Onboarding Tips - Week 11

Week 11 | Idea 11 | It's Onboarding Day. Celebrate!

Since it is the Holiday Season, our tip for the week will also focus on a "festive" idea.

This original inspiration for the idea comes from a friend, Aditya Maheshwari, who is heading Customer Success at Appsflyer. For one of their large enterprise customers with many apps and business lines, they decided to do a "Appsflyer Day" at the end of the implementation inviting all the business leaders and users from the customer side. This was a way for them to get all the users excited about Appsflyer, form some good connections with the team, and push adoption in each business line.

Hearing this story got us thinking about as not being a one-off, but as a part of our implementation and onboarding journey! Every customer onboarding can end with a celebratory event, with a focus on driving excitement and subsequently adoption to ensure success of the implementation.

Here are some thoughts around how to hold your "Celebratory Day" for Onboarding:

1. Brand it: For Rocketlane, we call this the "Onboarding Day" (since we're a customer onboarding product), while you can think of how you want to do this for your team. You can use the function or your product in branding the celebration. We preferred the function over our brand, since this is a function doing great work that deserves more recognition.
2. Make it about the function itself: We decided that Onboarding Day isn't going to be just about Rocketlane, but it is a day where the customer's organisation is recognising the need to invest in growth and progress of the Onboarding / Implementation team. So we divided the day's activities into educational sessions, and to showcasing ideas from the team on how to level up in onboarding, that includes how they use Rocketlane but isn't restricted to that.
3. Make part of it a group activity: To ensure everyone is excited, we decided our Onboarding Day should involve dividing the customer's team into groups, and having each group present ideas around leveling up to Leadership of the company. At Rocketlane, we typically get our customers to invite their VP Sales, CTO, CRO, etc as the panel, so there's also interesting feedback from more leaders, and the onboarding team gets that better visibility in the org for their good work!
4. Tailor it: Don't try to run the same playbook for every team. Understand if there's any specific challenges or goals in that customer's org and design your program to try to help with addressing those.

I make it a point to showcase the "Onboarding Day" as part of our Customer Onboarding journeys for teams > 10 members, so we ensure leaders are excited about this event for their teams even before they decide to buy Rocketlane :).

It helps you show the dream of what a successful implementation looks like, culminating in a celebratory event! Try this and tell us how you iterated on this to make it succeed in your company!