Kicking-off Digital Onboarding: 4 Learnings from a Cross-Functional Task Force
Dive into the transformative world of customer onboarding with Agnes and Marek as they unveil how cross-functional alignment and strategic automation revolutionized their approach. From uncovering surprising interactions that drive value to streamlining onboarding processes, this session promises a wealth of practical insights. Learn how these advancements not only refined their onboarding delivery but also significantly enhanced the overall customer experience. Don’t miss out on actionable strategies that could elevate your onboarding success.
Hello and hello. Hey everybody, welcome to your start now with the last session
of the
day. It's going to be a really great session. I'm a bit biased because they're
a customer
of mine. But just a few housekeeping rules, in case you haven't had a chance
yet to ask
questions via the app, you have track two or in track two now. So if you want
to ask
questions during the presentation, please add those questions via the app. We
're going
to have a Q&A at the end, about 10 to 15 minutes at the end. You can up vote
the questions
as well. And in case you haven't heard, you're going to have all the slides and
also the audio
recording. So of course, take pictures, take notes, but don't stress too much
because you're
going to have all the material. Good. Now that the housekeeping is out. We're
going to have,
as I said, this session today, which is going to cover a lot of the work that
the team at
SAP, Lein Ix did about onboarding and about looking at this sort of process in
a different
ways. And we're going to have two amazing speakers that are going to join me on
stage
in a second. We have Agnes, Geruski, and Marek Schumann. And they're going to
be covering
kicking off digital onboarding for learnings from across functional task force.
So join
me with a big applause to welcome them on stage.
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Final session. We are pretty much what
separates
you from the after work beer. This is Agnes, obviously. I'm Marek and I could
give you
a lengthy introduction of what Agnes is doing in the CSOPs team. The great
things that she
has already contributed, not only to this task, but others. Likely I could do
the same thing
hopefully about me, but this is not that interesting today, right? So the
reason why
Agnes and I on the stage here today is the topic at hand. We played a crucial
part amongst
others in designing and implementing a digital. Now what you can expect out of
today's session
is not a silver bullet of how to do digital onboarding, obviously. But what we
want to
share here is a little bit the things that we have learned over the last couple
of months
or one and a half years so that you can hopefully copy that. But we also want
to share the things
that we did and are not that proud in hindsight of doing. So please don't copy
those ones.
Before we jump into the topic itself, just who of you guys has already dealt
with onboarding
in detail or has a well-established onboarding practice within their firm? Just
... all right.
Can work with that. Just quickly keep your hands up for a second and look
around. So
there are a lot of fans up in this room right now. Now as I said, with the last
session,
we can take it down again. We only have 30 minutes. We will not answer all the
questions.
We will barely scratch the surface. So you delight because ultimately we have
interesting
things to share but again there's no silver bullet so I'm pretty sure there are
some hidden
gems in this crowd here today as well. Now we know who Agnes is. We know who
Maric is.
We don't know who Lina exists. Lina exists in enterprise architect vendor. So
we built
a tool for enterprise architects. For those who don't know what end before the
definition
here, it's a tool that helps you to bridge the gap between business and IT.
Obviously,
to run a business, you need applications, you need systems, you need technology
to run
it. That creates quite a complex ecosystem ultimately. And Lina exists a tool
that helps
to connect the dots and ultimately helps to keep things running, answering
questions such
as how does my app make app modernization, rationalization, you name it. As you
might
have guessed, this is quite a consulting heavy discipline and this is not any A
. Well, speak
today but it helps to understand also the problem statement that we tried to
solve.
