knowledge management: Across multiple companies, AI is improving how knowledge is captured, structured, and shared. AI-assisted workflows are making it easier to capture and structure insights in real time. This helps new team members onboard faster and provides support systems with relevant customer context, including configuration details, trade-offs, and past decisions. These insights improve both human and automated interactions.

Looking ahead, AI’s role in onboarding will only expand, driving improvements in sentiment analysis, predictive timelines, and risk mitigation. 

3. Balancing personalization and standardization

Attempting to standardize everything from the outset often leads to inefficiencies. Instead, companies should first identify patterns in their onboarding process before implementing standardized workflows. 

The key to balancing personalization and standardization lies in segmentation.
This is especially important for organizations transitioning from startup phases to enterprise operations, where expectations around documentation and process consistency become more critical.

One of the biggest challenges is the trade-off between short-term efficiency and long-term scalability. Many teams prioritize immediate customer needs at the expense of building repeatable processes, often due to resource constraints. However, postponing the creation of templates and standardized workflows only compounds inefficiencies over time. A clear example of where standardization adds value is in sales handoffs. Without a structured process, sales teams often scramble to gather information at the last minute, resulting in incomplete or inconsistent onboarding kickoffs. Standardizing sales handovers with a predefined checklist ensures that critical details are captured upfront, allowing onboarding teams to focus on execution rather than information gathering. 

Personalization doesn’t need to be an open-ended process. Instead of offering unlimited flexibility, a more scalable approach is to provide structured options rather than a blank slate. Personalization can be built within predefined guardrails, such as tiered offerings or industry-specific variations.

The most effective strategy is to start with standardization—identifying high-value, repeatable tasks—then layering in structured personalization where it adds meaningful impact.

4. The rise of self-serve and partner-led onboarding

Two key themes emerging as priorities for 2025 are self-serve and partner-led onboarding. Both trends stem from constraints on expanding internal teams, prompting organizations to find alternative ways to scale onboarding efforts.

Self-serve onboarding allows customers to take ownership of their onboarding journey, reducing dependency on internal teams. Intuitive customer portals are driving self-serve success by providing personalized experiences and step-by-step guidance – while keeping customers informed and keeping them accountable.

Partner-led onboarding is gaining traction among more mature companies that recognize the value of leveraging external expertise. While this approach comes with associated costs, it provides a scalable way to deliver high-quality onboarding experiences without increasing internal headcount. Organizations working with large enterprises often gravitate to this model as partners can offer domain-specific guidance and hands-on support.

The decision between self-serve and partner-led onboarding largely depends on a company’s size and customer base. The key to success in both approaches lies in designing structured experiences—whether through seamless self-serve workflows or well-integrated partner programs—that drive customer progress efficiently.

5. Re-onboarding and continuous customer education

As AI advancements and market dynamics continue to impact businesses, re-onboarding and continuous customer education have become critical.

It’s easy for customers to lose sight of why they chose a product in the first place. Regular reminders tied back to the goals set during onboarding help reinforce value and keep them engaged.

Frequent check-ins, education on new features, and showcasing real-world success stories strengthen customer engagement. For example, sharing insights on how other companies are leveraging the software to drive measurable results can inspire customers to explore similar opportunities.

Customers onboarded a year or two ago may now have entirely different goals, team structures, or workflows. Rather than making small adjustments or assuming past implementations remain relevant, actively engaging them to revisit their needs, explore new use cases, and adopt best practices from successful deployments ensures long-term alignment.

Continuous refinement—building a process, evaluating it, and iterating based on customer needs—should be an integral part of customer onboarding, creating an ongoing cycle of education, engagement, and optimization.

To dive deeper into these insights, check out the full report: State of Customer Onboarding 2025