How To Successfully Drive A Customer-Centric Onboarding

Introduction

In the first episode of the Scale Tale podcast, ZapScale’s founder Musami Ambastha hosted Clay Telfer, Director of Customer Success, Craft & Bauer Real Estate Co. They discussed the crucial topic of helping customers define success and craft the onboarding experience around their success.

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About The Guest

Clay Telfer is a customer success leader at Craft & Bauer. He played a prominent role in TutorMe’s acquisition in 2022, created and led their first customer success team, and increased revenue 4x in less than a year. He has 13 years of experience in building, scaling, and leading customer success teams for B2B SaaS start-ups across various industries including education, HR, CPG, and digital marketing. He specializes in slashing churn, building and scaling CS success departments, renewing and selling high-value accounts, and designing exceptional customer experiences.

Key Takeaways From The Podcast

Customer success is a multifaceted term and it revolves around ensuring customers derive maximum value from your product or service.

The main challenge in this domain is to align the goals and expectations of the customer, particularly during the onboarding process.

Many customer success managers feel the onboarding process is challenging either due to miscommunication between the customer and the company or lack of proper training and guidance provided to the customers.

Here are the key takeaways from the podcast:

1. The Importance of Customer-Centric Onboarding

This episode delves into the critical aspects of customer-centric onboarding.

Clay Telfer, an accomplished leader in customer success, shared insights drawn from his extensive experience in customer success. Telfer stressed the importance of onboarding and that it is not only about teaching customers how to use the product, rather it’s about empowering them to achieve their desired goals from the product. He highlighted the importance of aligning the onboarding process with the overarching objective of ensuring customer success.

Telfer emphasized that onboarding should focus on three core elements:

Understanding success

Customer success managers seek to understand what customer success looks like for each customer and personalize the onboarding process accordingly.

Empowering Customers

Onboarding should equip the customers with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed with the product.

Creating A Plan

Customers should leave the onboarding process and move forward with a clear plan of action to achieve their desired outcomes with the product.

2. Nurturing Product Outcome From Day 1

The podcast conversation also touched upon the importance of focusing on and nurturing product adoption from the early stages of onboarding. Customers typically intend to adopt the product to accomplish certain goals or solve a specific problem.

However, simply making a purchase will not lead to successfully adopting the product and utilizing it.

Instead of assuming that the customer will automatically figure out how to use the product, CSMs should guide them to provide guidance, support, and education throughout their journey.

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By consistently showcasing the value proposition and benefits of the product, CSMs should help customers see value in their product.

The goal is to bridge the gap between the customer’s initial intention of purchase and the actual value realization of the product. This proactive approach increases customer satisfaction and retention and also sets the foundation for customer success & loyalty.

3. Building Strong Relationships Through Value Delivery

Telfer stressed the importance of delivering value to customers from the initial stage of a customer’s journey. He challenged the notion that CSMs should focus on building customer relationships over delivering value to them. He argued that while maintaining customer relationships is important but not at the cost of delivering value, hence value delivery should always be the primary focus of CSMs.

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By focusing on helping customers achieve their desired goals, CSMs can establish a strong trust-based relationship that goes beyond the initial onboarding process.

4. Rebooting Onboarding For Existing Customers

The episode also addressed the challenge of rebooting onboarding for existing customers who may be not fully utilizing the product.

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Telfer shared a case study from his experience at TutorMe, where he revamped the onboarding process to drive success for underutilized customers.

By proactively identifying the key drivers of success and realigning the onboarding process around those factors, TutorMe was able to reignite customer engagement and drive significant renewals and expansions.

Conclusion

This was an enriching session that offered valuable insights into the intricacy of customer-centric onboarding and upselling in the field of customer success.

By focusing on understanding customer goals, nurturing product adoption, delivering value to customers, and realigning onboarding for existing customers, CSMs can drive long-term success and build long-lasting relationships with customers.