Now we were founded in 2012 in Germany and it took us a little bit over, let's
say,
five and amongst those customers by the way was also SAP. And it took us
another, well,
it was three to four years to then come to 500 customers ultimately and just
another
two years to double the amount of customers to 1000. This was also the year, 20
23, where
SAP decided that's a pretty cool tool. Let's buy the rest of the firm, that's
how we get
those three letters in front of our name. So I know it's SAP Lina X. And today
as we speak,
we look at roughly 1,400 customers. We have an NPS on average of 64, recognized
as leader
in the enterprise architecture discipline. So I tell you those things, I think
we did a
pretty solid job. And that's good, that's beautiful. But it's created a
challenge. And
it's a challenge that quite frankly, I wish all of you to have ultimately, that
's a good
problem to have. Nonetheless, how we reacted in the past to more and more
customers was
taking human capital and just throwing it on those customers. And again, we did
it quite
successfully. But at a certain point in time, we needed to find a way to scale
it while staying
customer centric. So what we tried to do ultimately is we tried to marry the
customer needs with
our business needs and find this sweet spot in the middle over there. Obviously
, if you don't
need your business needs, you don't have a business to run. So we tried to stay
there in the middle,
we tried to do more with less ultimately, find this scalable approach. And one
of the
levers that we tried to pull was in the end customer onboarding. What we did
there, this
is a map of Amsterdam. And I have a very, very simple question for the room.
How do we get to
our destination? Obviously, that's a pretty dumb question because I haven't
told you where
we want to go. Now I did my research, there's a bar called Taste that looks
like a pretty cool bar.
So let's rephrase that question. How do we get to... Good point. But I think
one crucial step
before we jump into our Uber is we need to know where we are, right? We should
the Uber pick us up.
And I mean, with the map, it's quite obvious. We always need to know where we
are, we know where
we need to go, and then we can talk about if we take a Uber or public
transportation. But while
it is very obvious with maps, there's one thing that we commonly see when we
onboard customers,
when we take a look at ourselves at SAP Linux, or even if we take a look into
SAP,
people love to talk about where they want to go. And everybody has a quick
opinion on
about vision and dreaming big, and everybody also is very much ready to jump
head over heels into,
we need to do one, two, three AI scale, digitalize it whatsoever. But what
people
commonly forget is understanding where they are. Sounds very simple, trust me,
it's it. We will try
to understand today what was our current state, or is this. We will try to
understand our vision,
our guiding north star, where we want it to be, and only then, only then we
will talk about our
Uber, which is getting from this as is to the to be. Now, understanding our own
reality,
onboarding is obviously a topic that was not new to Linux itself. I'm pretty
sure it's also not
a topic that is new to any Zas vendor as soon as you had your first customer,
because if you wanted
or not, you already did onboarding as soon as you have customers, sometimes
directly,
sometimes indirectly. Now, when we started to understand our status quo, we
wanted to go out
there and ask the obvious questions. How do we do onboarding? What makes our
customer successful?
What doesn't? What do they do? What they're supposed to do? Two very separate
things at this
point in time. So there were a couple of obvious questions, but one was key to
us in the very
beginning, and that was going forward, who is supposed to own onboarding. Now,
in the old world,
at Linux, at least CSMs were primarily supposed to onboard customers, and they
again did that
quite successfully. But ultimately, onboarding itself was as diverse as it can
be. There were
some best practices developing over years. Naturally, they were used in
different regions, but
there were long onboardings, fast onboardings, good onboardings, a lot of bad
onboardings.
There was just no standardized way of saying, "Hey, this is how we do onboard
ing."
Now, what we did at this point in time, we wanted to make sure that in the
future,
all the decisions around onboarding are being met swiftly, fast, and exit the
table, and we
named that our onboarding task force. First of all, that deserved to sit on
this table was a
specialized group of CSMs, our so-called CS onboarding managers. The second
group that deserved to
see that the table was our product team. We talked about scalability,
potentially automating.
Who knows? Obviously, we need an enablement to this round, because in the end,
onboarding is also
a lot about knowledge transfer. Now, there was one-fourth seat, and we come to
that a little bit later.
However, with this, we already formed our task force, allowing us to have short
decisions
and executing on them swiftly. Around that, we had circles of influential
parties,
of informed parties, leadership aligning our states and forms. That was a
little bit the
operating model that then formed, allowing us to move swiftly forward. Next up
was understanding
where are we, what do we do well, how does onboarding look like, but also how
should it look like
in the future. One, we had to start somewhere, so there must be a start of
onboarding, and number
two, there must be an end of onboarding. And what is onboarded, but that's a
whole new session
and another two hours. We can talk about that later, but as a second step, we
also wanted to
understand what happens in between. How do customers get from the map? Because
when we talk about
scalability, we need to standardize in the first place, and we want to standard
ize, we do need to
understand. So, at this point in time, we simply took a look at how onboarding
currently looks like,
what works well, what is a good onboarding journey, and we might find something
like this.
