We know two things for sure in successful B2B SaaS companies:

1. They have a skilled support team.

2. They have excellent customer onboarding.

But if they don’t work closely in tandem - you create unnecessary headaches and cost your company valuable opportunities to grow lifetime value (LTV).

This is about efficiency and ways to make your life easier in customer onboarding. It’s sensible to be strategic with your processes and build important internal relationships.

Let’s look deeper behind the scenes. The team work between these two departments is what will set you apart from competitors.

“Team work makes the…” etc etc ↓

🧪 The Project: Support & Onboarding Tag Team

Let’s look at how to level up the relationship between these two hard working teams.

If you don’t already have a strong relationship with support team leaders, I’d suggest you reach out for a coffee chat about how this project could benefit both teams.

Then agree to work together to make incremental changes. 👍

Step 1: Create a flag system

Implement a system where support teams flag specific types of customer interactions during the onboarding phase.

Create clear categories for these flags:

• Implementation challenges

• Feature confusion

• Integration issues

• Adoption resistance

Each flag should trigger a specific response protocol from the onboarding team. This ensures that patterns are identified and addressed systematically, and quickly!

This flag system should impact customer health scores. This provides valuable data alongside anecdotal experiences.

It can be used to back up important decisions regarding improvements to your customer onboarding program.

Step 2: Create onboarding tags for visibility

Work with your support team to configure the support system to automatically identify and tag customers in their onboarding phase.

This depends on the tools you are using but it should be easy to automatically tag customers through an integration (direct from a CRM or via Zapier).

Then create support workflows for these customers that include things like:

• Priority routing to senior support staff

• Automatic notifications to assigned onboarding managers (either adding them to the ticket, or via a Slack message)

• Custom response templates aligned with the customer's current onboarding stage

This ensures that support responses complement, rather than contradict, the onboarding process.

Step 3: Embrace knowledge exchange

Start a two-way street of information. Share onboarding plans with the support team to give them context of the customer experience.

In return, support teams contribute their insights about common customer challenges.

This is valuable information to keep teams up to date and allow informed decisions regarding iteration of processes.

The knowledge share can include:

• Weekly digests of support ticket themes for onboarding managers

• Access for support teams to view onboarding milestones

• Shared documentation of configurations and customisations

• Regular updates on changes to the onboarding program structure

• Updates in Help Center/Knowledge Base

Step 4: Increase metric visibility

Create a shared dashboard that combines support metrics (e.g. ticket volume and satisfaction scores) with onboarding progress indicators (milestone completion and engagement levels).

It will give both teams a view of customer health during the crucial early stages of the relationship.

Combine these metrics to create a simple, shared scoring system. It creates a unified view of customer health during onboarding without requiring complex technical integration.

Step 5: Plan for efficient escalation

Create an efficient system for support teams to escalate urgent onboarding issues.

This can include:

• Clear criteria for what constitutes a critical onboarding issue

• Direct communication channels between support and onboarding teams

• Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for onboarding team responses to support escalations

• Regular review of escalation patterns to identify appropriate iterations

Go a step further and get the product team involved in this process. Clear communication between departments is the key to success.

🤓 The Analysis

Be strategic. Iterate on processes. Communicate regularly.

Create an incredible customer experience by showing the efficiency behind the scenes.

This project will help you showcase a unified approach to customer success that leverages the valuable insights of both customer support and customer onboarding.

What you can expect when implementing these steps:

• Reduced onboarding duration

• Higher customer satisfaction

• More efficient resource allocation

• Improved ability to predict & prevent customer churn during onboarding