The Customer On-Boarding Process
Customer on-boarding can be one of the most complex processes in a business due to the amount of coordination required among both internal and external teams. With each point of coordination increasing the potential of a mis-communication or delay. In our opinion, this process is also a prime example of classic workflow - multiple tasks that need to be coordinated across multiple people to accomplish some objective or make some decision. Let's break the process down into the parties involved, the systems involved, and the data required to successfully on-board a customer.
The People
A customer on-boarding process may involve team members from sales, marketing, customer success, professional services, legal, finance, implementation and maybe even the executive team. These human touchpoints may be determined by geographic region, deal type or size or other customer attributes.
The Systems and Data
Key customer records and other supporting information may be housed or need to be added to the CRM, ERP, Marketing Automation, or other systems depending upon your enterprise stack. The "Deal Won" event may impact the data marketing uses to measure their performance for lead generation and qualification, the data sales uses to measure sales rep performance and deal cycle times, and the data that management uses to project revenue.
Long Term Questions
Customer on-boarding is more than just registering the "Deal Won" event. Important workflow or rule related questions may be: "How do we assign a customer success rep to this account?", "How will we manage the renewal next year?", "When should we bill for the implementation services?", "How will we track the general health of this customer over time?", "What services will be delivered when?". Each of these questions may represent a workflow or a rule that can be defined so that the decision making process that is followed throughout each customers experience remains consistent.