We're ditched in the middle, looks kind of promissile, I don't know what
happened there, but it's fine,
we're good to go, and we found pretty much any other journey that you can see
or imagine out there.
Now, the big question for us was, what is a successful onboarding journey? And
we heard that a couple
of times throughout the day today, well, it depends, right? It always depends.
And in this case,
there were so many influential resource capacity contacts, this list goes on.
So, in the end,
every customer comes with a different problem setting to you. They want to
achieve different
things. And here we are now trying to standardize that. That doesn't sound like
fun, doesn't it?
But in the end, we took a different approach. We reversed engineered it a
little bit. We took a
look at what is onboarded and what needs to happen at the customer, because CS
Ms love to talk about
exceptions, right? When I ask a CSM, like, hey, we should do x, y, z, yeah, but
I have the customer
that does KBC, yeah, but you also have 30 customers that do x, y, z, right? So,
that's what we try to do.
We try to focus on the 30 customers, because in the end, what we try to
generate was the
biggest common denominator of all of those journey, something that is not a
perfect fit for everybody,
but in the end, represents a little bit the guidance. And so, almost relevant
for all customers.
And we refer to this going forward as the happy path.
Now, the happy path was a lot about similarities, less about the exceptions.
And the happy path
guided us ultimately with a common operational model, so that we could speak
the same language
and make our decision path. It was, on the one end, clearly prioritizing, right
? Also focusing
on the similarities. In addition to that, we kept in mind that this happy path
was not supposed to
provide the full on journey that you need to follow step by step by step, but
rather provide
guidance without limiting the customer to that journey. And lastly, when
conversations got really,
really complex, it often helped not to talk about what definitely no goals or
what the customer
shouldn't do. And with that, we came to our first learning and setting up this
digital onboarding
practice. Find your happy path. Sounds easy? It's not. But with a couple of
tricks you'll get there,
make sure that you have the right people at the table to execute your decision
fastly,
form your onboarding task force group. And second, you need to have a common
language
that you can refer to. You need to standardize before you scale. Now, at this
point in time,
we understood our status quo, and we had a pretty good idea where we wanted to
go to,
right? Our happy path more or less. Now we need to talk about the third thing
when we think back
to the map, our UBA. So how do we get from where we were to where we want just
fast?
Onboarding, and that holds true not only for us, but I believe for most people
in this room,
has some key essential parts on a very high level. In our case, and again, for
many of us here too,
it's enablement. We need to transfer knowledge, right? In the end, we want to
make sure that
the customer can drive this forward in their own pace. The second big point for
us in onboarding was
quick wins. It's a decisive part of the journey. First impressions matter, and
we need to make
sure that we create the stickiness in onboarding, right? So that after onboard
ing, people have
something that they can show to their budget holder that motivates them that
they want to continue.
And lastly, we of course also wanted to educate our next steps, which is often
by the way quite
underestimated. Onboarding is a hyper-careface. You will not able to execute
this until the
end of the customer lifecycle. So we needed to make sure that customers can
grow on their own,
know where they can get help, etc. And if you remember back to the very first
slide,
we had this too beautiful circle. We wanted to scale, right? Doing more with
less. So we
helped ourselves accountable to some principles, making the self-service, also
bringing the knowledge
as closely as possible to the customer. Secondly, we wanted to make itself
paced. That means that
in the end, the customer is back in the driver's seat, and we pushed them a
little bit, but they
can determine when is what relevant to them. And the third point, personally, I
'm a strong believer
of the power of the dualists we wanted to, that you can take. How the
translator to our world
is as follows. We split up our customer success journey into onboarding and
anything that happens
after. We had a decisive moment in the middle when onboarding was completed. So
when those three
essential criteria are where hopefully to a certain extent met, customers
transitioned from
onboarding to continuous, yes. And there was a lot happening there, but we per
relate, that's not
part of the onboarding right now. And then we started to put all of this
content into different
pillars for slides optimized for bigger screen. So either take a simple. At
this point in time,
we had, for us at least, a scalable digital onboarding journey, and we were
ready. It was
just one problem. Our customers were not really ready for that, because due to
whatever reason,
our customers really love to talk to people. So we somehow needed to talk to
them. And that's
fair. It's lovely customers that we have, right? So we started to add also a
couple of human
touch points in there, office hours, Q&A's, which helped us also to feed it
back into our digital
journey. We added a pooled welcome session, one-on-one touch points, et cetera.
