Ultimate Guide to Customer Success Onboarding: Checklist & Template

In a highly competitive industry, your first contact with new customers can make or break the relationship. It’s why effective customer success onboarding is critical. 

Your customer onboarding experience sets the tone for what’s to come from your customer’s relationship with your business and the customer journey ahead. 

Akin to a detailed user guide, your customer onboarding process introduces customers to your product or service and, when done correctly, sets them up for a positive and rewarding experience. 

In this article, we’ll explore the impact of customer success onboarding on key metrics, the key components of an onboarding checklist, and onboarding best practices.

Skip Ahead: 

• Understanding Customer Success Onboarding
• Impact on customer retention and satisfaction
• Key Components of an Onboarding Checklist
  • Research and record customer information
  • Welcome the customer
  • Request additional information
  • Schedule a call with the customer
  • Set clear expectations and goals
  • Schedule timely follow-ups
  • Track and improve
• TABLE: Key Milestones in the Onboarding Process
• Best practices for customer success onboarding
• Personalization and human touch
• Regular communication and follow-ups
• Measuring onboarding success
• Conclusion 

Understanding Customer Success Onboarding

Before diving into onboarding checklists and best practices, let’s begin with what customer onboarding is:

Customer onboarding is the process customers go through immediately following a purchase. This process introduces customers to your product or service, familiarizes them with its core features, and helps them reach value faster than if they were to navigate and learn the offering independently. 

There are three primary models of customer onboarding: high-touch, low-touch, and self-serve, each offering a varying degree of contact and customization.

1. High-touch onboarding involves personalized contact, often person-to-person, and is typically reserved for enterprise-level customers. Examples of support for this onboarding model include a dedicated account manager, customized training calls, regular check-ins, and a direct support contact. 

2. Low-touch onboarding takes a more standardized approach, requiring less person-to-person contact. This model is often used when products or services aren’t too complex, or the customer prefers a certain level of independence. Examples of support for this model include email campaigns, online courses and guides, community forums, and digital support. 

3. Self-serve onboarding is entirely driven by the customer and is typically reserved for simple products, often designed for a broad audience. Examples of support for this model include how-to videos, automated setup wizards, Q&As, and online resource libraries. 

Impact on customer retention and satisfaction

Regardless of your chosen onboarding model, customer onboarding plays a significant role in customer retention and satisfaction. Here are some of its benefits:

• Builds trust and confidence – A smooth and comprehensive onboarding process ensures customers that you’re invested in their well-being and that choosing you over your competitors was the right decision. 
• Increases product understanding – Introducing customers to core features ensures that they’ll understand what, when, how, and why to use them, reducing confusion and frustration. 
• Sets clear expectations – Onboarding explains what customers can expect from your product or service and what it requires of them, eliminating potential confusion. 
• Encourages engagement – When customers understand what, when, and how to use your product or service, they’re more likely to use it. 
• Lowers demand for support – Informed, knowledgeable customers are less likely to need help with basic tasks and procedures. So, by creating educated customers, you can reduce the overall demand your support team experiences.

That’s not all. In addition to the above benefits, effective customer onboarding can directly impact key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer churn, LTV, and more. These KPIs are often the language of executive-class business members, which means understanding how customer onboarding affects your KPIs can help you communicate with those high-level executives, secure funding, and more.

Here are a few of the KPIs effective customer onboarding can impact:

• Increases customer lifetime value (LTV) – Because your customers understand your offering, trust you, and are more engaged with the product, they often use it for longer. 
• Improves customer satisfaction score (CSAT) – When customers have clear expectations and a working knowledge of your offering, they’re less likely to struggle with adoption or rely on customer support. This directly increases their overall satisfaction. 
• Accelerates time to first value (TTFV) – Thorough onboarding helps customers adopt your offering faster, getting them to a point where they gain value from the product more quickly. 
• Boosts upsell/cross-sell rates – Educated and satisfied customers are likelier to purchase more of your products or services. Additionally, customers are naturally engaged in the onboarding process, so you have an invested audience tuned in to any supplemental services they might benefit from.
• Reduces customer churn – Higher customer satisfaction often correlates with decreased customer churn. This positively impacts your LTV, CSAT, and upsell/cross-sell rates. 

