Customer on-boarding: Journey Mapping

We've recently been able to align our Sales - CS - Product - Marketing teams on the need for improved internal and external onboarding processes. What's exciting is that essentially all key stakeholders are hands-on, so we should be able to improve our onboarding process significantly.

Salesforce is our source of truth and we're incredibly under-utilizing the tool. Two questions:

What functionalities within SFDC do you recommend we leverage?
For those of you that have SFDC, what other tools do you use to streamline the onboarding process?

Our Tech Stack:

Hubspot
Mailchimp
Slack
Tableau

We're a Gsuite shop.

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Comments

Anita Toth

@Gabriel Fallas If you and @Nandkishor Tripathi chat about this, could you share your thoughts what you think will work best? I'm curious about knowing these answers too.

Thanks!

Gabriel Fallas

Makes sense.

Just checked out their 60-second demo - looks like an epic tool. I'll keep it in mind, thanks @Gurdev Anand !

Gabriel Fallas

@Nandkishor Tripathi

Thanks for all the input!

My goal is for Salesforce to become our single source of truth for customer interactions and account management. A couple of questions:

Do you have a specific field where you track NPS scores?
Do you use any tools to streamline data/contact transfer to Salesforce; i.e, troops, hubspot, etc?

Would love to connect to learn more of how you're leveraging the tool!

gurd3v

Yes, integrated with SFDC. We leverage it to keep our onboarding process on track in different stages. We have a fairly intensive onboarding process, so keeping it all on track can be challenging using Asana or something like that. TaskRay provided us with some logic capabilities and integrated organization which keeps everyone on the same page.

Wasn't easy though - we really unlocked TaskRay once we brought on a SF expert.

Gabriel Fallas

@Will Pagden thanks for sharing your experience.

Question: was the admin solely dedicated to being a SFDC admin or was it one of her main tasks as a part of a larger role?

Gabriel Fallas

I'm assuming you have TaskRay integrated with SFDC?

I'm curious, what are the benefits you've gotten out of the tool? Thanks @Gurdev Anand !

Gabriel Fallas

@Matt Vadala thanks for that insight.

To be honest, I'm not fully familiar with the "Lightning Experience" - I'll have to do some Googling and circle back to this one when I have more questions!

Slack's elastic search is great, but I agree that it's not the best at being a unified easy to reference platform.

Gabriel Fallas

I've seen ChurnZero in action and it looks like a fantastic tool, but it is not within our budget at this time .

Agreed on starting with Product. Last week we met with our Product Support team to understand their current workflows and determine where there are opportunities for improvement. We found that we even had a client "status" that was not being used at all, and the Sales team was under the impression that it was - ha!

How are you all implementing gamification into your processes?

We're looking to launch a mobile app in 2021 so I'll keep Braze in mind!

Nandkishor Tripathi

Happy to connect and help!

Anita Toth

I've sent a message on LinkedIn.

Gabriel Fallas

@Alex Turkovic thanks for the input and the offer!

Smartsheet was a client of my previous employer and I love their product. I'm sure I can Google an answer for this, but how is your team utilizing 'Cases'? I checked and it doesn't seem we're currently leveraging that functionality.

We're meeting with our Salesforce Admin this week to discuss what we already have readily available. There are some teams that have built zendesk ticket triggers within Salesforce. Once I have a better idea of what we already have, I'll definitely reach out for some more advice - thanks!

Gabriel Fallas

Hey @Jared Spencer Orr , I absolutely agree. Thankfully, we do have an Admin.

We've had SF for year a but just haven't tapped into its full (or near full) potential.

Nandkishor Tripathi

Hi Anita,

Thank you for your question.

Feedback received from customer goes and recorded in customer's account to understand how they felt on all communication with them.

In addition based on the business rules customers feedback is shared for closing the loop in internal slack channels / Alerts.

Follow-up actions are taken by designated supervisor /

Relevant Insightful information shared to designated team / supervisor. For example if there is a specific feedback about the product feature this will be shared in the internal communication for quick actions.

We also recommend to do Text and Sentiment analysis for Insights (if we have large number of communication happening.) This helps a lot in understanding top priorities and segment the customer base.

Happy to answer if any specific questions.

Will Pagden

Noticed a lot of great answers here already @Gabriel Fallas. I have worked in companies with great onboarding, and others with awful onboarding. These companies also used SFDC as a single source of truth.

In honesty, the vision at the company that was awful was a million times better than the one with great onboarding. The difference however was an awesome SFDC admin. She could make anything you wanted too happen. Whereas the other company, with the great vision couldn't action that vision because the admin was junior and didn't have the knowledge. We identified the training gap and got them the support they needed but it took time. So my key takeaway is dont compromise on the cost of a decent admin as they will really help drive you forward.

gurd3v

We leveraged TaskRay for managing the on-boarding process, but agree with a recommendation made above regarding keeping the on-boarding in app as much as possible early on.

Anita Toth

@Nandkishor Tripathi When you get the NPS feedback (the written stuff, not the number), what are you doing with this feedback? Is it staying in the customer's account or is also being shared elsewhere too?

John Bosch

@Gabriel Fallas we are currently using ChurnZero on Top of Salesforce for Onboarding Journeys. My other recommendation is to start with product. The more you can drive guided setup through forms and even gamification into the process within the product itself the better, and use other tools and Salesforce Workflows to bridge gaps where it cant be done by the product. We will be using Pendo for product analytics and Braze for push notifications (we're a mobile app with a SaaS backend).

Nandkishor Tripathi

We can use Salesforce as single source of truth for all your customers interactions and feedback received at each touch-point across journey. In most of my CX maturity implementation I have used Objects, Cases, Records, Workflows effectively to bind the feedback (experience data) collected.

Account / Client Success knows exactly the sentiment of the customer for his entire life. For example CSM will know that last quarter NPS score was 8 with specific feedback. And if we are tracking this for long time then you know exactly what you can expect in your next communication with customer.

Happy to talk more in case this sounds interesting.

Regards.

Matt Vadala

@Gabriel Fallas I've been studying some great process automation in SFDC that can be pretty easily built out by an appointed admin. That could be a start toward @Alex Turkovic's point. This will probably yield the greatest push forward for your teams, I'd imagine.

For unified and open collaboration I'd heavily push for SFDC feed usage in the Lightning Experience. I'd want to say to use this over Slack for the benefit of posting all of your notes/info/progression in one unified easier to reference platform. I'd nudge a hashed out talk in Slack or a quick chat over Google Meet. This is just some ideology I like to toss out on collaboration, there just never is enough.

Alex Turkovic

Hi @Gabriel Fallas - having spent a fair amount of time building various versions of client onboarding flows, there are definitely systems that make it easier than others. Given your current tech stack, utilizing 'Cases' in Salesforce is probably your best bet, however (and to @Jared Spencer Orr 's point), you'll need a strong SFDC admin on staff to help you build your flows and reporting if you don't already.

We did something similar using Zendesk to build out project flows which works reasonably well. That said, for large & complex client engagements, SmartSheets was an amazing addition to our stack as it allowed us to get really detailed while at the same time providing the customer with clear comms.

Happy to chat more about it if you like.

Jared Orr

Having an SFDC admin or at least someone who knows there way around the platform would be great. They will be able to create reports and build dashboards that track sales and onboarding efforts. I did this briefly a few years ago for a sales org and it really helped with data tracking efforts and overall accountability!