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According to Wyzowl, 86% of customers are more likely to stick with a business that invests in onboarding education. Conversely, botch that initial touchpoint, and you risk customers disengaging from your product or service altogether.
But building a great customer experience is easier said than done—especially when onboarding is siloed across sales, client success, L&D, customer support, and countless other teams.
This guide is for the team building that process. It lays out 10 stages in two phases, from defining business outcomes to launch, with an owner and a recommended tool for each. For the stages a new customer moves through after signing, see our guide to customer onboarding.
What Is a Customer Onboarding Process?
A customer onboarding process involves teaching newly acquired clients about your product or service so they can use it with confidence and autonomy. Most include:
- Nurture emails (e.g., “Welcome to our platform,” “Here are your login credentials”)
- A welcome webinar or in-person training session
- A product tour or walkthrough
- In-app tooltips and guides
- Knowledge bases and support content
- Courses, certifications, and other customer academy learning
Why Your Customer Onboarding Process Matters
Your customer onboarding process helps achieve retention. By guiding customers when their confidence and trust in your product is most vulnerable, you show them you’re invested in their experience. Set them up for success early, so they have ample reason to reinvest in your offerings come renewal season.
Per Userpilot, the median time to value for SaaS platforms is one day and 13 hours. The sooner you help clients realize the value of your offering, the more likely you are to retain them long-term.
And make no mistake: That effort matters. According to Bain, increasing retention by just 5% can boost profits between 25% and 95%. That’s a wide margin, but even on the low end, the upside of keeping clients who trust your product—versus spending a premium to attract new business—cannot be ignored.
Implementation vs. Onboarding: What’s the Difference?
Onboarding is the education your customers engage with: the course materials, product videos and in-app tips that teach them to use your product.
Implementation is the technical work of hosting, staging and deploying that education, usually handled by an engineer or systems specialist. Customers can only onboard once implementation is done.
At Intellum, we use the terms interchangeably, as both are prerequisites to our clients’ success. Customers can only onboard once implementation is set; likewise, implementation doesn’t get us far without high-quality onboarding materials.
Still, both terms are necessary, and it’s important not to conflate the two. Make sure to define these terms upfront with your project team, and ensure stakeholders understand how the work they’re responsible for helps drive onboarding vs. implementation forward.
How to Create a Customer Onboarding Process
Creating a customer onboarding process takes 10 stages in two phases: five to prepare the program and five to build and launch it. You can’t improve your customers’ lives without first thinking about what makes for an effective onboarding experience; likewise, all the prep in the world hardly matters if you cannot execute in a live environment.
Preparation
Your customer onboarding process starts well before any individual client is signed. The first two to three months of your program—when you’re defining success and gaining internal alignment—are arguably the most important of all. During that timeframe, you’re laying the foundation for a successful onboarding program not just for client number one, but for client 1,000 and onward. That groundwork is critical.
1. Define business outcomes.
To design a clear customer onboarding process, you need clear outcomes you’re driving toward. Think of the business outcomes you’re looking to achieve, then build a shared language around what success looks like.
These outcomes must be tied to organizational success. While customer onboarding metrics like customer satisfaction or completion rate can help your product or program team understand progress, they mean far less to the C-Suite and other senior leaders. Product adoption rate, churn rate, and customer lifetime value are meaningful metrics that any leader at your organization will follow.
2. Align stakeholders.
Once your outcomes are drafted, build your team. Identify which stakeholders are key to success—either because they’ll drive your outcomes or because they’ll consult on them—and bring them into the fold.
Ask yourself: Who else needs to be included? Perhaps you need product designers and engineers to deliver your onboarding. Maybe your Customer Success team will partner on content, and Business Intelligence will gather performance data. Know who your representatives are across the business, and have a system in place to facilitate decisions and hold stakeholders accountable to the items they own.
Tip: Not sure who to partner with for your customer onboarding process? According to our 2026 State of Education-Led Growth Report, education leaders are most likely to collaborate with Customer Support teams, followed by Customer Success, Product, Sales, and Marketing.
3. Audit content.
If you lead a content, education, or L&D function, you’re likely not starting from scratch. From sales and marketing collateral to support articles and customer product training materials, you have clay to work with. Mold it! Take inventory of all the materials available to clients today so you can see what’s worth keeping and what’s worth scrapping.
It’s a common saying—especially now, in the age of AI and large language models—but it bears repeating: Put garbage in, get garbage out. Just because you have content doesn’t mean it’s the right content, or that it deserves a spot in your customer onboarding process. Focus on whittling down the resources you have until you have high-quality ones that directly support your business outcomes.
4. Map learner personas and workflows.
Research and develop the learner personas you’re looking to onboard. Who are the customers most likely to need detailed onboarding? Which clients are more self-sufficient? What pain points does each persona hit in its first weeks? How do those personas differ in industry, company size, and job title? Map these insights to specific user journeys and learning goals. The more granular you get, the more you’ll be able to personalize these experiences to your exact audiences.
Keep scope in mind. Differentiate what workflows are mission-critical vs. what are simply nice to have. If you are adopting a new tool—for instance, a customer onboarding platform that lets you design role-specific, personalized onboarding—your processes will likely have to change too. Prepare for that and identify the biggest risks, contingencies, and must-haves in existing workflows. Future you will be grateful you did.
5. Establish your governance plan.
The final part of preparation is governance. Before you start migrating content or creating new assets, you need to know who’s responsible for what and how you’ll manage creative decisions or roadblocks. That’s where your governance plan comes in. Together with your stakeholders, create a playbook to keep your project on the rails.
If you have a project or program manager, lean on them for expertise here. And if you don’t—we understand it’s a luxury—that’s okay too. It’ll take a concerted, team-wide effort to hold one another accountable and keep roles and responsibilities in mind. (We’ll also explain who should own each part of the stages to come.)
