CHAPTER 1
1. Facilitates a Seamless Handoff from Sales
Why it’s important
Your sales team fought hard to win the new customer for your business, so you don’t want to lose any time getting the onboarding started, or lose any key information stored on the opportunity.
By leveraging automation based on the criteria on your opportunity you can pick the right template from your library to allow your onboarding team to follow best practices. Automation can also pass along key information from the sales cycle to the project such as details about the client and if the project is fixed price or T&M.
How you benefit
- Seamless connection from sales to project delivery keeps everyone on the same page
- Follow best practices by leveraging templates
- Avoid double entry of data and information
- Provide real-time visibility for your Customers, Sales & Account Teams of Project Progress
CHAPTER 2
2. Captures your Customer Goals & Requirements
Why it’s important
If you don’t have a clear idea of what your customer goals are at the outset of their onboarding project, how can you possibly forecast the real value your customers are expecting from the project?
By not only only defining your clients goals, but by also capturing their requirements and scoring each requirement for how big an impact it has on meeting the clients goal, you can prioritize your efforts to deliver maximum value for your customers in the time you have available.
How you benefit
- Know your customers goals and the impacts each will have on their business
- Map requirements to your customers goals
- Prioritize work on the requirements that will deliver the most value for your customers
CHAPTER 3
3. Mixes Agility With Client Delivery Dates
Why it’s important
To be successful, customer onboarding projects need to balance fixed delivery dates to meet your client expectations, along with a level of agility so that your team can deliver customer value in the most efficient manner possible.
Water-Scrum-Fall projects combine the best of waterfall and agile projects together in a seamless client experience.
How you benefit
- A project methodology that works like your team does in the real world
- Manage delivery timelines with traditional task management, but maximize customer value by adding agile sprints directly into your overall plan
- Prioritize work in your sprints according to your client’s goals and requirements
CHAPTER 4
4. Lets You Find The Person With The Right Skills
Why it’s important
As your team grows in number it becomes increasingly harder to keep track of what skills your team has, who has upcoming PTO and what people are assigned to in the coming weeks.
Without knowing this information your resources may become double booked, putting your delivery timelines in jeopardy. You are also hit by an inability to know when you can take on new projects, either reducing your utilization metrics or making false promises to your new customers on when you can deliver.
How you benefit
- Keep projects on schedule driving customer satisfaction
- Use your team more efficiently, increasing your resource utilization rates
- Know when your team can take on more work, to keep the whole business growing
CHAPTER 5
5. Lets You Map Out Key Stakeholders
Why it’s important
Being able to track stakeholders gives you insight to the key decision makers at your clients, along with what is important to each of them from the project. You can also include key personnel from partners who are important to your onboarding process.
Add in the ability to assign RACI responsibilities for each stakeholder and the communication plan for your project becomes clear.
How you benefit
- A single source of truth where anyone on your team can see who is who, at you customers business
- Clear responsibilities for both you and your customer helps keep everyone on the same page
- Stakeholder based communication plans make it less likely that key information can slip through the cracks
CHAPTER 6
6. Standardizes Your Client Meetings
Why it’s important
Ever run a successful onboarding project without holding a meeting with your client? Didn’t think so!
Meetings are a critical part of a successful customer onboarding so you should look for a tool that incorporates meeting templates and minutes capture into its core workflow.
How you benefit
- Automate creation of the right meeting agenda at the right time during your project
- Standardize meetings across your team based on best practices
- Onboard new team members faster with meeting coaching notes
- Share meeting minutes with your customers stakeholders, keeping everyone on the same page
CHAPTER 7
7. Keeps Your Customers Up to Date
Why it’s important
Successful customer onboarding is a collaborative process between your team your customer and potentially even a partner.
Gone are the limitations of sharing a PDF of an MS project schedule with your client. Your modern onboarding solution should come with a real-time update and/or a community you can share with clients covering much more than just timelines, with information such as meeting minutes, change requests and more, keeping everyone on the same page.
How you benefit
- Less time needed from your team, update the project in one place, and your customer is updated in real time
- Single source of truth for everything connected to your project
- Open communication throughout the onboarding project builds customer satisfaction
CHAPTER 8
8. Always Available KPI Reporting
Why it’s important
Collecting data is one thing, but presenting it to your management team in a manner that lets them make informed decisions to improve the business is another.
That’s why you need your customer onboarding solution to come with not just a set of out of the box reports but is also customizable by your business users, so all the reports and dashboards that your executives need to make decisions to drive your business forward are always at hand.
How you benefit
- Report on all your KPIs in real time 24 hours a day from any device
- Visual dashboards with drill down capabilities to the underlying details
- Configurable to your unique business needs
- Scheduled email updates of your key reports
CHAPTER 9
9. Online Training & Certifications
Why it’s important
When you invest in a solution it’s typically the start of a multi-year relationship with the vendor and the solution. Over time, new releases will roll out and your team will change as people move roles and you bring on new hires.
So you need a vendor with a strong online training solution to keep your staff up to date and onboard new employees. Look for a vendor with training broken out by roles, and one with a certification program, so you can measure your team’s training effort.
How you benefit
- Keeps your team informed of the benefits your business can get from updated versions of solutions
- Gets your new hires up to speed quickly on your key business solutions
- Certification programs let you find qualified staff with pre-existing competence in your onboarding solution
