What are the best practices for onboarding customers to cloud solutions?

A few years ago, my team designed a SaaS on-boarding service that had six stages very similar to the best practices highlighted in this article. We found the first stage of customer discovery and assessment as the most import stage, as this sets the ground work for a successful cloud migration.

In my experience, best practices are not of the one size fits all nature. Your company's goals, the type of SaaS you're selling, the industry you're in, all dictate what constitutes best practice. That said, in general, coming out of Sales and into onboarding, it's important to understand the customer's journey and position their onboarding experience in that context, as a continuity of the Sales experience. It's also important to quickly introduce your onboarding team to the customer while the ink on the contract is still drying. As you engage with the customer, validate requirements and build your onboarding plan with them, there will be gaps that will need to be managed promptly. Most often these will be product gaps or SOW gaps.

The initial pre questioning and exploring pain points is the foundation of a successful onboarding experience. Ensuring transparency of deliverables and setting realistic timeframes will build trust. Following up with post cutover needs and quick changes will also aide a smooth transition over.

Customized is the word here. Not all onboarding will be cookie cutter. Customize and unique will be the case for every customer.

An well understood handshake of the plan is necessary, not only for compliance perspective, but rather to unearth future potential risks and to get a chance to mitigate such risk.

What I think is most helpful is developing useful templates to support your onboarding process. These can be presentations, project plans, requirements gathering questionnaire, project financials tracking, recorded training sessions/videos, etc. It is important to adapt and adopt your customer's style and team. A one person-show customer will not require the same approach as en enterprise customer with whom meetings always mean 5 different teams, each bringing 2-3 people to the call. It's also essential to stay engaged with your Sales team and continue to solicit support from the customer's original decision makers. This helps maintain focus on execution and achieving the original objectives that led to the purchase of your SaaS.

One conundrum that SaaS implementation teams face is that often you can only assign one person to keep the onboarding cost in check. And if that is so, that one person needs to wear many hats. Two of the more important hats are being a competent project manager, because an onboarding project is, well, a project and needs to be managed as such. But just as important if not more, your onboarding consultants must be competent users of your SaaS product and cheerful (but trustworthy) evangelists, to the extent possible. Your onboarding team's attitude towards your SaaS product will be essential to drive adoption. Happy teams, happy customers.

A great tool to use to providing training in group or individualized is a quick start guide at every station. Giving the end user time to explore the new features and capabilities on their time. Having a great team to support them with any questions especially during the first 30 days is crucial.

A cloud solution's success is dependent on finding high value use cases that drive consumption. To do this, I suggest running a series of workshops with key client stakeholders to uncover their major pain points. Then, align these with the capabilities of your cloud solution. Prioritize these initiatives based on a value vs. effort matrix, RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort), or MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have) method. This will allow you to create a roadmap focused on delivering incremental value to your clients, and to drive cloud consumption and license growth for your organization.

It is obvious that automation is a means of doing things more effectively and efficiently. Once you have fully organized criterion and understood the process, It would be unbiased, performance efficient , and cost effective to have automated process in place to speed up the onboarding process.

Stale and unclear processes should be broken up in multiple concise micro steps. Straight forward cluster of workflow should be combined as one item. Gradual and continual improvement of onboarding process requires regular review with the objective to improve it.

It makes sense to outline the offboarding flow as well, atleast , at a generic level. Letting go a business is always unfortunate, however it is of paramount importance to acknowledge such decisions are taken up by the other side based on serious business driven analysis, and the best we can do is to reflect our professional approach even during offboarding. Professionalism often brings back business.