Introduction - How the onboarding team at Webengage was started

• Started with 2 post sale teams - support and success
  • Support - looked just at issues
  • Success
    • implementation, growing business, product training, everything post sales other than issues
    • Spend most of the time on handling implementation queries, etc and coudn't work on growth and strategising with customers on their campaigns
• By 2017, the product was maturing and attracting larger customers too. So 2 problems:
  • There were many more features added, and the product started growing more complex. This made implementation more complex, and it was harder for success team to handle implementations AND do their core work
  • There was also a pattern in support tickets - we often saw issues in execution of campaigns for customers due to bad data flowing into the system. This impacted their conversions and effectiveness of the product. The root cause was just flawed implementations.
• Decided why not separate the 2 functions - one for onboarding, and then for business growth and stategising with the accounts
  • Launched a separate onboarding team with 2 team members
    • Techno-functional role
    • Started experimenting with low MRR customers
    • Defined broad KPIs and processes
    • Goals/KPIs: get integration done without any issues, less escalations, timeline of 4-6 weeks, get the customer set up with ~10% of the product and allow them to get used to the product, CSAT score
    • Success manager will work on campaigns to deliver value as next step - to show ROI
    • Process - started with a basic rigit process
      • Intro Call & Standard Questionnaire
      • No SOP - go on client calls whenever asked by client
      • Slowly started streamlining the documents, sync up meetings, and thus the processes

Questions

• Any process changes for Low MRR and High MRR accounts?

  • Started with one process for all. Did't matter what you pay, everyone was treated the same and team members engaged with all kinds of customers
  • Now adapted - Enterprise accounts need much more process and are documentation heavy, need approvals, etc

• Hard customer journey example?

  • Customer with large customer base that was active from very in the early morning.
    • Insisted on 4am call for go-live coordination and live help
    • Initially resisted, tried to do some expectation setting, but finally decided it's the right thing for the customer
    • There were some issues during go-live, and were sorted immediately. Saw the value in being there for the customer.
    • Realised from this incident that the Webengage team actually had a "customer-first" mindset, and stuck to that.

• In implementatins involving data and heavy lifting on the customer side, how to ensure correctness of integration and how to put in process to get it right early?

  • Earlier - used to make customer make do integration end to end and then test everything. This would have lot of issues that would come up, and it wasn't an agile process. Issues with go-live too.
  • Modified process
    • Webengage understands everything as events and processes.
    • First thing done is data modelling around what events are being passed
      • Create separate staging webengage account for customer
      • Pick 3 events and fire those events in the UAT environment
      • Verify the 3 events implemented on a live call.
      • After green signal is given, implementation for rest of the events is done
      • Follow agile process and do it in iterations - to get more data and integrations built
  • Details of Process
    • Break into themes for the weeks
    • Showcase a presentation on the first call with the methodology and what will be accomplished each week
      • Week 1 marketing heavy - involves data model definitions, etc - specific large tasks to be accomplished
      • Week 2 tech heavy - some integrations in a staging environment
      • Week 3 tech heavy again - implementation review and bug bashing
      • Week 4 marketing heavy again, etc
    • We use documents or checklists for many of the key phases and activities - For example, very detailed, exhaustive list of all that needs to be verified from an implementation for each platform (web, apps, etc)
      • Customer can give these documents and lists to appropriate teams to ensure nothing is missed or done wrong
      • The implementation checklists, for example, can be used by the customers' QA team
      • Onboarding managers also do their testing to verify the implementation

• What is documented? Do you document for internal guidance/checklists, and for sharing with customers?

  • Very document heavy recently
  • Anything that is repetitive becomes a document
    • Even an email that is sent at the end of a phase, etc becomes an email template saved in a document that you can refer to and use to send for a new customer
    • Saves a lot of time to have everything saved - can just copy paste or duplicate a document. Onboarding manager can then focus on other things.
  • All knowledge acquired is being documented so it is useful internally and potentially to customers as well.

• What have you done that has had impact on how you move your largest customers along the journey faster?

