The Customer Success Pro Podcast
This is The Customer Success Pro Podcast, hosted by Anika Zubair. Customer Success is not a destination, but a a journey. Join me on this crazy CS journey as I chat to leaders, strategists and experts in customer success about their experiences and definitions of customer success and share with your their best practices on how to build and scale world class CS organization. Each interview will unlock tips, tricks and best practices to help scale your customer success career and company. I will dive into important and relevant topics to help spread knowledge about customer success in order to help companies put the customer at the center of their business. Because at the end of the day when customer are successful, so is the company.
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The Customer Success Pro Podcast
How to Build a Scalable Onboarding Program from Scratch with Cara Benecke
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In this episode of the Customer Success Pro Podcast, host Anika Zubair speaks with Cara Benecke, the Head of Customer Success and Support at Workflex. They discuss the critical importance of building a customer onboarding program from scratch, the challenges faced in establishing customer success as a revenue driver, and the significance of creating 'wow moments' during onboarding. Kara shares her insights on how to effectively engage customers, the necessity of understanding their needs, and the importance of feedback in refining onboarding processes. The conversation emphasizes the need for customer success teams to be proactive, data-driven, and customer-centric in their approach to onboarding and retention.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Customer Success and Onboarding
03:34 Building Customer Success from Scratch
11:39 Challenges in Building Customer Success
22:51 The Importance of Onboarding
35:36 Creating Wow Moments in Onboarding
55:22 Key Takeaways for Building Onboarding Programs
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Speaker 2 (00:00.354)
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Hello everyone, I'm your host Anika Zuber and welcome to the Customer Success Pro Podcast, your go-to space for real talk, expert advice and actual insights in the world of customer success. I'm a CS executive leader, award-winning strategist, CS coach and customer success fanatic. I help CSMs and CS leaders build the skills and the confidence to become revenue driving pros and scale world-class CS teams.
So whether you're brand new to CS or a seasoned leader, this podcast is here to support your growth. Because customer success isn't a destination, it's a journey. And I'm here to be your guide and navigate every step of your journey. So join me every Wednesday where you'll get fresh CS tips, tricks, and strategies you can actually use. Some weeks I'll share my own insights and best practices from working in CS over the last 13 years.
Speaker 2 (02:17.196)
And once a month, I'll bring on expert guests to dive into the most relevant and pressing topics in customer success today. So if you're ready to level up, hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in, and let's make your CS journey a little bit easier together.
Speaker 2 (02:41.154)
Welcome back. Today I'm talking about one of the most high impact yet often overlooked areas in customer success, which is building a customer onboarding program from scratch. Joining me is someone who knows this challenge inside and out. Kara Benike is the head of customer success and support at Workflex where she didn't just inherit a CS function, she built it from the ground up. With over a decade of experience spanning across customer success, account management, and sales,
Kara has earned her place as one of the top 100 customer success strategists. She has helped fast-growing companies design onboarding experiences that not only set customers up for success, but also drive measurable revenue and retention. And in true startup style, she has done it all while balancing speed, scalability, and an exceptional customer experience. In this episode, Kara is going to be sharing how to approach onboarding when you're starting with a blank slate.
from defining success metrics to defining onboarding and designing processes to avoiding common pitfalls that can derail even the best intended programs. Whether you're an early stage company or rethinking your existing onboarding process, this conversation will give you a blueprint to create an onboarding journey that works. So let's chat to Kara. Welcome Kara to the podcast. This has been so long overdue, so I am so
honored, excited, and ready to have this conversation with you today. But before we jump into a very hot and interesting topic for the customer success community, I'd love to get to know who you are and maybe share a little bit of your background for my listeners, how you got into customer success. I know you have a unique story, so tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Yeah, thanks Anika. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. It was so overdue, so I'm very, very happy that we're doing this today. Yeah, so who am I? So my name is Kara. I'm a German, but I've been living in Spain for over nine years now. And obviously I think as almost all people, my career didn't start in customer success. So I always wanted to be a brand manager and do a really cool advertising. Actually, when I used to watch TV, I always used...