In the end,
you might think, well, that's not automating. That's not digital onboarding.
Well, it actually is,
because a common misperception is digital onboarding. It's not about full
automation or
digitizing everything. It's about making sure that we get those high frequency,
low value tasks
out of the way, and we can focus our work on what actually generates. And that
's what we try to
also do with this journey. Now, it's my favorite slide, actually. So we were
very much aligned
on what we wanted to do. We had a great vision of where we wanted to be, and we
now wanted to
close the gap of our current onboarding from an operational point of view to
where it was supposed
to be. We wanted to go to the stars, so we needed to build a rocket ship. That
's just one thing
about rocket ships. It does take a lot of time to build a rocket ship. And at
the same time,
we went all around boarding. Back in the days, looked a little bit like this,
like a funky donkey.
We were tempted to go for the quick win. We wanted to have the most powerful
next step.
In donkey terms, that means something like this. So we were ready to put a jet
pack on a donkey,
which is impressive. But I think we can all agree it doesn't know the donkey
rocket and the jetpack,
but it was actually the tale of Hunter and Dabbot. Rooted one year ago here at
Gainside Pulse,
because I went to my team and I was like, "Guys, I got it." Journey Orchestr
ator, we can automate
our day zero communication, World
using Journey Orchestrator.
We then we got it all set up. We had different language requirements, regions.
We had a pretty
cool communication plan. There was just one problem. It was just not relevant
anymore.
We moved fast. We had a different process. We fell for it. We fell for the
and we started to optimize our status quo. And that was a huge waste of time.
half months of work, put in the trash can, and started over again. Still not
Different story. So when you do that, do yourself or try to optimize for the
outcomes. And that is
our hurtful second learning at this point. Just because you can, you really
shouldn't. If you
want to close the strategic gap, do it from both ends. The operational point of
view, as well as
the strategic point of view. Thank you, Mark. So, Mark shared about the
beginning of the task
force. And he shared the principles that guided the task force when creating
the overall customer
journey. It was self-paced, self-serve, and actionable. But what does that
actually look like?
This is what we launched. You can see it here on the side directly within the
workspace.
We see harmonized milestones and tasks added with relevant academy content from
our learning
management platform. And best practice metrics per milestone that give instant
actionable feedback
to our customers. All brought together directly at the customer's fingertips
within the workspace.
And in addition to that, all of this is supported by a single source of truth
for our customer data.
And for us, this is Gainside. This is what was launched. And we were very proud
And then we were asked, are you successful? And the harsh truth is we did not
know.
We had built a journey that was supposed to help our customers in achieving
their goals.
And we're very proud of it. But we did not know whether our customers were
achieving their goals,
nor where they stand within that journey.
Mark said it before, the task force were three teams. I joined.
And we were four. And the first thing we wanted to look at was at reporting,
the end of onboarding.
What did customers actually do? And how did they feel about it?
So the first thing when I joined the task force was to revamp the onboarding
satisfaction survey.
It was a survey that had grown over time. Many questions and, yeah, the conf
luence page about
that survey actually states quite a lot of fluff, not really making any use of
it.
So we revamped it, making it five questions. But satisfaction, value achieved,
feedback around the interactions and touch points, and improvement
opportunities.
