Customer Onboarding Best Practices For 2025

When I was head of growth, our team reached 40% activation rates, and onboarded hundreds of thousands of new users. Without knowing it, we discovered a framework. Here are the 6 steps we followed. 1. Define value: Successful onboarding is typically judged by new user activation rates. But what is activation? The moment users receive value. Reaching it should lead to higher retention & conversion to paid plans. First define it. Then get new users there. 2. Deliver value, quickly Revisit your flow and make sure it gets users to the activation moment fast. Remove unnecessary steps, complexity, and distractions along the way. Not sure how to start? Try reducing time (or steps) to activate by 50%. 3. Motivate users to action: Don't settle for simple. Look for sticking points in the user experience you can solve with microcopy, empty states, tours, email flows, etc. Then remind users what to do next with on-demand checklists, progress bars, & milestone celebrations. 4. Customize the experience: Ditch the one-size fits all approach. Learn about your different use cases. Then, create different product "recipes" to help users achieve their specific goals. 5. Start in the middle: Solve for the biggest user pain points stopping users from starting. Lean on customizable templates and pre-made playbooks to help people go 0-1 faster. 6. Build momentum pre-signup: Create ways for website visitors to start interacting with the product - and building momentum, before they fill out any forms. This means that you'll deliver value sooner, and to more people. Keep it simple. Learn what's valuable to users. Then deliver value on their terms.

I improved retention and onboarding success by making a change to the first step in the onboarding process. A few years (and a few companies) ago, I made a small tweak to the way we onboarded new customers—a tweak that ended up making all the difference. We stopped diving headfirst into the technical implementation. Instead, we started with what I called a Partnership Kickoff. This one shift transformed the customer experience, boosting retention and improving onboarding success rates. Here’s why: The Partnership Kickoff brought intention to the relationship right from day one. Instead of rushing to “get things done,” we: 1️⃣ Engaged all the key stakeholders in the partnership 2️⃣ Discussed goals and confirmed success criteria upfront 3️⃣ Set proper expectations on BOTH sides 4️⃣ Clarified roles and responsibilities for onboarding and beyond 5️⃣ Created space to ask questions and address concerns This wasn’t just a feel-good meeting. It was about getting ahead of risks, ensuring alignment, and setting the stage for success. Here’s the secret sauce: ⚫️ Set expectations early Sales aligned on the importance of this meeting, and CSMs communicated the who, what, and why in their first email. ⚫️ Use a New Customer Intake Form We asked customers to provide key information upfront—no assumptions or overreliance on Sales handoffs. ⚫️ Prep the right way Sending the kickoff deck in advance meant our meeting focused on conversation, not presentations. ⚫️ Lead with goals and expectations Capturing customer goals was the priority, setting the tone for how we’d measure success. ⚫️ Clarify next steps We left every kickoff aligned on what happens next and who’s doing what. The result? Customers felt heard, understood, and set up for success. It wasn’t magic, but it sure felt like it. That small change? It delivered BIG impact—the kind every CS leader dreams about. Are you being intentional about how you’re starting your partnerships? If not, maybe it’s time to rethink step one. ________ 📣 If you liked my post, you’ll love my newsletter. Every week I share my learning, advice and strategies from my experience going from a CSM to CCO. Join 12k+ subscribers of The Journey and turn insights into action. Sign up on my profile.

After 5 years helping 800+ companies streamline onboarding, here's the most underestimated way I’ve found to eliminate delays: Prescriptive playbooks. Most onboarding failures happen before customers even start using your product. We dump endless configuration options on them and ask them to figure out what they want. I know a software vendor in our space who gives a spreadsheet with 800 rows for their customers to fill, before they can “start” implementing. The result? Analysis paralysis, delayed launches, and frustrated users wondering if they're doing it "right”. Customers do sometimes blame themselves for these delays, but they’ll steer away from your software and software in your space if they have this experience Ever notice how many tools give you templates instead of a blank page? There's a reason for that. Smart companies use more prescriptive and preset configurations: For ex, Slack: Suggested channels and workflows This leverages two psychological principles: → People are more likely to use tools when they feel they've already started → Once started, momentum keeps them going Instead of asking "What do you want to set up?" start with, "Based on companies like yours, here's what we recommend." Map your customer types to proven configurations. Present these as the starting point. This approach eliminates decision fatigue, ensures customers benefit from your best practices, and de-risks launches with proven setups Your customers don't want infinite choices. They just want confidence that they're set up for success.

