How can I improve my customer onboarding?

After you’ve worked really hard to close a new customer, the last thing you want to do is drop the ball when you’re getting that customer up and running. Salesforce does a great job of giving you the tools to close deals – from leads through opportunities and accounts, and tools to maintain the customers using cases in Service Cloud.

But how do you manage the project of getting them from close to maintenance mode?

With a project management system, like Cloud Coach, that’s integrated with your CRM, you can improve your customer onboarding experience – for both your customers and for your team. Let’s take a look at how you can improve and streamline your customer onboarding process with Cloud Coach Milestones.

Step 1: Create your onboarding project template.

You probably already know the steps that you need to take to successfully onboard a client – from the initial introduction call to internal set-up, and testing. Document all of those steps, who needs to do them, and set them up as a new template in Cloud Coach Milestones.

Creating a template is as easy as creating a new project – simply create your tasks, add dependencies and resources, and click “Save as Template.”

Step 2: Use automation to create a new project based on our template when an opportunity closes.

Since Cloud Coach Milestones is built natively on Salesforce, I can use process builder to automatically create a new project when an opportunity closes. (If you’re not familiar with how to set up the process, check out Automate Project Creation from Opportunities.)

Step 3: Execute your projects.

Now comes the moment of truth – execution! Your team can collaborate on the project and complete tasks – all while keeping you and your account manager in the loop. Since your project management is cloud-based, all of your project data is always up to date.

Step 4: Evaluate your performance.

After you’ve run a few onboarding projects, gather the team to do a retrospective. You can also use metrics from your projects to make improvements. Here are a few things to consider:

Does your template include all of the tasks that actually need to be done?
Are the tasks in the right order?
Are the right people assigned to complete the tasks?
Are your task durations accurate? Have you allocated enough time (or too much) to complete each task?

Step 5: Update your template.

After you’ve evaluated your performance, it’s time to go back and make updates to your template. You don’t have to create a whole new template – you can edit your existing template, including adjusting task durations, adding new tasks and changing resources. Any new projects will automatically follow your new project plan.

Step 6: Continuously improve.

Of course, you have the opportunity to continuously improve your customer onboarding experience based on the lessons you learn. Schedule regular meetings to review your process and update your project templates to provide better outcomes for your clients.

If you don’t already have a customer onboarding project management system in place, consider adding Cloud Coach Milestones. It’s free and easy to get started. If you have more complex needs, learn more about the full collection of Cloud Coach project management solutions.

AUTHOR

Cloud Coach

Cloud Coach simplifies post-sales operations by unifying onboarding, professional services, and customer success into a single, Salesforce-native platform. Our solution empowers teams to deliver consistent, high-quality customer experiences, breaking down operational barriers to foster seamless collaboration and efficiency. At Cloud Coach, we enable businesses to onboard, service, and succeed—all from one platform.