One survey for all teams, all the delivery models. And the second step, or the
second thing we also
looked at was the customer's workspace. We created a dashboard working against
site
with customer data, the onboarding looking at the customer's state after
onboarding,
allowing us to compare again against regions, teams, delivery models,
ultimately allowing us
to derive structured learnings from these insights to continuously improve our
onboarding practice.
But understanding that a customer didn't do something we considered to be
relevant
wasn't enough. So we didn't stop understanding or helping our customer success
onboarding specialists to understand where their customers stand, at one
glimpse, having a look
and understanding of the portfolio. Again, two different things. One is another
dashboard.
In gamesite, looking at the customer's progress within their workspace over
time,
making it visible whether they were trending positively or negatively over time
. And recently
started automating or implementing automated CTA's that would turn milestones
after a while of time.
Again, making the customer success onboarding manager aware so that they can
intervene.
Because Maric said it wonderfully, you can create a happy path that works from
the we try to make
it as easy as possible for onboarding specialists to intervene and to suit most
impact.
So for us, the third learning is to light up the black box of customer onboard
ing.
Because you can't improve what you can't measure. So we'd recommend to involve
CSOps a little earlier.
So we get standardized insight.
So our approach was to land, learn and expand. We landed, defining a clear
scope of onboarding,
defining a clear customer journey, clear milestones, interactions and that's
what we launched.
Then we put measures in place to learn from it through reporting and monitoring
And now it was the next time for the next step to expand.
And then next.
But having standardized cross-functionally agreed upon insights made available
really allowed us to cut through the noise. Because we had the data.
And it was agreed upon making it visible helped us to really raise awareness on
what matters.
What we see here, not very well, how this adopted as we wanted to.
And this is considered to be crucial during onboarding. Making this available
became like
these insights became a company-wide initiative. Clearly prioritizing based on
the data what we
had made available. And sharing these insights does not only help the
continuous improvement,
the other teams in the subsequent steps of the customer journey. Because we
really do understand
now what happens and what does not happen during onboarding. Ultimately with
that, multiplying
our impact. So as a fourth learning, we would say digital onboarding is really
just the starting
point for the digital customer journey. It sets the foundation, it sets the
expectations
and it helps with the collaboration and based on these quantified insights,
we can gather and drive learnings and move from there.
Those were four learnings that we went through over the course of one and a
half years, approximately.
But what did we actually achieve with that? All in all, summing it up, having a
clear customer journey,
clear prioritization and clear guidance had direct and industry. For our
customers,
it meant that we increased customer value and we have time to value. Internally
for our customer success onboarding teams, we finally knew where our customers
were, what the
friction points were, where they would get stuck and when it makes sense to
intervene.
And with that, we got a much more clear, resilient and transparent onboarding
delivery.
And it reduced the workload. Internally, it also helped, having an
understanding of what
happens during onboarding, how everything gets adopted, what the state of a
customer looks like
after the end of onboarding helped with the internal collaboration. So all in
all, we went
through those four learnings in the course of about one and a half years. But
in the interest of
time, let's wrap it up. As a first step, Marek told us about building the task
force,
really understanding which stakeholders and key stakeholders are relevant to
build this
onboarding experience, find the same language and define the happy path. We
then did some attempts
to automate and learn where it makes sense versus where it doesn't make sense
and learn to not
fall for the quick one. And we put measures in place to report and monitor, to
ultimately
continuously took those learnings to implement them to develop even further. So
those were our
four learnings and these came in a subsequent manner. So there is no rush to
address the third
or fourth one prematurely. All in all, we can just recommend to build your task
force,
find the same language, build your happy path and scale from there. Thank you
so much.
Thank you guys. I need to be in the middle, so I have the mic here. So we do
have some time
for questions now. And then we all meet at the tail experience. Yeah, I saved
that on my map.
So let's start with questions. And if you haven't put your questions in,
just go on your app homepage. You can appvote the ones that are of most
interest for you.
And I've seen that donkey, like probably one of the first ones. But yeah, who
wants to take
the donkey question? I can, that's my level of expertise. I got this.