Implementation
Once you’ve done your prep work, you’re ready for implementation.
Think of it like preparing a Thanksgiving meal. The implementation is the cooking (and the launch is the meal). But without any of the prep—knowledge of what you’re cooking (business outcomes), a guest list (stakeholders), a list of recipes (content), a shopping list (workflows), and a seating plan (governance)—you’re setting your implementation up for failure. Thankfully, we’ve done the preparation.
6. Initiate a kickoff.
The kickoff brings all your stakeholders together to recap the preparation work, so everyone else is aligned on the plan before the build starts. Leave time for questions, but don't reopen decisions already made. The recap covers:
- The business outcomes you’re driving
- The people involved
- The content you’re migrating/updating
- The personas you’re designing for
- Any customer onboarding software tools you’re using
- Roles, responsibilities, and accountable parties
7. Design your content.
Assemble the folks doing the actual work—learning experience, product designers, content writers, etc.—and collaborate on how to bring your programming to life.
If you’re migrating existing content to a new tool (for example, a dedicated customer onboarding platform), use this stage to move that content over and update it based on your learner personas and objectives. Keep those goals top of mind, as they’ll help prevent scope creep if the team deviates from the original onboarding curriculum.
8. Build your infrastructure.
With your content built, move toward staging and production. Where your onboarding materials live will determine who you’ll partner with during this stage. For instance, if you’ve created SaaS customer training, you’ll partner with Engineering. If you’re onboarding clients via your company website, you’ll work with your Web Development or IT teams.
Always anticipate what might go wrong. Technical implementation will always include hidden dependencies, especially with data or technical configurations. Get on your Engineering or IT team’s queue early if you need support with functionality like SSO or integrations.
9. Test the experience.
Test the full customer onboarding experience and take note of what's working well, what’s not working well, and what’s completely broken.
Know who to go to, and for which asks. If there’s an issue with the flow or comprehension of the onboarding, speak with your designers. If there’s a technical issue, try Eng, IT, or Web Dev. If there’s a reporting issue, tag in Business Intelligence. This stage can easily slow teams down, so use your governance plan as a north star to get unblocked quickly.
10. Launch and maintain.
You’ve put in the hard work; now you get to see the payoff. Together with your stakeholders, identify and move toward a go-live date. Consider the elements necessary for a smooth launch—client comms, CS or support hours, etc.—and ensure those prerequisites are met before flipping the switch.
That said, don’t feel the need to perfect your launch. Ideally, everything will work flawlessly before you go live. But it’s also okay to soft launch a minimum viable product (MVP) version with a pilot or beta group, especially if it’ll help you gather user data—and iterate—faster.
How to Improve Your Customer Onboarding Process
Four practices improve a customer onboarding process once it's running: break down silos between the teams that touch the customer, keep every stage tied to your business outcomes, give every team a way to spot account risk, and act on what customers tell you during onboarding.
Avoid silos.
Perhaps the biggest roadblock to effective customer onboarding is siloed information. When collaborating with stakeholders, you do a disservice by undercommunicating or treating project phases as discrete tasks.
Customer relationships don't pass cleanly from one team to the next. A salesperson’s or marketer’s job does not end when a customer begins onboarding. The customer’s learning journey doesn’t end just because they completed all their onboarding materials. Client success doesn’t end when the customer submits a support ticket, just as customer support doesn’t end when the support ticket closes.
Responsibilities change, of course, and you don’t want to have too many cooks in the kitchen. But the greater risk is no cook in the kitchen at all. Work with stakeholders to provide a truly collaborative, end-to-end experience where your customer feels like they’re treated with intent and care—not handed off from one person to the next.
Remember your outcomes.
If your implementation process is particularly long, it’s easy to lose track of where you began. You may start designing content, only to realize what you created doesn’t impact your broader business outcomes at all.
Unclear goals can also cause cross-functional conflict. If Customer Support is focused on ticket resolution times and pushing that outcome without identifying and flagging risk signals for deeper evaluation, that can conflict with Client Success’s net revenue retention goal. Likewise, a new (but difficult) account could be good for Sales, but cause ripple effects for other teams.
The key is finding balance—and that starts with alignment. Work with stakeholders to ensure everyone agrees on the outcomes you’re looking to achieve with your customer onboarding process. Embrace healthy conflict upfront, rather than let it sneak up on you.
Beware potential risks.
Every team needs a way to identify not just account opportunity, but risk. Teams must be able to recognize risk signals at the account level, so they can escalate or take action accordingly.
Use your alignment meetings as opportunities to discuss risk signals openly, rather than avoid what’s simmering or the underlying questions that could put your program at risk. Don’t be afraid to use AI as an added security layer, too.
Listen to your customers.
Once customers start their onboarding process, you’ll receive an influx of feedback ranging from where they feel stuck to where they’re thriving. Each new feedback loop brings key learnings about your product or service—and potential ways to improve.
Onboarding is rooted in real questions and practical applications. So, take advantage of the opportunity. Listen to what clients are experiencing during onboarding—good or bad—and have candid conversations to see where you missed the mark. That way, the customer feels heard and supported, your onboarding improves, and you build long-term trust in the process.
Onboard and Retain Your Customers With Intellum
Intellum is trusted by the world’s leading businesses, and with good reason. Our AI-native education platform helps you build personalized onboarding that sticks with your audience long after they log in for the first time.
Use our authoring tools to create content, learning paths, and objectives that are built for the individual learner. Design role-specific onboarding flows that incorporate user progress and behavior that speeds up time-to-value. And with our Data Connector, all of your onboarding metrics live directly next to product and revenue data—so you can measure what matters and show the value.
Request a demo, and see what Intellum can do for your onboarding experience.
