Who should own customer onboarding?

You want to ensure that your customers see value in your product or service. Who would you assign this mighty task to?
July 4, 2022
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Sivaprakash

Your company has created the best product or service out there! You want to ensure that your customers see value in your product or service. Who would you assign this mighty task to? Which team is trained to handle the specific use-cases for your customers? 

Here are snippets of the conversations on Preflight and what our community has to say about this.

Filip Rodnic, Customer Success Deployment Manager - Parkour Inc.

We have the “CS Deployment Manager” role, an onboarding specialist within the CS organization. The CS Deployment Manager’s responsibility ends when the customer goes live in the production environment. However, our customers are classified as high-touch within the B2B model; hence they require a fair amount of attention and technical platform knowledge from the person who does the onboarding.

Piyush Wason

Our product is enterprise-level, so we have a dedicated onboarding team divided further into four teams:

  1. Project Managers
  2. PMO
  3. Implementation Specialists
  4. Solution Consultants - Enablement 

Maeve Murphy, Customer Success Associate - Chronus

We have a hybrid model. We have implementation specialists, but our CSMs are also responsible for some implementations. CSMs are generally assigned more straightforward implementations and are in charge of expansion implementations. We can reach out to CS Ops for backup/implementation assistance. We are trying to move away from CSMs taking on implementation as we grow our implementation team.

Greg Maynes, Manager - Client Services IBISWorld

In my experience, clients in the mid to enterprise markets warrant onboarding by their client success representatives as it helps build rapport and ensure that clients see the value. In smaller markets, CS usually has less bandwidth for onboarding, as it dilutes service for legacy clients and clients in onboarding. 

When making a good impression, the earlier, the better! Make sure you equip your team with the right tools to give your customers a stellar onboarding experience. 

If you have any additional strategies you want to share, we’d love to have you join Preflight Community and share it with our members!

More resources

  1. Propel22 recordings
  2. Implementation Stories
  3. Preflight Conversations
  4. The Launch Station - a podcast for all things customer onboarding
  5. Customer onboarding resources from Rocketlane
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FAQs

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Myth

Enterprise implementations fail because customers don’t follow the process or provide clean data on time. Most delays are purely “customer-side” issues.

Fact

Implementations fail because complex environments need real-time technical problem-solving. FDEs unblock workflows, integrations, and unknown constraints that traditional onboarding teams can’t resolve on their own.

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A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) embeds in the customer environment to implement, customize, and operationalize complex products. They unblock integrations, fix data issues, adapt workflows, and bridge engineering gaps — accelerating onboarding, adoption, and customer value far beyond traditional post-sales roles

Did you Know?

Companies that embed engineers directly with customers see significantly higher enterprise retention compared to traditional post-sales models — because embedded engineers uncover “unknowns” that never surface in ticket queues.

Sebastian mathew

VP Sales, Intercom

A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) embeds in the customer environment to implement, customize, and operationalize complex products. They unblock integrations, fix data issues, adapt workflows, and bridge engineering gaps — accelerating onboarding, adoption, and customer value far beyond traditional post-sales roles.