Speaker 1 (04:57.422)
to watch advertising rather than actually television. So that was my dream, which also came true. So I was a brand manager for a really cool brand at a really multinational company. But then, my life sort of got into more into the Spanish kind of territory. And I started actually working in a key account manager at a manufacturer. And that's where I actually found my love for sales, actually. So that was very, very different. So I did that for
almost eight years and sold detergent to supermarkets. Sounds very sexy, but I really, really enjoyed it. And then more or less like three years ago, I got into the startup world, into the tech scene and actually also started within sales and partnership management. also very different. And then joined Workflex where I did kind of both sales and customer success, which is I would say sort of the role of a key account manager.
So, you know, as a kick-off manager, you do both, you hunt and you farm. And yeah, I got to a point where I was like, okay, I cannot do both. I cannot do sales and take care of a hundred clients. So I had to decide and then actually decided for customer success. And that's where I am now as a head of customer success and support at WorkFlix.
love that. Also, I do love that we have kind of similar backgrounds, but I didn't ever want to be an advertising nor work at a detergent company. But that's a really cool background. I love that CS, we're so unique. There's no similar background. I've talked to hundreds of people on this podcast and I'm just like, I love hearing how customer success has come up from so many different parts. And I totally agree, Karna. I love sales too. I was in account management, not key account, but account management.
moved into CS and I do, I love sales too. I know that this is to be controversial to say on a customer success podcast, but sales can be a lot of fun. Sales is all about creating value and customer success is about delivering that value essentially. And I love the cross of it all. And I think that's where a lot of your career has ended up taking you right now with Workflex and also how you kind of do a little bit of everything, which everyone does in a startup or scale up and you wear multiple hats, but you're now
Speaker 2 (07:15.406)
currently focused just on customer success and support like he said. So tell me a little bit more about what the Workflex CS and support team is doing. What do you guys held accountable to? What is the day to day look like of the business?
Yeah, so I think I had a very, very great situation of being able to build customer success from scratch in a startup, because you can build it so that the way you want it to be seen and you want it to be held accountable for, of course. And I think that's one main differentiator already within Workflux, a customer success is that
I always wanted it to be a revenue driver. I never wanted it to be the typical department where everybody's like, that's our department that just makes the customer happy. So that was sort of my first goal where I said, no, please no, because I also knew I wouldn't have a seat at the table if I wasn't making myself accountable to revenue and the big number. And I was also very lucky because since I did sales also within Workflex,
I knew what sales was like at Workflex. So the transition from sales to customer success and the transition for a customer, what it looks like for me was very smooth. And I was able to lay it out, you know, and not have any issues, for example, also with the handovers from sales into customer success, because I knew what it was like to sell it and I knew what it like to keep a customer. So, yeah, so we're very
revenue driven organization department. So things like NRA, GRI, know, those are North star metrics. that being said, it wasn't easy, right? So it sounds very easy now since you say you were used to doing everything. So also had to learn a couple of new things, especially because I came from key account management, from a very different kind of environment, from fast moving consumer goods, you know, where
Speaker 1 (09:22.25)
you were given discounts of maybe 0.2 % and you had to do like forecasts and if you were doing the forecasts and they weren't correct, then you would have actually products, goods in the production that were a loss of money and not just like with a software where you do a wrong forecast, well then nothing really happens. So that kind of tech part was actually very new to me.
But I think we're doing actually quite a good job. we've been growing. We've had very good numbers so far. Of course, we also had our challenges. I'm sure we'll talk about them. But I think that was actually the luck I had that I knew where the customer journey started within the sales process so I could make sure that transition was smooth and that it was also always a department that was very revenue driven from the start.
Yeah, I love that. I love that you just mentioned that the customer journey, where it started and where you impacted it and where your team came in really. Cause I think a lot of times we still break everything into silos. I don't think it's purposeful. I don't think we do it intentionally where we want to say this is sales' job, this is CS' job, this is product's job. But we try to kind of put things into boxes because it's naturally how our brain works. It's how most companies are built.
First you sell it, then you implement it, then you deliver value, then you renew, all these steps, right? But I think it's really unique that you got to see the sales lens because you got to embed the entire customer journey into as early as the sales function and what they're doing in sales and then continuing on into onboarding and continuing on to renewals, et cetera, which we will get into. And it's so lucky, like he said, that the company just got it where it's...