🧠 The Psychology Behind Successful Customer Onboarding A hard truth I've learned as a CS leader is that perfect features mean nothing if your onboarding fails. Another hard truth: Psychology matters more than process. You must focus on human behavior rather than just feature adoption. Here are my three principles to live by in onboarding: The Momentum Principle: We discovered that customers who achieve value in the first 48 hours are 3x more likely to become long-term advocates. So we redesigned our onboarding to focus on quick wins before complex features. By breaking down the journey into smaller, achievable milestones, we create a pattern of success that builds confidence and momentum. The Ownership Effect: When customers invest time in customizing their setup, they're significantly more likely to stick around. We now encourage early personalization through guided setup sessions. Rather than doing it for them, we coach customers through the process. This has increased product stickiness by 47% and reduced early-stage churn by 34%. The Contextual Learning Framework: We stopped treating onboarding as a linear checklist. Instead, we now adapt the journey based on user behavior and role. Our data shows that contextual learning – delivering guidance at the moment of need – increases feature adoption by 68% compared to traditional training methods. The results speak volumes: Time-to-value was reduced from 45 days to 15 and adoption rates increased by 56%. Successful onboarding is about building confidence and creating habits. Every friction point isn't just a technical issue; it's a psychological barrier waiting to be understood and removed. Are you designing your onboarding for features or humans? #CustomerSuccess #SaaS #Onboarding #CustomerExperience

🚀 From Time-to-Value → Outcomes → Advocacy Every Chief Customer Officer , Next-Sales/Post-Sales, and Customer Success leader I talk to is wrestling with the same reality: 📉 Customers don’t just buy software and services. 📈 They buy outcomes. And here’s the hard truth: • Faster Time-to-Value (TTV) drives renewals. • Clear outcome realization fuels expansions. • Documented impact earns advocacy: references, referrals, and case studies. That’s the flywheel: TTV → Outcomes → Advocacy. Miss one step, and the whole growth engine slows down. 🛠️ Here are 5 actions I've been taking this year (and you can too): 1️⃣ Make TTV an Executive-level (and if possible, Board-level) metric. Don’t just measure logins, onboarding steps, or deliverables. Report on how quickly customers realize their first value, and present it to your executive team alongside ARR. 2️⃣ Redesign onboarding for outcomes. Shift away from “task completion” checklists. Build your onboarding around the first ‘aha’ moment that proves your product works. And if you don't know what the first moment of truth is, make it a priority to discover it now. 3️⃣ Run Executive Value Reviews. Don’t wait for renewal calls. Meet with decision-makers mid-cycle to demonstrate impact in their language: ROI based on revenue growth, revenue protection, and/or efficiency gains. 4️⃣ Quantify the impact. Adoption metrics are nice. But impact metrics are better: hours saved, costs reduced, revenue generated. Speak in numbers your CFO would applaud. 5️⃣ Operationalize advocacy. Turn happy customers into a systematic engine: reference pools, customer councils, case studies, and peer-to-peer referrals built into your success motion. And this is an area where we (ahem, I) still have the most work to do this year. Just ask our marketing team when they asked me for some strong advocacy statements and quotes.... ⚡ And what about the future? Almost all of us have acknowledged now that Customer Success isn’t just about being “customer-friendly.” It’s about designing a repeatable growth flywheel where every outcome creates the next expansion, and every expansion fuels the next referral. The companies that nail this don’t just retain customers, they earn them, over and over again. #CustomerSuccess #PostSales #NextSales #CustomerExperience #CreateTheFuture #Growth