  • For enterprise customers, we observed a few things
    • There were lots of stakeholders involved, different teams, dependencies involved
    • Not all of them were on the same page - the tech team may have a different understanding of what the integration involved.
    • Led to messy situations with different understandings among their teams
  • To solve this, we did 3 things:
    1. Adhering to Scope of work
       • The most important step we took was to figure the scope of work
         • Define scope with help of marketing team
         • Identify business requirements, pain points being solved
         • Strictly follow the scope of work and share it with all the teams involved
    2. Creating the same understanding among teams
       • For example, enterprises have separate web team, ios team, android team, etc
       • We created the data model document with marketing team, and have a sheet with the names of the events, where to pass these events, where to call tracking functions, etc to create the shared understanding.
       • App team, web team, etc can put their comments on the sheet while it is circulated to them on their designated columns.
    3. We have a daily stand up called or alternate day sync up to make sure the teams have the same understanding and are doing things the right way
       • If there are issues and open points, ETA for resolving the open items is mentioned and discussed on the next stand up

• When do you mark onboarding as done for the customer?

  • When the customer has run at least 2 campaigns with our software successfully

• How do hand-offs happen - from Sales/Pre-sales to onboarding and then onboarding to support and success?

  • Sales and pre-sales fill out a table with all they have learnt about the customer, and all that they've spoken about
    • about the client and their business
    • why did they buy webengage? what are their pain points
    • what other tools did they look at?
    • what have they used in the past?
    • use cases suggested and committed to by pre-sales
  • Do a call with the sales and pre-sales team to understand the customer sentiment before the kick-off call
  • CS is involved from the onboarding phase itself, and are kept in loop on emails throughout the onboarding journey even if they don't join every call.
    • walk them through challenges, expectations set, all the things done so far, the sentiment, etc
    • Also, an email is sent to all involved capturing all of the above as a formal account transfer
  • There could also be documents/ checklists showing what was done and verified as part of the hand-off
  • Perspective from Badri (Pando):
    • For sales hand-off to implementation/delivery, we have tried to automate as much as possible. Full process below:
      • We have a questionnaire that sales team answers for every customer
        • what modules were sold
        • who are the client execs
        • have you promised for any cost savings? what %?
        • etc. Around 30 such questions - mostly Yes/No answers
      • Next they upload documents used - SOW, Proposal Presentation, etc
      • Next delivery team goes through the questionnaire content and documents and comes up with their clarifications they need and their set of questions.
      • Once the questions are ready, there's a call with the sales team to get the answers
      • Sales then schedules the first "executive connect" call
        • Introduces delivery team
        • Goes through executive perspective first hand on "why did you buy this", top priorities, service levels, etc
        • Discuss what is going to done in the kick-off meeting and who is needed for it
  • Added by Sri:
    • Freshworks used to have an post implementation hand-off document to success and support
      • captures all that was done, all modules configured with the context around it
      • capture all work arounds suggested and being used, if any
      • capture what did not get done - what's left for later or on the roadmap items
      • idea is to help support/cs have all additional context possible while engaging with the customer on issues, etc

• So what's the structure of the implementation team at Freshworks and how do they take care of custom integrations, custom requirements? How does hand off happen at FW?

  • Answer from Preethie Vimalan
  • We've divided our implementation team at Freshworks into 4 major parts:
    • Engagement Manager - who is like a combination of a relationship manager and project manager, and is the Freshworks POC for everything in this phase
    • Onboarding Specialist - who takes care of product implementation (configuring everything needed inside the product based on customer requirements)
    • Onboarding Engineer - takes care of custom integrations, custom apps, and anything that needs writing code
    • Solution Architect - involved in really complex accounts, to ensure the solution is being delivered in a scalable way, and the right calls are taken on custom apps, integrations, workflows, etc
  • We also introduce the Customer Success Manager right after the deal is closed.
  • There are at least 5-6 hand-off documents, including a document made by the TAM (technical account manager) who collates everything into a "360 degree" document that gets attached to the helpdesk

• Who should have a separate onboarding team?

• What's the level of support onboarding offers during POC?

• What kind of people do you hire for the onboarding team?

• How do you put a timeline on a customer POCs?

• How do you measure success?