It makes sense. They know they want to have customers really achieve outcomes that drive revenue, like you said. But not always. It's not always the case where you get to build it from the ground up. Did you face any pushback or challenges while you got to build things from scratch? As cool as it is, like I think it's awesome. But I think sometimes we have rose tinted glasses and we tend to think, it was great. I got to build it from scratch. But
Speaker 2 (11:44.344)
Building from scratch can also be its own challenge. And I'm so curious, you were saying you got lucky and the stars aligned and maybe your leadership was in the right place, but I'm sure there was challenges, like as you were building from the ground up and even with your sales mindset, what was some of the challenges when you were looking at the full journey or onboarding or any part of the customer journey?
So along the customer journey, there were a lot of challenges, but I think the biggest challenge I had as somebody building it from scratch was actually getting the approval from the co-founders to hire more people and getting the approval from the co-founders to get tooling or to get some kind of investment.
jeez, so hard. It's such a-
It's hard. especially when you're a startup and a scale up, know, there's so much money that goes into sales. They hire BDRs, they hire AEs, they hire sales ops, especially like sales ops, because it's sales ops, it's not rev ops, you know, you never really see them as customer success leader. And, and then they just close, they close, they close. And you're just sort of running behind you like, my God, how am going to do this? Because the thing is also
and that's what we really struggled with is we were always one step behind, in compared to sales. So when they closed millions of euros in the quarter, and my team wasn't, you know, onboarded, I was always running behind. So we had a lot of issues and actually too little resources to capture all of the sales that were coming in every quarter because hiring a new CSM would mean, you know,
Speaker 1 (13:28.142)
It's not like a salesperson that can sell from maybe week two onwards, right? think sales, what I like about sales is a good salesperson can sell anything, right? Although they might not be an expert in the product. With customer success, it's a little bit different. You have to be an expert in the product and the onboarding needs a little bit more time also. So that was one of the biggest challenges actually until then I've sort of found
a rule and a way as to say, okay, this is sort of my ratio that I'm looking at revenue versus customer success managers. Also, obviously you don't want to always hire somebody when you make more revenue, right? You always want to become more efficient. So you need to look at your process. Where am I losing time? Where, you know, where can I automate things? Where can I maybe delegate things to other departments? Right? So.
That was a real challenge to find sort of the groove and the good ratio that we need. And then I'm currently in the process where I'm looking at tooling and seeing what I can use, et cetera. So that's also always, it's always a business case, right? In a general business space, asking for budgets.
It is. And I think that's something that's underrated. Like you just said, you're building all these beautiful processes, next steps, like this beautiful ideal customer journey, which we all idealize. It's like, oh, I made this amazing customer experience that any customer is going to love going through. But there's always these pains of budget. And I think that anyone listening, whether you're a startup convincing your co-founders or even large organizations that have super red tapes,
for bringing in any sort of tooling or even justification for a hire. It's so difficult. And in 2025, with AI, with all the things that are affecting how people work and how we look at operational efficiency, like you said, versus growth and scale, it really is this balancing act that as a leader, as a business leader, not just a CS leader, you have to figure out what makes sense right now with your team.
Speaker 2 (15:39.522)
with your company, with your NRR, like what is making sense? And sometimes we want it to be a plug and play, like you just said, more revenue, more CSNs, but we know how that failed. I've seen it fail firsthand at lots of startups and scale-ups when you just hire more people, like to fix a problem, but throwing more money at a problem in this day and age is probably not gonna solve it. But it is a business case, and I think a lot of leaders can...
better work on that skill. I think we work on a skill of showing our value maybe as a team, but sometimes that doesn't translate to value for budget, which is also tricky, which could be a totally different podcast. now that I think of...
