Ask HN: How to solve the customer onboarding bottleneck? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to solve the customer onboarding bottleneck?

1 pointbewal4164 comments

We sell a B2B SaaS to a nontechnical market. In the early days, we had the privilege of working with each new customer in weekly calls, doing a thoughtful onboarding in which we carefully migrated their data into our architecture and thought hard about their problem. Suddenly, our sales team started crushing it and we have nowhere near that level of capacity to support onboarding. At the same time, our customer lacks the technical abilities to onboard themselves, which has created a severe bottleneck with onboarding.

Has anyone else gone through this struggle. How did your Product/Success/Support teams address this "onboarding bottleneck" issue?

View on HN

What does your customer success look like? How would you augment them to keep the high touch experience you've had? Do you need to keep that high touch experience? Have you had an engineer roll with them through onboarding to see where technical efficiency gains through software and automation could be found?

I'm the only Customer Success guy at the company. Currently onboarding ~15 customers. I come from a more technical background and not the domain of my customers.

How would you augment them to keep the high touch experience you've had? If I had a wishlist, it would be another hire, and they would complement me by providing more domain knowledge than I do. Sometimes, Im anxious that I'm not "asking the right questions" during onboarding.

Do you need to keep that high touch experience? Our sales team really leans into our high touch experience, because that where our competitors fall short. Recognizing that "white glove support" is a real advantage, I'm trying to figure out if I can keep that. What I guarantee is that no customers would be live without my support (not trying to sound important- it's just that we seriously have no self-service abilities). Since our customers are so nontechnical (think floor operators in healthcare), the product team furloughed self-service in exchange for my white glove services.

Have you had an engineer roll with them through onboarding to see where technical efficiency gains through software and automation could be found? We have not done that! Our tech team is very flooded with tickets on future product creations, that it's been tough to capture their time.

I have someone I worked with in customer success at a YC unicorn I think you would get value from speaking with to build some momentum to power out of this blocker, I believe them to be a skilled practitioner in the trade and trust their guidance as it relates to this domain. I'm happy to buy you an hour of their time. Let me know if you're interested, and I'll connect you. You can get my email from the mods.

Thank you! Will reach out

Reply on news.ycombinator.com