Appreciate the enthusiasm and feedback, I will try to clarify what Onboard does, who it's for and why it's important!
One way to think about when "Customer Onboarding or Implementation" happens is generally any time a product or software is SOLD. (ex: via online demo, salespeople or signing a contract..)
Most companies that have sales people (Account Executives, "AEs") have a corresponding success people (customer success "CS", onboarding specialists, or account managers).
Of course in SaaS, the focus is often on customer retention and ensuring they have a wonderful experience. The more companies think through the customer journey, the more they realize customers are losing faith in the products & services they use when the onboarding is poor. Sometimes, it can be fixed with product, other times however, it must be addressed by people & process.
The product is for modern customer success teams specifically at SaaS and service companies who are looking to manage, automate & streamline THAT onboarding and implementation process.
Companies are using spreadsheets today because its more organized than post-it notes and email. They are trying to make it easy for customers to receive value from their software/service and the first step is often to configure it so the rest of the buyers can use it effectively.
Sometimes, or even oftentimes, software built for non-technical folks require other teams and departments to assist, integrate or sign-off on this process. It may become painful and disorganized, generally a lack of transparency and visibility lead to delays in configuration, implementation and causes frustration while creating a subpar customer experience and is one of the primary reasons for customer churn.
Because of this, some companies are looking for ways to:
1) Automate the list of tasks (who needs to do WHAT, by WHEN, and HOW) & with notifications to remind folks they have tasks to complete
2) Provide visibility to all stakeholders (internal & external) so everyone can see where the blockers are and stay on track (transparency often creates accountability)
3) Streamline a scalable, repeatable process for an onboarding team can manage hundreds or even thousands of concurrent clients being onboarded at any given time
seconded that your website copy doesnt do a very good job of telling me what it is you guys do. i have no idea who to send this to in my company whether its the sales person or customer success or PM or developer. just giving feedback that it needs work. i know this is hard. good luck.
Thanks. You are right, none of the other vendors do custom launch plans. They are all building templates, which is what everyone is used to -- we built custom launch plans because we spent nearly a decade onboarding Enterprise SaaS -- we know that's what is needed ;)
To answer your questions:
1) We don't have those types of elements right now, it's an interesting idea though!
2) Yes, we faced the problem of customer onboarding as we built my last company (Ambassador Software), especially as we moved up market and realized that "lots of people needed to do lots of things" before the buyer of our SaaS could actually use it.
The product has certainly evolved during YC thanks to all of the conversations we've had with customers and prospects. We came into YC with more traction than some companies (and many paying customers) so, we had some market validation, however, it's been turbo-charged while being in YC and getting such great intro's & connections.
Thanks again for your comments, happy to discuss further!
Often times customers want transparent communication, aka: understanding what needs to happen and by when for things to stay on track.
We've seen that often times people get busy and when follow-ups and reminders are solely left to one onboarding specialist, it's possible they could lose track -- one easy solution is to automate the reminders and take it off their plates indefinitely.
Another way to show clients they have to do some of the work is simply by assigning them the various tasks. The best way to show you care about their experience is explaining what they need to do is a simple manner, providing videos, articles and other resources so they can accomplish their tasks and move onto the next one.
These are just some of the things that assist with the trade-off, happy to discuss further, feel free to email me directly: jeff@onboard.io
Thanks Jeff, better documentation and explanation materials are something we need to put together for the current project we're working on also. It's a consumer app but the same issue applies - we get a lot of support tickets coming in about how to do things that we should explain somewhere.
Thanks for the feedback. Would really love to hear about what are the challenges with the onboardings you and your team are currently undertaking.
re: the website -- our marketing site and app serve very different purposes, regardless, we are in the process of overhauling our marketing site, so thank you for pointing that out!
It's possible that the site is hanging waiting for GTM to load.
Issues: Tracking deliverables across multiple customer divisions, having to go through customer-side project managers who don't understand the questions that are being asked, necessary documents spread all over the place, difficulty in slipping schedules as needed.
Thank you, super helpful and something we consistently hear (and have 100% dealt with). As you mentioned, all of these lead to delays, frustrations and ultimately under-delivering at a critical step of the customer journey
Really appreciate your comments and feedback, thanks again!
You've posted repeatedly like this in this thread. That's not allowed in someone else's launch thread (YC company or otherwise)—it's extremely bad manners. Please stop now.
It's maybe ok to post one comment telling people about your alternative product, depending on how you do that. More than that, it starts to be spamming.
Received your cold LinkedIn message... founder to founder, spending time on building a better product is always going to yield better results than scraping your competitor's launch announcement to send cold messages to all their commenters.
If you are going to reach out, I've always found it helpful when a company speaks to their differences and in a positive tone, rather than throwing shade.
One way to think about when "Customer Onboarding or Implementation" happens is generally any time a product or software is SOLD. (ex: via online demo, salespeople or signing a contract..)
Most companies that have sales people (Account Executives, "AEs") have a corresponding success people (customer success "CS", onboarding specialists, or account managers).
Of course in SaaS, the focus is often on customer retention and ensuring they have a wonderful experience. The more companies think through the customer journey, the more they realize customers are losing faith in the products & services they use when the onboarding is poor. Sometimes, it can be fixed with product, other times however, it must be addressed by people & process.
The product is for modern customer success teams specifically at SaaS and service companies who are looking to manage, automate & streamline THAT onboarding and implementation process.
Companies are using spreadsheets today because its more organized than post-it notes and email. They are trying to make it easy for customers to receive value from their software/service and the first step is often to configure it so the rest of the buyers can use it effectively.
Sometimes, or even oftentimes, software built for non-technical folks require other teams and departments to assist, integrate or sign-off on this process. It may become painful and disorganized, generally a lack of transparency and visibility lead to delays in configuration, implementation and causes frustration while creating a subpar customer experience and is one of the primary reasons for customer churn.
Because of this, some companies are looking for ways to: 1) Automate the list of tasks (who needs to do WHAT, by WHEN, and HOW) & with notifications to remind folks they have tasks to complete 2) Provide visibility to all stakeholders (internal & external) so everyone can see where the blockers are and stay on track (transparency often creates accountability) 3) Streamline a scalable, repeatable process for an onboarding team can manage hundreds or even thousands of concurrent clients being onboarded at any given time
This is what we are helping companies solve.