Yeah, and I I had one of my, the best managers I had was a uni lever actually. And there's something that she said that really stuck with me. And I think it's so true, not only like for any kind of job that you do is knowing which 20 % can fall off your table. Like one thing is prioritizing. Yes, fine. And I think there's a lot of like tools, methods, how you can prioritize, but really knowing
the 20 % that can fall off your table and not have such high impact on your quality of work or your success. And I think that is, especially when you're building something where you have so many areas where you want to work on, really knowing like, and now we'll come probably to the one topic of this podcast, which is onboarding, really knowing, okay, which 20 % and I'm not going to concentrate on, and I'm going to take the risk.
off the app that something might happen. And actually for me, it was renewal. We didn't have a churn problem, but imagine you're responsible for a department for retention and you're not going to concentrate on renewals to start with. That was the risk that I took because I knew I had other more important things to concentrate on to really make the department successful. So I knew I had to park it for now.
Speaker 1 (17:50.114)
And that's probably also something that a lot of people struggle with, especially within customer success. have so many areas, you know, it's not like sales where they concentrate on outreach. I close my deals, you know, done. We have so many areas of onboarding, adoption, advocacy, renewal, et cetera, and so on and forth. And I think that is one thing that customer success managers really need to think about is like, okay.
which 20 % can fall off my table so I can really do a great job. And it's not easy.
Yeah, it's not easy, especially when we're always asked to do more. As you were just saying that, I'm like, what 20 % when every day you side on to Slack and there's something more for a customer success professional to do, which again, it's so hard, but it is finding the right balance. Like you said, you have to prioritize and that can be, again, another topic, but we'll talk about prioritization and onboarding in a second as you built it. But I'm curious, you mentioned...
that you're in Spain, but you're German. Also, you come from key accounts, but now you're in customer success. I always love getting to know my guests a little bit deeper because we're all so unique in the lives we choose to live, but also in our career ambition and how we've gotten to the points that we have gotten to. I'm so curious. You come full circle, really, of the go-to market teams. You've worked in non-tech and now tech roles. And again, you've lived abroad. All these amazing
milestones, but what's really next for your CS, either career, dream or ambition? What would you hope for yourself?
Speaker 1 (19:24.704)
Wow, that's a good question. So I would hope for myself that I find a place in the company and I hope it's going to be Workflex where they really put the customer first. So I don't know about you, but I don't see a lot of chief customer officers around there. And I would really wish.
to become a chief customer officer at one point, because I just think companies where they really put the customer first, companies that I really enjoy working for. It's not just, you know, it's just a title and the career kind of step. That's already nice. But it's also nice, obviously. But I just feel like where I most enjoy the work is really where the customers put first and also the entire C-suite sees it. Right? I think.
What is really frustrating when you work in customer success is when you have this constant internal discussion about your value that you're giving to the company. And I think it can really drain you like totally, because you do so much and, and, and in the end you're going to retain the entire money that the company has, but the ones that get celebrated on is always sales or always somebody else. Right. And I mean, I come from sales and I also.
like to celebrate my sales when I was working in sales. But I just feel like when you really work in an environment where they value the customer success role, I think that's where you get the most out of yourself and the most enjoyable work.
I agree. And I agree to everything you've said. As an American who's lived in Germany, but also the UK, so Europe for the last 14 years, it's rare, I would say, to see the Chief Customer Officer title. I do see it more and more now, which I absolutely love seeing more and more SaaS and non-SaaS companies embrace the title. But like you said, a lot of our career as customer success leaders is advocating for
Speaker 2 (21:32.802)
the customer internally, which can get extremely exhausting. And you want to do all the amazing things, like you just said, onboarding to advocacy to everything in between. But why should you have to justify it within your C-suite as well? And I've held VP of customers because titles, not chief customer officer, but it's been the most senior executive title in the business. And still I had to fight for the value of what we're doing internally. And I think.
There's a lot of psychology in this, but I do think it's from the sales being like that initial wing and it's like that initial dopamine rush that you get. It's like, ooh, exciting. And then you totally forget about all the work. And then the renewal almost becomes forgotten because there was so much work to get to that next dopamine hit that we only ever care about that first initial dopamine hit because we have such short attention spans these days anyways, but.
I appreciate a sales win, I really do, but I agree. I would love to see Chief Customer Officer become more normal. I'd love to see you in a Chief Customer Officer position sooner or later, whenever it comes. But I totally agree. I think there's so much room to grow there. And I think that we own so much about the customer journey, which is what one part we are going to talk about today, but it needs to be recognized. And I love that you have that ambition. But let's talk about onboarding.
