Hello Gainsight Community!

In our recent Digital CS webinars, we’ve seen questions over and over again around how digital onboarding can help improve existing onboarding programs, and I wanted to start a conversation on a few ways that digital tactics can be leveraged if you are getting started setting up your own digital-led onboarding program!

Usually, ‘digital’ onboarding comes up when customer-facing teams realize they are facing delays in product activation and adoption (usually tied to a slow TTV). And often the delays here are associated with slow responses - customers who don’t schedule an onboarding call, or where it takes days (or weeks!) to even get in touch post-purchase. 

Where digital can help here is streamlining onboarding communications - and making it easier for customers to take needed actions quickly when they are in-product.

So, if you are considering ways to fast-track onboarding, here’s two tactics/capabilities you can leverage to get started:

 In-app communications and onboarding checklists.

One really easy way to push users to complete onboarding actions (without constantly nudging them manually) is to put what they need to do right in front of them in an easily accessible way - such as in-app guides and the in-app Knowledge Center Bot! Within the KC Bot (a screenshot of our Gainsight PX free trial bot is included below!) you can pinpoint what users should do by surfacing a few select in-app guides that help them complete needed actions, and even include resources to self-serve how-to content that they may need next on that same KC Bot. It also helps sometimes to see progress (“2/5 items completed!”) to help get all of your needed boxes checked.

One note, you don’t need everything you see here to get started - launching a KC Bot with just a few onboarding items and without a library of how-to videos is totally ok and a great way to field test how your users engage with this content quickly!

 Automated onboarding emails.

While the KC Bot is key to helping users through their onboarding checklist, users have to be in-product first. This is where emails can help! Having a cadence of emails that push users to complete the right order of actions helps them to get back in-app and re-engage with your product, without a CSM needing to manually review whats been done (or not) and create an individual email each time (I’ve included a screenshot of one of our free trial emails here as a reference!). This also frees CSMs to send more pointed emails - that align with the specific customers desired outcomes - instead of the basic checklist items of whats needed next.

One super important way to make these emails meaningful (and make sense to your customer) are to tie them to feature activation. If using Gainsight PX, you can set an email to only trigger if a user engages with X feature - so if the next email requires a specific action to be taken, you can instead automate sending a different email that indicates they still need to complete XYZ before moving forward. Again, to get started, you can set up a few emails that work for ALL customers - then get granular on what a specific user receives over time.

These are just TWO ways digital-led onboarding can be executed - curious what else has worked well for others, or what you are doing today beyond these tactics?  Let us know in the comments!