Embarking on the venture of onboarding your customers is much like navigating a complex landscape—knowing where you are is crucial to planning your route. Just as a "you are here" marker on a map provides clarity, understanding your current level of maturity in customer onboarding helps you chart a clear and actionable path forward.
Customer onboarding is not just about going live with your product; it's about ensuring customers obtain initial value and long-term success, laying the foundation for strong and lasting relationships. The Customer Onboarding Maturity Model, shown below, is key to clarifying the current state of your onboarding approach, as well as mapping reasonable stepping stones to enhance your program.
A maturity model is a tool to measure how well you are doing and how capable you are of continuous improvement. The Customer Onboarding Maturity Model is an invaluable tool for assessing where your organization stands in this journey. Whether you're working at a startup dealing with the chaos of ad hoc processes or at an established company looking to optimize your onboarding strategies, understanding your maturity stage is the first step towards delivering exceptional customer experiences.
The Four Stages of Customer Onboarding Maturity
The Customer Onboarding Maturity Model includes four stages: Reacting, Performing, Scaling, and Optimizing. The development of any new product or service goes through similar stages. By identifying your current stage, you can celebrate your wins and set realistic goals. As you read the details of each stage, reflect on what sounds most familiar to you.
Reacting: The hallmark of this stage is firefighting—scrambling to address issues as they come up. If you find your team constantly putting out fires without a proactive approach, you may be in the Reacting stage, common in startups or organizations transitioning to new business models, like moving from perpetual to subscription licenses. In addition, the chaos of treating every customer as a “special snowflake” often leads to burnout and high turnover rates among both employees and customers.
Performing: When moving from ad hoc to standardized processes, you enter the Performing stage. At this stage, companies build dedicated customer onboarding teams to deliver consistent customer experiences. While playbooks become crucial, reliance on manual efforts can make this approach unsustainable as your customer base grows. If your company has established best practices but still relies heavily on manual interventions, you’re likely in the Performing stage.
Scaling: The Scaling stage is marked by your company’s rapid growth and the need to handle a larger volume of customers efficiently, as well as a move to “product led growth.” As your business grows, adding more people isn't a sustainable solution. Instead, it’s time to leverage technology and segmentation strategies to deliver a one-to-many approach for customer onboarding. During the Scaling stage you assemble a technology stack to address customer and internal needs.
Optimizing: At the Optimizing stage, customer onboarding is a core component of your company's growth strategy. Your team clearly demonstrates the impact of customer onboarding on the business bottom line, highlighting shorter times to first values, decreased customer support costs, and increased customer retention and lifetime value.
Assess your current stage.
Take a moment now to write down your organization's current state. Maybe you just shouted, “Reactive!” when you read the section above because you are running around with your hair on fire. Have you developed structured processes for everyone on the team to follow? Perhaps you are implementing new technologies to scale your approaches or are on the cusp of optimizing customer onboarding strategies.
Wherever you are, remember that each stage is a natural part of development. Understanding your current stage on the maturity model isn't just about identifying challenges; it's also about celebrating the progress you made. Maybe it’s awesome that you are struggling to scale because that highlights the amazing growth your company is experiencing. Sometimes just acknowledging how reactive and exhausted you are becomes the first step in making changes.
Plan for the next stage.
It’s nearly impossible to jump from an ad hoc, reactive state to an optimized state overnight. Therefore, knowing where you are on your customer onboarding journey helps you make informed decisions and build a realistic roadmap to keep moving and progressing. Write down the next phase of your maturity journey now.
When assessing companies’ customer onboarding programs and working with individuals in the Orchestrated Onboarding® Masterclass, I ask them to self-identify where they think they are on the maturity model before I share my evaluation. I find teams usually know what’s going on and are pretty aligned with how I rate them. Then, we use the maturity model to illuminate the path forward and build a reasonable roadmap of maturity.
Maturity is not a linear journey.
While some companies are clearly in one specific stage, others have facets of different stages in play all at once. For example, even though a company I worked with leveraged technology and content to scale customer enablement, overall, I rated them in the early stages of performing because they lacked processes to organize internal teams.
Plus, customer onboarding is not static because businesses and industries are always in flux. As a result, your optimized approaches to onboarding, enabling, and engaging customers will constantly need to evolve to meet the environment you are in. Your company may be moving up market, focusing on larger sized companies, or shifting down market. Acquiring new solutions and being acquired are both very disruptive and can throw you from Scaling and Optimizing back to the Reacting stage. Your company could be in a growth at all costs phase, keeping your team delivering high touch engagements, or suddenly shifting to cost cutting and efficiencies, requiring to provide a digital approach overnight.
Take action now.
Understanding your current position on the Customer Onboarding Maturity Model is the first step towards creating a more efficient, effective, and scalable onboarding process. Recognizing whether your organization is in the Reacting, Performing, Scaling, or Optimizing stage allows you to celebrate your progress and set realistic goals for the future. This journey is not linear, and it's common to experience elements of multiple stages simultaneously, especially as your business evolves and adapts to new challenges. Remember, the goal is not just to reach the next stage, but to continuously refine and improve your onboarding processes to align with your company's growth, fluctuating market conditions, and changing customer needs. Let me know how I can help you.
DONNA WEBER is the world’s leading expert in customer onboarding. For more than two decades, she has helped high-growth startups and established enterprises turn new and existing customers into loyal champions. Her award-winning book is Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers Into Loyal Champions. Learn more at donnaweber.com.
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