That's why we're here to really chat is you built it from scratch and that's no easy job at any company, but you built it completely from scratch and you got to really design exactly what you want when it comes to onboarding your customers and what happens once the sale closes. So why did you decide to prioritize onboarding as one of the first kind of processes you built?
because coming from sales, thinking about renewals, like I'm just curious, what went through your brain about building onboarding first and what did you do first really?
Speaker 1 (23:32.494)
So the first thing I actually, so obviously when I started at Workflex, I was doing sales and customer success. was having like 70 sales deals and a hundred customers I need to take care of the business. So sometimes I don't understand how I did it. But the funny thing was while I was closing my deals, I was already half of sort of onboarding the clients because I knew what was going to be important for them to be successful.
And we straight away saw that a client that was onboarded in the best manner we could, right? There's also, don't believe in perfect onboarding. I think it's always a work in progress. They were the most successful. They were the ones that got the best adoption from the start. They were the ones that were the happiest. They're the ones that renewed. They were the ones that actually referred us to other potential clients. So.
And that was actually something that we saw fairly quickly. Also, and I just said it before and we didn't have any churn problems or anything like that. So we had a very happy customer base, a very strong retention rate. So that was actually something also probably, you know, that's why I didn't have to solve churn problems or something like that in the beginning, which was also, you know, lucky, right? So I could really see and analyze with data, obviously.
what's the first thing that actually makes my client successful? And obviously we also had a couple of other clients where the onboarding didn't go that well and we could straight away see, you know, the software wasn't communicated well internally because we use a software that is actually used by employees. So you have to make sure that the tool is communicated well enough internally within the client.
because it's also change management is something that they've never used and they actually now need to use it. So obviously if that is not communicated well enough within the client internally, then employees are not gonna use it, right? Because they're either not gonna be aware of it, they're not gonna see the advantage of using it. So we straight away saw when it wasn't communicated the right way, then also the customer wasn't successful and didn't see the value that we were actually going to bring or should bring.
Speaker 2 (25:55.788)
Yeah, I love that. But you were, you almost already knew the value piece, which helped onboard customers, I'm guessing quicker or faster or at least easier than customers that you didn't understand the value. But I know as speaking to lots of CS professionals that sometimes CSMs or even people building onboarding programs, they don't have the insight. You had the sales insight, which is awesome, but sometimes they just don't have the insights of why did this customer
you know, why did they buy? What was the outcome that they were looking for? And it's lost. And I think that sometimes because we work in the silos that we were talking about earlier, when a customer is handed from sales to customer success, it's lost what the customer values and what they care about. And then we just start onboarding from a product feature functionality. And I'm wondering if...
You know, as you were building, did you build based on value? Did you build based on features? How did you make sure that even for the customers who didn't maybe know the direct value, how did you start to flush that out to make sure outcomes and value was delivered first rather than features?
I worked straight away to deliver the first wow moment. I think when you, and it goes to all of us, right? When you buy a product with any kind of product, if you go to supermarket or, you know, if you buy something online on Amazon or whatever, you expect that when you receive a product to at least give you the first. Yeah. That's what I came up with.
the right thing.
Speaker 1 (27:37.856)
I bought the right thing, right? Or, this is nice. yeah, that's what I expected, right? So that first wow moment is super crucial also when you buy a software. And it's super crucial that it happens fast. So obviously what we did, we talked to customers, right? So we talked to customers that were onboarded a year ago and we asked them what they appreciate about the onboarding, what helped them.
what worked, what was missing. And we also had a lot of things missing, right? And then we sort of took, let's say three best practice clients. And obviously they also have to look at a bit at segmentation, right? It's not the same when you have a big enterprise client that maybe also has some integration, customizations, et cetera, then you have smaller clients. But then we sort of had like three best practices of what you need to be successful with Workflex.
and have a successful onboarding. And one thing that turned out that every customer liked was they signed the contract and within 24 hours, I think it was in the beginning even 12 hours, a little bit slower now since we're a little bit bigger, they got access to the software. So we're not like, we don't have premium in the beginning, right? So you really have to buy a WorkFlex to log in.
