Top 5 benefits to having a dedicated platform for customer onboarding

Customer onboarding isn't easy. On the surface, it involves managing multiple processes and stakeholders.

In a nutshell: there's the initial setup and configurations, regular correspondence with your customers, feature demonstrations, teaching them how to use the product and derive value from it, routine check-ins, and the final handoff.

Depending on the complexity of your product, there could be more or fewer phases involved in the customer onboarding journey.

Traditionally, customer onboarding and implementation would take place using multiple tools. For instance, there'd be a separate tool for communication (WhatsApp, Slack, or Gmail), project management (Asana, Monday, or Trello), document collaboration (Google Docs, Notion), and time tracking and resource management (Harvest, Forecast). As you can see, it's quite a lot.

‍Read along if you're on the fence about using a single dedicated tool for all your customer onboarding projects.

Here are the top five benefits of having a dedicated platform for customer onboarding.

1. Helps you deliver value faster

‍Your customers aren't very patient. They expect to see the value you promised them while selling your product, immediately. The sooner you provide value, the less likely they are to churn.

A solid platform for customer onboarding will:

1. Allow you to set up value-based milestones for your customers right from day one
2. Help in keeping communication consistent
3. Help your team handhold your customers to their first aha moment without much difficulty.

Even if it takes a while for your customers to realize value, you still get to maintain a reasonably high-touch relationship with them when you onboard them through a dedicated platform.

Assistance, training, and support become more manageable when it happens in one place with easy monitoring. This kind of relationship-building is proven to keep customers interested in a product.

You also get to keep an eye on metrics such as TTV, customer renewal rate, DAU, MAU, and feature adoption rates. These metrics help you identify areas for improvement and act quickly, thereby accelerating the time it takes to provide value.  

Creating Early Wins with The First Value Delivery Framework

2. Enables consistently delightful CX

‍Imagine giving your customers an interactive walkthrough of your product, establishing every step of the onboarding journey from the very beginning, clearly outlining their responsibilities, and providing them with visibility only to the things they care about. All while not overwhelming them at any point in the process. Sounds impossible, right?

All this and more can be achieved if you conduct your customer onboarding and implementation through a dedicated platform.

A platform like Rocketlane helps you adhere to a tried and tested playbook with templatized processes so that you can deliver a predictable and consistently delightful experience for all your customers.

4 Ways Rocketlane Makes Customer Onboarding Smoother, Simpler, Smarter

3. Gives you complete visibility across projects

‍If you're hopping between multiple project tools, documents, and emails, you're probably also facing issues with visibility. With a dedicated customer onboarding tool, however, you can always stay on top of things by getting complete visibility on:

1. The status of each project
2. The progress made
3. Which project(s) is falling behind
4. What's causing the slippage in timelines
5. Who's responsible for what
6. Which customer is currently unhappy and more

This kind of visibility makes it easier to be proactive and helps your team step in before anything goes for a toss. This brings us to the next benefit.

Project visibility: The secret to great customer onboarding

4. Get actionable insights to help your team level up

‍Famous British mathematician, Lord Kelvin, once said, "If you can measure it, you can improve it." This is true especially for your customer onboarding and implementation process. Using a platform like Rocketlane helps you understand what's working and what's not. You'll get answers to important questions like, "What are we doing best?", "Which processes cause the most delays?", "Which phases/tasks/milestones are overshooting time?", "Why are certain phases alone getting low CSAT ratings?".

Answers to these questions end up revealing patterns that you've somehow not noticed before. And these insights could be game-changing. One minor tweak or change in an approach could potentially lead to massive gains.

Finally, we come to the most crucial benefit a dedicated customer onboarding platform can provide.

5. Makes life easy for everyone involved  

Our team collectively has several years' worth of experience working in the SaaS space, running hundreds of customer-facing projects using multiple tools and workarounds.

In essence, we've seen it all!

We've shared Trello boards, docs, and trackers sheets while onboarding customers while maintaining internal and external versions of every project.

We've created internal spreadsheets with statuses, issues, and risks across projects.

We've even had team members spend hours each week keeping them updated. And yet, escalations were a regular occurrence.

We've put up with a lack of data on time-to-value and team performance. We used to operate on guesswork instead of metrics.

We've struggled to deliver consistent experiences to our customers, which led to unhappiness and churn. We've given many customers a subpar experience.

And we've honestly had enough! That's why we built Rocketlane so that you and your customers don't have to suffer anymore.

Just give Rocketlane a try. You'll thank us later!

More resources

1. The Right Time to Invest in Customer Onboarding Software
2. How to Pick the Right Customer Onboarding Software [Free RFP]
3. Spreadsheets are killing your customer onboarding process