Customer Success
Customer Onboarding
Customer Onboarding is part of our Customer Success Career Leveling Framework. Explore next steps in your career from this industry-standard model.
Curated Learning Resources
How Our Customer Success Team Achieved Negative Churn For Four Consecutive MonthsCustomer success starts with proper onboarding to ensure customers achieve value quickly from the product. Proposify monitors activation metrics like number of proposals sent and won to gauge onboarding success. While some companies charge a setup fee for onboarding, Proposify only charges for professional services like proposal template creation. They use software like Gainsight to track customer health scores and identify red flag metrics that indicate risk of churn. The customer success managers handle Renewals and account expansions by looking for opportunities to upsell new features that solve customers' biggest problems. An effective customer success strategy can improve retention, reduce churn and increase lifetime value.
GitLab's Internal Customer Onboarding ProcessGitLab's customer onboarding process aims to ensure new customers achieve value and success from the start. The onboarding phase begins when an opportunity reaches the negotiating stage. An assigned CSM will then introduce themselves to the customer via email and schedule a kickoff call within 14 days. The kickoff call establishes goals, milestones and next steps. The CSM then develops a success plan and has a first cadence call within 30 days to discuss enablement opportunities and the customer's progress. GitLab tracks time-to-value metrics like time to engage, first value and time to onboard to monitor and improve the process. Delays in onboarding are documented and risks are flagged to determine if account escalation is needed.
