Customer Success Foundations: Onboarding Best Practices

Using Customer Success Plans, Smooth Handoffs, and Playbooks to Achieve Onboarding Success and Drive Customer Value

What you'll learn

Understand and communicate the importance of onboarding

Build an iterative and scalable Onboarding Playbook

Create outcome and data-driven Customer Success plan

Collaborate with Sales for a smooth handoff to Customer Success

Requirements

An interest in Customer Success

A desire to build the ideal Customer Experience

Description

If you are streamlining your existing Customer Success process, building a new Customer Success practice, or brand new to Customer Success, then this is the course for you. Have you ever wondered how to make customer onboarding a more tailored experience? Do you worry about delays in your customer’s time-to-value? Does your current onboarding process leave you guessing about what the customer sees as success and whether they’re likely to churn? It’s never too early or too late to start learning onboarding best practices that will bring structure to your process and faster value to your customers. Whether you’re a true beginner in the Customer Success field or a seasoned professional, these best practices will help shape how you approach onboarding and your understanding of Customer Success as a whole.During this series of lectures, you will:- Develop the skills to determine what success looks like to your customers and how to achieve it- Create plans and playbooks that will streamline your onboarding process and make it more customer-centric- Discover why collaboration between the Sales and Customer Success teams is key to a good relationship with your customersCustomer Success is a fairly new field that’s grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Companies are seeing the benefits of Customer Success at other organizations, like reducing churn and increasing Net Recurring Revenue, and want that success for themselves. Customer Success, once thought of as a luxury or nice to have, is quickly becoming essential to a company’s ability to win over and maintain strong relationships with their customers. What does that mean for you? This is the perfect time to establish a Customer Success process within your company or suggest exciting innovations to an existing process. With these best practices as part of your toolkit, you’ll be ready to establish strong foundations and build on that base with creative ideas of your own.This course consists of 3-4 lectures per section, and each section includes at least one exercise that will help review what you’ve learned and get you thinking further about each best practice. Activities in this course include creating your own Customer Success Plan, practicing your meeting presentation skills, crafting the beginnings of an onboarding playbook, and more!I’ve been working in Customer Success for the last four years and have learned so much from trial and error, as well as the wonderful Customer Success community. I’ve taught groups small and large how to build their own Customer Success practice, and I’m excited to share my knowledge with you! We’ll update this course with new information and resources as often as possible to keep you at the forefront of what’s considered best practice in the world of Customer Success.Whether you’re new to Customer Success and onboarding or you’re a Customer Success leader looking for inspiration, this course can get you started. No matter what, you’ll leave this course with a new ally in your Customer Success journey. Take that step and let’s explore these best practices together!

Overview

Section 1: Welcome & Introduction

Lecture 1 Instructor & Course Introduction

Lecture 2 The Importance of Onboarding

Lecture 3 Exercise: Reflection Activity – What do you want to get out of this course?

Section 2: Create a Customer Success Plan: Establish the Definition of Success

Lecture 4 What is a Customer Success Plan and Why Create One?

Lecture 5 Customer Success Plan Components

Lecture 6 When to Start Building a Customer Success Plan

Lecture 7 Exercise: Building a Customer Success Plan

Section 3: Establish a Smooth Customer Success Handoff Process

Lecture 8 Why is the Customer Success handoff important?

Lecture 9 Determine Who Does What and When

Lecture 10 The Internal Handoff Meeting

Lecture 11 The External Handoff Meeting

Section 4: Create Onboarding Playbooks

Lecture 12 What is a playbook?

Lecture 13 What Onboarding Playbooks should I create?

Lecture 14 Components of a Playbook

Lecture 15 Exercise: Create Your Own Playbook

Section 5: Wrap Up

Lecture 16 Final Thoughts

Employees who are looking to build a career in Customer Success,Employees who have just started their career in Customer Success and are looking for best practices for foundational knowledge,Employees who have experience working in Customer Success but are looking for ways to streamline their processes with best practices,Leaders who are beginning to build a Customer Success practice,Business professionals who are looking to improve the customer experience,Business professionals who are looking to improve customer retention,Business professionals who need to improve the Sales to Operations handoff