This is the eighth blog in our Executive Guide to Cutting-Edge Tech Customer Onboarding blog series. If you have not read our other posts you can find them here.
Crafting an effective onboarding process requires more than just technology. It demands a strategic blend of leveraging technology while maintaining a personalized touch. Kathleen Rouse offers insights from her experience working with companies at various stages of growth, where she created tiered levels of customer support to enhance the onboarding journey.
Differentiating the Customer Success Motion
During her tenure at a SaaS ERP provider, Kathleen defined a customer success approach tailored to the needs of different customer segments. To demonstrate the different approaches, we will focus on two distinct types of customer success motions: the strategic and the commercial.
Strategic Customer Success: This high-touch, white-glove service catered to enterprise-level clients, with accounts often ranging over $1 million in Annual Contract Value (ACV). Roles such as Senior Account Manager, Customer Success Director, Senior Project Manager, and Principal Solution Architect were created to ensure successful onboarding, ongoing adoption, and customer satisfaction. Each account team handled only a handful of clients, focusing on deep engagement and value creation.
Scaled Customer Success: For smaller clients with an annual spend of up to $50K, maintaining a large team was cost-prohibitive. Instead, a self-service model was implemented, where customers could access resources through a customer community, technical office hours, and automated renewal management. Technologies like WalkMe were pivotal in guiding these customers through the onboarding process, offering a scalable and cost-effective solution.
Collaborating for Success
The key to success, Kathleen explains, was collaboration across departments. Partnering with Human Resources Business Partners (HRBPs) and IT ensured the onboarding process was not only customer-centric but also operationally efficient. This alignment helped tailor the onboarding experience for each customer tier without overextending resources.
Streamlining Employee Onboarding with AI
As your company grows, the need for efficient onboarding extends beyond customers—it includes your employees. Priya Sarathy, Ph.D., of Wheel Data Strategies, shares how AI revolutionized her contractor onboarding process. Before implementing AI, creating documentation and training materials was a manual and costly process. Today, AI analyzes and optimizes these materials, leading to faster onboarding, enhanced employee satisfaction, and increased productivity.
Conclusion: Technology as an Enabler
In both customer and employee onboarding, technology like AI and self-service platforms can be powerful enablers. However, the key to a truly effective process lies in striking a balance between automation and human touch. By thoughtfully segmenting your customer base and leveraging technology appropriately, you can create an onboarding experience that is both cost-effective and highly engaging.
As your business scales, remember that the right mix of personalized service and technology can differentiate your brand and drive long-term success.
About the Authors:
Kathleen Rouse is an Independent Consultant and has taken her 20+ years of experience maximizing adoption and increasing renewal rates to best-in-class 95%+ and 45%+ growth rates and turned them into playbooks, processes & templates for her clients to increase their customer retention and growth.
Priya Sarathy, Ph.D, CDMP is a data strategy leader and analytics enabler with over 15 years of experience in leading analytics solution design and build, and transformations across various industries, such as financial, telecom, technology, and services. She has a Ph.D. in Econometrics and Quantitative Economics, and multiple certifications in machine learning, programming, and Data management.
Dr. Beverly Wright serves as VP of Data Science & AI, and Executive Director for Data Science & AI at University of Georgia, as well as Past President of INFORMS Analytics Society, and Chair of Data Science & AI Society at Technology Association of Georgia. Beverly is a sought-after professional speaker at established conferences, presenting on topics related to data science, artificial intelligence, consumer insights, and marketing analytics.
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