What's Covered
Being an early-stage platform still in beta phase of development poses an unusual challenge for customer success. We of course share the goal of more established businesses - get the customer to value as quickly as possible - but have another challenge: what is value? What are the blockers for our customers to reach that value? (This is particularly relevant in the early days of product roadmap prioritisation).
At Embeddable we soon made the decision that we would employ a high-touch and hands-on onboarding approach. Now I know you might be thinking, “that’s so un-scaleable”, and therefore anathema to the tech world, but doing things that don’t scale can pay dividends, as we’ve seen with our approach.
We started by figuring out who we were onboarding. Our Embeddable teams are generally made up of front-end and back-end engineers, and product teams. Becoming successful with Embeddable often requires input and engagement from all of these team members, so we designed a process to get them comfortable with the platform quickly. We also knew that these teams could provide really valuable feedback for us.
We analysed the minimum these teams would need to do to understand the platform end-to-end, and designed an onboarding session to go through each part of the platform. We added a “homework” challenge, which was particularly helpful for highlighting anything that wasn’t clear in our documentation, and meant that our teams could really hit the ground running when they started to build their own dashboards. By setting up the onboarding flow in this way we’ve been able to get a significant amount of actionable feedback from our early adopters, all of which has fed into improving the process and platform as we grow.
Alongside the customer-facing onboarding structure, we agreed internally on our key metrics - what we considered “onboarded”, and the stages that each customer passes through to get to that critical point. This has enabled us to quickly see where teams spend the most time or get stuck, and see if there are product or support gaps that we could fill to speed up the journey to being successfully onboarded.
What’s worked well
- Regular calls with our onboarding teams have helped us gain insight into their process
- We’ve been able to continually improve our documentation as questions have come up
- Support is crucial in the beta phase of a new product - both to ensure a good customer experience and to inform product development
- Setting out an onboarding process has allowed us to maintain the conversation with each team, and not get lost among their competing priorities
What’s next?
As we grow and the platform develops, we’ll be looking for new improvements and ways to speed up our customer’s journey to getting value from Embeddable. Whatever changes we make, our focus will remain true to our principle onboarding goal: how can we help customers get to value as quickly as possible?