Key Components of an Onboarding Checklist

Customer onboarding checklists effectively function as a road map for customer success managers, ensuring customers are led down a carefully curated path toward customer education. The onboarding checklist can be broken into three distinct sections:

1. Pre-onboarding preparation 
2. First contact and the welcome process
3. Setting clear expectations and goals

Each of these parts plays a critical role in helping your customer success team support customers in their journey from activation to adoption and becoming lifelong users of your product or service. Further, each section has its own line items that, together, make up an actual onboarding checklist. Those items are as follows:

Pre-onboarding preparation

1.  Research and record customer information

First contact and the welcome process

2. Welcome the customer
3. Request additional information
4. Schedule a call with the customer

Setting clear expectations and goals

5. Set clear expectations and goals
6. Schedule timely follow-ups
7. Track and improve

Now, with a clear overview of an effective customer onboarding checklist, let’s look at each section and item more closely.

Pre-Onboarding preparation

The pre-onboarding section of your user onboarding experience is like the foundation of a house. When laying the foundation, each intentionally-laid brick plays a small but essential role in the overall foundation and eventual success of the final structure. The same is true here.

Regardless of your onboarding model, the pre-onboarding phase always includes collecting and recording customer information. The goal is to understand the customer’s unique needs and pain points and to fill in any gaps you may have about your customer base, like why they’ve opted for your specific offering to solve their problem. 

1. Research and record customer information

At this stage in the customer onboarding process, customer information can include the basics like name, email, phone number, date of purchase, and company information. 

However, depending on your chosen model, particularly high-touch or low-touch models, you may want to gather more information than you would if you were using the self-serve onboarding model. This is because the more information you collect now, the more personalized every subsequent step can be. 

Still, it’s possible to ask for too much info. According to Forbes, “…more than half of customers will abandon the account-creation process if they feel they need to provide too much personal information.” So, the key is to find the right balance when gathering customer data. 

First contact and the welcome process

Your first point of contact with new customers is one of your first impressions. While your customer is likely familiar with your company and brand, your first point of contact in the onboarding process is their first impression as an official customer. And for many customers, the onboarding process can make or break their future with your business. 

2. Welcome the customer

The next step in the user onboarding experience occurs after the customer has purchased your product or service—you welcome the customer. While a welcome email may sound fairly low-stakes, as we’ve already discussed, this first point of contact represents a high-stakes first impression. 

A successful greeting should:

• Extend a warm welcome to the customer
• Offer precise, clear, and easy-to-follow instructions for getting started
• Reference any resources that may be immediately valuable
• Include a single call to action (CTA)

3. Request additional information

This step is optional, depending on the depth of your onboarding process. High-touch processes may wish to receive additional information from the customer, while low-touch processes can move ahead and schedule a call. 

If collecting additional information is appropriate for your onboarding process, then your call to action in the customer welcome should direct them to a form, survey, or questionnaire. Again, aim to strike a balance between getting the information you need without asking too much of customers at the start of your relationship. 

At the conclusion of your questionnaire, you should again include a CTA, this time directing them to step four. 

4. Schedule a call with the customer

Now, it’s time to schedule a call with the customer. While this step is simple compared to other steps in your checklist, it’s important to remember that this step sets your team and the customer up for the third, final, and perhaps most important section of the onboarding process: setting expectations and goals. 

This is also the step where you may pair your customer with a customer success manager if you haven’t already. 

Setting clear expectations and goals

5. Set clear expectations and goals

This final section aims to demonstrate how to use the offering and how it addresses their needs or pain points. You can accomplish this within the call you set up in the previous step.

During your call, you should establish milestones in the customer’s journey and define success metrics. Milestones include completing the initial setup or completing their first task with your offering. Similarly, defining success metrics means working with the customer to understand what success looks like for them and how to measure it. For example, are they measuring adoption rates, ROI, or another KPI?

And finally, create a personalized plan. Creating this plan is two-fold. 

First, creating a personalized plan is an ongoing endeavor—it should occur at the call’s beginning, middle, and end. You should ask insightful questions throughout your interaction, which should inform your meeting, resulting in a dynamic, lively conversation rather than a scripted, transactional call. 

