(Without the Baby)
Over the past few weeks we’ve onboarded over 2,500 new users across hundreds of Organizations around the globe. These organizations have either just adopted the use of technology to alleviate the pain of not being equipped to work remotely or they are switching from another product to ours. What is consistent in either scenario is the fact that there is a level of anticipation for how they will be onboarded. Teams wonder what the experience will be like from the moment they gain account access, to training and ongoing support.
This post will cover “What to Expect, When You’re Expecting”, without the baby, of course.
Everyone has expectations with how they should be brought onto your platform and each team member within an organization has a different opinion. Throughout this post we’ll outline key strategies to make the onboarding experience more impactful and even enjoyable.
As we all know, the goal of any company is to create internal champions within an organization and build a fan base for your product which in turn helps to further expose your product. In addition, they’ll provide intentional feedback which is valuable as you continue to support and enhance your platform and they will hopefully become a referral source to their network.
Here are the topics we will cover, these apply to both a single user or an entire team:
- Set their expectations
- Listen and pivot
- Share your Roadmap
- Be available
Set their expectations
This is an extremely important step and is more hands on for Enterprise SaaS platforms than apps. You’ll want to inform them of how they will be educated on your product. As an example, you may cover topics likeProduct Overview, Features, SLA’s, Help Desk, Support Modelsand this may be done through a Webinar using tools like Zoom, Google Meets or GoToMeeting amongst many others.
For Catapult, we guide them through the three products we offer for Issuers, Responders and Content Management.
Issuers are those individuals who can create projects, invite responders and can evaluate them. We cover how we document a prudent decision making process, scoring, document storage, and the next phases.
Responders are those individuals/Vendors who receive the Questionnaire and need to complete it efficiently so that they can not only deliver it timely, but can handle more opportunities.
Lastly, Content Management is the content libraries that store all the questions you’ve been asked and your answers. We allow multiple libraries to exist to accommodate different product lines firms may offer or segment their content based on types. It goes in more depth but you get the idea. We outline how our automation process works to save them 92% of the time it takes and how throughout the entire lifecycle they’ll have efficiency gains of over 66%. This in turn lets them monitor team member activity to clearly define bottlenecks to eliminate them.
Be Proactive In Your Customer’s Learning
Keep in mind, some products will require a more hands on experience while others can be supported through a self-service model which is the most popular option these days given the volume of support tickets that a company can/can’t support.
I am reminded of the quote:
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day;
teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
A great quote that should be a reminder that your training material needs to capture each feature you offer, how to use your product and most importantly that the articles are updated frequently to mirror your current version (design and feature enhancements) as you release them.
Listen and Pivot
As you communicate your onboarding plan you may receive feedback from your client on what they expect that may differ from what you’ve outlined. Enterprise companies that we support are never the same and they each receive a certain level of white-glove service to make their experience seamless.
At Catapult, we tell each of our customers that it may be bumpy at the start. Not everyone on your team wanted to switch from no product to a product, it disrupts what they were used to. The same can be applied from one product to another (think about going from corporate Skype to Slack and then back to Microsoft Teams, it’s endless).
We listen to their pain points and also the things they loved with whatever they were doing before. This way we can highlight those items during our hands on demos or we can add them to our roadmap so that our product can be the best it can be to service our customers the way they desire.
Share your roadmap
This is our pivot and a main reason we leverage the Atlassian ecosystem to share our product roadmap with customers so that they can have their voices not only heard but they can see us in action delivering these features over time. Sometimes we can deliver a new feature that we all agreed upon in a few days and other times it takes several weeks. Not every feature we hear is developed, but everything is considered and then we put our Catapult spin on it so that it flows in an optimized way in our ecosystem.
Be available
New and existing clients should have an expectation that you’re going to be available to them, maybe not 24/7, but during business hours. The checks they are writing aren’t small, and you should acknowledge this. If your product isn’t intuitive or it requires multiple training sessions then you better offer great support to balance the curve otherwise you’ll lose clients faster than you’ve added them.
At Catapult, we have a built-in messenger to support clients on-demand, and we perform webinars and take calls throughout the business day. Because we have a global team and multiple time zones we can cover the needs of our customers around the clock.
We’re excited that you took the time to read this post on onboarding. If you’d like to learn how Catapult can save you time and increase the quality and confidence of your work, shoot us an email at learn@catapulthq.com