So who drew the donkey? At first attempt was that a child actually drew it,
draws the dog with old friend the internet to find a good donkey picture. I
think it was page
three where we found the donkey of our dreams. Good. In case anyone was
wondering.
Which type of customers are targeted to the digital onboarding? And do you also
include
large strategic accounts in that? Okay. So to answer that,
quite try to abstract it a little bit. Digital onboarding is not something as a
vision. We
are not fully there yet, right? Where we see a differentiation in between high
touch or low
touch customers, big or small customers. We rather see it as a fundament where
every customer
needs to go through. And if you have a customer that for instance, then has a
higher ARR,
or is very strategic for you, on top of that, we then try to build up
additional services.
Let that be more touch points for instance. So right now we do have a
onboarding approach and everything below or above that actually goes through
something else.
But yeah, the future is pretty much that. Having this digital layer and then
building
additional extra services on top of that if the ARR increases.
Good. We have a question, Arctic, would you recommend when the survey response
rate is too low?
I can take that one. I know it is a challenge that sometimes when there are too
many surveys,
the response rate drops. So for us it was really important to make sure that it
is one
concise survey after the end of onboarding. That is quick to fill in. As
mentioned, five questions
shouldn't take longer than two minutes max with the option to add comments. But
that's not
mandatory. And really to make sure the customer can answer right away. And in
the email that we
sent out, it is also indicated how long the survey would take them. And yeah,
it is a standalone
survey. There are no other surveys sent around that time within our customer
journey. So that
had helped us at least. Good. Next question about where did it all start in
your onboarding
and or what led to the priority? I can give it a shout, although I know that
leadership is in the
room and already smiling at me. There was not a decision that I took. But the
pain point that we
have outlined in the very beginning was the need for scale while maintaining
customer centricity.
Right? So the tipping point, I think we cannot narrow it down to one event that
happened. But
rather, as you have seen the growth numbers in the very beginning, they are
close to
quadratic ultimately. So do the math. You can't just hire more and more. Before
that, we had a
more linear function in between the CSM and how many customers they can onboard
or take care of.
The problem is if your customer base is growing almost quadratically or
exponentially and your
function of taking care of customers is linear, that doesn't go well. So we
needed to find a way
where we again can do more with less. So it was nothing that we did reactively.
It was rather
something that we did proactively. Luckily. Good. I think we have a question
about,
let me go into the onboarding trend score because I know that you share that
slide with all the
score and of course it slides a small, you're going to get them. But can you
just talk us through on
what builds up an onboarding score? Yeah, the score we saw is a mixture of
engagement metrics
and setup metrics all coming together to broken down to what we expect the
customer to do at a
certain stage during the onboarding and then whether they meet or do not meet
these expectations
accordingly. To be transparent, we're also revamping that. So it's always a
constant work in progress
to make sure it really adds value to our customer success onboarding teams. And
we're again enriching
it with triggers with CTAs that then where we would expect a customer to have
achieved a certain
setup and if that is not met then brought forward. So somebody could look into
that.
If I was adding one or two sentences, that's how we ended up with that. But in
the end on a more
generic level, we had two to three categories that we took a closer look at.
Number one was
content naturally, right? So we have work spaces, we have a tool more or less,
we want to of course
make sure that there is stuff in the tool and not only the right stuff but also
enough of after all
our tool relies heavily on collaboration. So we want users to be in there. We
want to see if we
have regular traction. Do people look into it? Do they come back after they
looked in for the first
time? And then thirdly, which was a little bit specific to us, we started off
with complexity
measures. I believe we dropped that by now because we have seen when it comes
to modeling, etc.
there were some clear no-goes, right? And that's something if you remember
slide three or four
where we said it's often not that we tried to track some of those points where
we knew if this
happens, we should talk. So that was also quite helpful for us. Good. An ever
green question about
a customer lifecycle, how did the onboarding to CSM or how does it work in SAP
Lunayax,
the sort of transition between the two functions?
I have to smile a little bit, right? Because I'm painting a picture of good.