Second, outline their next steps. This includes step 6 and the steps they must take to achieve their success metrics.

6. Schedule timely follow-ups

Schedule timely follow-ups, either at the end of your call from step 5 or in a follow-up email within 24 hours of the last point of contact. The goal is to establish a schedule for regular check-ins to monitor their progress on their success metrics. Adjust the frequency of these meetings to your onboarding model, budget, client importance, and other factors. 

Ultimately, these follow-ups act as a feedback loop, allowing you to check in on their success and your onboarding process’s success. Additionally, they will enable you to reinforce your relationship with the client, smoothing out any obstacles they may encounter and reinforcing the positive interactions they’ve had so far. 

7. Track and improve

Finally, with your client in the final stages of a successful onboarding process, it’s time to track, evaluate, and improve your onboarding process. 

This begins with monitoring onboarding metrics. For self-serve models, this may be course completion metrics, complete log-ins, or feature engagement. Low and high-touch processes may include more qualitative data. 

Once you’ve collected and recorded key metrics, analyze your data for patterns and trends. For example, if customers fail to schedule their first call, there may be an issue with initial contact. Or, if customers aren’t completing their onboarding course after lesson 3, perhaps there’s an issue with that lesson. 

Share the data you collect and any insights you might have with your internal teams. And remember, data for individual customers is valuable but anecdotal. The goal is to identify trends in larger data sets and over longer periods of time, like a month, quarter, or year. 

Use the insights you’ve gained from this process to inform improvements you make in the onboarding process moving forward. This will allow you to refine your onboarding process. 

Key Milestones in the Onboarding Process

Best practices for customer success onboarding

Of all the things you can do to curate a custom onboarding experience for your customers, personalization, regular communication, and measuring process success are the three most important best practices to follow. 

Using an approach that adds the human touch across multiple channels, staying connected and knowledgeable on the customer journey, and constantly improving enhances the onboarding process by fostering a constructive and engaging environment. Let’s take a closer look at these three best practices for your customer onboarding. 

Personalization and human touch

Regardless of industry, market, or niche, automation and technology are rampant in 2024. And while automation and technology certainly have their place in the modern business world, the human touch becomes especially important in the ever growing and paradoxically removed presence of technology. 

You can achieve a high level of personalization with a variety of methods, including emails, in-app notifications, phone calls, and even in-person meetings. Each of these methods is excellent for celebrating milestones and customer success and effectively improves the customer experience, strengthens your relationship, and helps boost customer satisfaction and retention. 

Regular communication and follow-ups

Regular communication and follow-ups are foundational to any successful customer onboarding strategy. Communication ensures customers feel supported and valued, which ultimately supports their overall experience, but also increases your chances of delivering a quality experience and improving that experience over time. 

Some of the most effective channels for communication include in-app messages, emails, phone calls, video calls, and corporate messaging platforms like Slack or Teams. Overall, the goal is to support the customers while making it convenient for them and beneficial for both parties. 

Measuring onboarding success

Measuring the success of your onboarding experience is akin to checking the pulse of your customer’s experience at regular intervals. Your goal is to ensure the customer is engaged and satisfied with your offering or resolve any issues should they arise. 

Monitor the health of your customer relationship by collecting:

1. Metrics like TTFT, churn,  and CSAT 
2. Customer feedback. 

By monitoring this information, you’ll be able to assess where there’s room for improvement and continue to provide a smooth user onboarding experience. 

Set your customers up for success. 

The best way to keep your customers happy is to ensure they get the results they want from your product or service with a simple, easy-to-follow customer onboarding process. That takes knowledge, and a Customer Training LMS Software is the only way to build that knowledge and process effectively at scale. 

A Customer Training LMS Software will help you retain customers by keeping them engaged. Learn more about how you can achieve this with Thinkific Plus. 

Conclusion 

Thank you for exploring the customer success onboarding checklist and onboarding best practices with us. 

If you’re ready to take the next step and get personalized guidance to streamline your user onboarding experience with online learning, get pricing details, and a live demo of Thinkific Plus, don’t hesitate to reach out to our experts.

Request a call with a member of our Thinkific Plus solutions team today, and let us help you unlock the full potential of your online learning journey.