A New Formula for Customer Onboarding

​Webinar Presented by Adam Avramescu and Linda Schwaber-Cohen

We've been training customers since we've had products that required training, but recently, the idea of onboarding training has been getting more and more attention. So today, I'm providing a summary of the webinar hosted by Skilljar and presented by Adam Avramescu and Linda Schwaber-Cohen from January 2019 called "New Formula for Customer Onboarding."

With the rise of subscription-based businesses, companies need to make sure their products are effectively adopted by their customers. Customer onboarding is such a critical investment, because if customers don't adopt the product, they don't renew and can end up costing more to acquire and support than the revenue they generated. 
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Adam and Linda started the webinar with a few observations about what some companies are doing wrong when it comes to onboarding.

The first mistake is thinking that there is one right way to onboard all customers, and a set of best practices that everyone should follow. It seems logical that different companies and different customers would have different needs. But there are also different use cases for the same product.

For example, you wouldn't want to give end users and administrative users the same kind of training. Either the end users will be overwhelmed with too much detail about setting things up, or your admins will not be getting enough training for their jobs.

The second mistake is equating account onboarding and user onboarding. Yes, there are tasks that need to be done when you obtain a new account. But these are not the same as the more frequent new user onboarding every time a new person joins a team that uses your product. 
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The third mistake Adam and Linda discussed is that onboarding should be owned by one team. The truth is that onboarding is a journey for the customer, and you'll have team members supporting different parts of that journey from marketing, sales, and customer success.

Adam and Linda used these common misconceptions about onboarding to develop the New Formula for Customer Onboarding. The formula is based on risk and scale to create four different archetypes of recommended onboarding strategies. You may have one or more of these archetypes at different times.

1. High scale, high risk archetypes describe the scenario when you have many end users in a regulated environment. Think tax-preparation software or medical records. This is where if an end-user screws up (because they don't know how to use the software), they can cause serious problems in some way. For this archetype, an onboarding strategy might include many of the following:
   
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2. When the archetype includes many end users in a low-risk environment, the goal in onboarding education is geared more toward broad adoption and behavioral change. Education offerings for this archetype could include:
   
   
   
   
   
   
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3. Sometimes, you have a group of highly specialized users with the potential for high risk if they make errors. Onboarding this group might include:
   
   
   
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4. The last archetype is for products adopted by specialists that are highly customized, but their errors don't cause high risk problems. This is a great group for an on-demand training curriculum, email nurture campaigns and learning pathways for different use cases.

• High stakes certification process
• Online proctoring
• On-demand education offerings
• More frequent assessments
• Learning labs
• Formal corporate roll outs
• Oversight for completion and scoring
• Job Aids
• Train-the-trainer
• Regular and virtual instructor-led training offerings for advanced topics

• On-demand education offerings
• In-product education (those little popups that guide a user through a new task)
• Broad analytics reviews
• Webinars (1:many live sessions)
• Change management training
• Informal corporate roll outs
• Adoption reminders and marketing
• Microlearning videos
• Email nurture campaigns
• Basic certification

• Live labs
• Live training curriculum (it's not as costly to provide classroom training, since there are fewer users)
• Personalized training plans
• Clear training paths for different use cases
• Close relationship and collaboration between Customer Success and Education

• On-demand training curriculum
• Email nurture campaigns
  
• Learning pathways for different use cases
  

Of course, your onboarding strategy won't be perfect overnight. Adam and Linda recommend defining which onboarding archetypes you have in your company, and which are the highest priority for optimizing. They also recommend shadowing a customer onboarding to see if you are using the wrong approach or the wrong archetype. Get started with the most impactful thing and lay the foundation for measuring your success.
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For those who didn't get a chance to view the webinar live, you can access the recording here. If you get the chance, it's an hour well-spent if you are thinking about improving your customer onboarding strategy.

​Let me know if you need help building content for your on-demand onboarding strategy.