Again, if we have
the right people at the table to talk about it, we can resolve this. So on
paper, we really wanted
to make sure that onboarding serves as a quality gate. And so that we kind of
harmonize the output
of onboarding. What comes out of onboarding should be well-unboarded, qualified
, engaged customer.
Now, then reality hit a little bit. And we noticed, okay, sometimes people also
buy the tool,
lose interest, notice it was not the right tool or they simply leave the
company. What should we do
with that? That body's in the basement, right? So there are so-called cold
customers. And we need
to make sure that we also have, when it comes to this handover, we have a clear
set of, let's say,
well, outcomes, the onboarding essentials. Is it enabled? Do we have data in
the tool?
Do they know what's coming next? Are they educated on that? And we are now
trying to make sure that
we kind of are strict down the harmonization of this quality gate that we only
allow customers
that tick those boxes. Another question, envisioning the sort of onboarding for
a smaller startup
without a tool like inside or a CSB. And maybe without a dedicated onboard and
have a look at
the type of process. That's a perfect question for magnets. Perfect. Well, the
way I like to look
at it is that it really does not necessarily depend on the tool nor the team
structure. But
I think something that everybody or every company, no matter how big or small
they are,
can do is to define how a customer state should look like customer success
onboarding or CSM or
anything in the middle. So really looking at the state that is ideal, the
definition of done,
and then deriving from that how customers can get supported in achieving these
goals.
And that can be either through a call and every call is one on one that works
too,
that has worked for us as well. But it can also go through other, for example,
digital channels.
It can go through emails, it can go through an academy, it can go through a
mixture of these
digital measures. And it's not necessarily dependent on a tool like inside. I
would say
though that gain types, a gain type helps a lot or a tool like gain side
because it is a single
source of truth for the customer data. And I would say that this is really the
foundation in order
to make informed decisions and in order to automate effectively and to drive
insights
from those customers that then were onboarded. And it becomes even more
powerful if you feed in
workspace data to really understand the state of a customer at a certain point
in time.
And then based on that, drive even more automated actions.
Nice. Anything to add? I would add two things. I think that was holistic but
number one is
expectations management. Onboarding is I have the feeling 50% of us is just
telling the customer
don't do this now, right? Or this is what you can expect and not that. Often
you also,
in onboarding as a filtering discipline, you have to readjust the expectations
that were created
in the presace phase, for instance, right? So expectations management is key
and that is
something that every company can does independent whether they use tools or not
And the second thing is something that everybody says, I shouldn't do, I will
do it anyway,
translating a German idiom here who writes it downstays the longest. So
document it. Because
even if you don't have a dedicated onboarding team, chances are high that
accounts will transition
at the later point in time from one CSM to another. And by that time, you don't
know what was going
on. And especially the person that gets the account doesn't either. So really
documented
and do the right expectations management. That's something I believe everybody
can does.
Okay, one last question. In terms of balancing human and automation effectively
was there a lot of trial and error to get it right?
I can say one or two sentences from the very early stages. We learned it the
hard way.
Our customers helped us to iterate, readjust, and find something that actually
helps. And I think
they are too hard onboarding. This is just not something that the customer
really enjoys.
They are therefore the outcomes. So onboarding is just the mean that ideally
takes you there
the fastest and automations are sometimes perceived by customers as nicey, less
faces,
etc. Right? And we need to break that stereotype. And it heavily depends on the
customize that
you have, how you manage the expectations naturally. So in the end, our
customers
deter us a lot to find the way in the middle. And as you said at the beginning,
it's a segmentation. So there's a layer of digital and then you scale it up
based on the rest.
I just want, it's not a question, but thanks from the audience for this
presentation,
it's great to have a little laugh at the end of the day. So very well done. And
I couldn't
agree more and echo that. So you have funky designs and creative boarding.
Please, you know,
who to look up for. But thank you so much for your presentation, guys. So...
Good. It's end of day one, everybody. So there's going to be slightly different
events,
but I hope to see you all at the party. There will be, I believe, some drinks
around here. So
stick around for a second. Otherwise, we'll see everybody at the party. Thank
you.
quick win, We took one and
