Onboarding Tips - Week 47
Srikrishnan Ganesan
#1 Customer onboarding, PSA, and project delivery software. Rocketlane is a purpose-built project collaboration and PSA tool for implementation teams, consulting firms, and agencies.
Week 47 | Idea 47 | Devil's Advocate
One of the biggest challenges in onboarding a customer is that they often have very specific expectations that your product would work a certain manner, or may need your product to be customised / configured to work a way that you don't actually support - just because they are used to doing things that way. It may not be the best way to do something, and your product may just have a different way of getting results for the customer.
But it can get very hard if you have to tell them on multiple occasions that you don't support their way of working, deny too many requests / requirements that they bring up during the implementation, and end up bringing up alternative ways of getting the work done in your product. At one point, they start wondering if you don't value them as a customer, or if you aren't the right fit for them.
The result? Your own teams start avoiding this situation, and they indicate to your customers that their asks will be brought up in product roadmap discussions. They don't want to have hard conversations with the customer, and fear it may come across as "not being flexible".
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So this week's tip gives you a way to address this, and is something I learnt from Brittany Yandura 's recent Implementation Stories session. She shared about a trick she uses to avoid the trap of wanting to please the customer and avoid challenging them. She simply tells the customer right at Kick-Off, that it is her duty to play the "devil's advocate" for the customers' thought process. That her role involves challenging the customer to think differently, or question what they want to accomplish and why, simply to get to the best outcomes together, and to expose them to how other customers are most effective with their platform.
This simple exercise of setting expectations ensures that there is conversation around what is the goal behind an ask from the customer, and push them to open their mind about more ways to get to the goal. Or of course, even challenge the goal itself at times! It also helps you have a more uniform way of delivering outcomes for the customer - as you steer more of them to see and adopt your approach in the space.
Global leader with passion for program management, Stakeholder success and delivery excellence
2 年Most often than not, this is the discussion that onboarding teams encounter. Expectation setting upfront is an art and requires skill and backup from all corners. When done correctly, this approach will have great benefits for all stakeholders