Should Customer Onboarding & Implementation be done by Professional Services

Eddie Salce

Hello GGR Community,

This is my first post, so please go easy on me. In my career as a CSM, I've always run Onboarding and Implementation. At most, we would have a Solutions Engineer alongside us, or the customer would have a set number of hours, but all in all, CSMs ran Onboarding. I'm starting to hear talks of Professional Services managing the Customer Onboarding and Implementation as a Service customers purchase.  I'm a little hesitant of this approach, I'm a big believer that Customer Onboarding is critical to customers' long-term success. Additionally, I think it introduces too many handoffs and as the saying goes, "Too many cooks in the kitchen". 

The argument for this approach is that what we're doing now isn't scalable, and CSMs should only focus on building the customer relationship. I'm not sure if this is true since I've only worked for Startups, so not sure how this looks at organizations with a larger customer base. Maybe there's something I'm missing here, or I'm being naive, but seems odd to me that we would not take point for the first 90 days of a customer's time with us.  Any thoughts?