But they got access to a demo account and they could try themselves out and play around. And since the software is very self-explanatory, it already gave them this wow moment of saying, yes, this is what I needed. yes, this is what I wanted. So the product didn't need a lot of explanation itself, which was great obviously. And that's also good for us in that sense. But that wow moment was straight away something where we saw,
the client has this first push of, I signed the contract and not even, a day passes and I already have access and I can already start trying things out.
Speaker 2 (29:43.084)
Yeah, I love that. love that. think it's so important, the way, whether you have a freemium model or not, delivering wow as soon as possible. Like my previous company, we didn't have freemium, but we had a sandbox environment that you could just create like a dummy account and you could go and build against our APIs completely for free, whether you were, you didn't even need to have a sales demo call to even build to kind of see that wow moment. And I think a lot of onboarding starts as early as customer experience and design, which can be
a totally different experience. But like you said, you want to feel that, yes, I did the right thing, or I made sure that this is solving a real business problem. And then as a CSM, you come in and then show the value of that wow moment. You show the value of exactly what they've bought and how it's going to help them either grow revenue or become operationally efficient or whatever else, you know, your product and tool is promised to do, which is really, really critical, as you said, it's that early signal.
that shows that your onboarding process is on the right foot and that your customer feels like they're getting value from, like you said, sometimes it's even before they probably even had a kickoff call that they start to grab this and see value. But when did you start to really think, okay, our product is showing a wow moment almost before CSMs are really speaking to a customer, which is great, but how did you start to structure?
the onboarding process from a CSM perspective, like once your CSM started to get involved, what were the signals that you needed to start to build this structure around this process?
So mainly what I did is not see it from a customer success manager perspective, but see it from a client perspective. So I just put myself in their shoes thinking, okay, if I was to communicate this new tool and we're a compliance software, right? So it's a very boring topic and nobody wants to use tools. New tools are just annoying, right?
Speaker 1 (31:49.006)
especially when you're an employee and they ask you to use your tools. So what I did is I mainly saw it from a customer perspective. And in the beginning, all of our clients had kickoff calls, right? Today, it's totally different. Okay, today I cannot allow myself to do kickoff calls for all clients because I have different sizes of clients, kind of subscriptions, et cetera. But at the beginning, I wanted to make sure, okay, every client has a kickoff call.
So I get to know the client and I get to know what is important to them so I can actually map out the onboarding. So in the beginning, I didn't actually have an entire map where I was like, okay, yeah, so I need to do this, this, this, this, this, then I have a perfect on button. It was a lot like, okay, I have a kickoff of the client. Okay, this client needs this. Interesting. The other client needs this. Interesting. Right? And it was a work in progress and it was a work in progress probably for six months, right? Because
there were different use cases, then you could see, ah, okay, this is a bucket here of one client which likes to communicate the software this way. Oh, this is another bucket of clients where we need to take into account another point, right? So you could sort of see a different kind of buckets with different kinds of types of onboardings and cases. So I can actually map out the onboarding the right way. One thing though that was always important, and I think that's where you...
get to value again is just straight out ask the client, does success for you look like? Like what does, what does WorkFlex need to do and what needs to happen that you say after this onboarding, this was a successful onboarding. And not just saying, yeah, well, if everything runs smoothly, then we're happy. No, no, no, no, no, Which numbers need to move so you can say, Hey,
I'm satisfied with the on-bound and I'm satisfied with what WorkFlix is giving me. And I can see that I'm going to be successful with the tool. And that's sometimes for clients not easy. And especially we sell to HR managers and HR managers like to be, no, none of my clients listen to me now. But HR managers are not so KPI driven maybe as CFOs, right? If you sell to CFOs, they're very like, yeah, I want to see this, this, this, this, this, this number needs to move. But if you have clients that are not really
Speaker 1 (34:13.207)
that are also maybe not used to buying software. Yeah. They really struggle. So you really have to take their hand and say, okay, well, let's imagine. So you bought a software to save time. How much time do you want to save? And then obviously it's very important that you also give best practices and you can maybe say, hey, I have clients that usually save half an hour per request that you put into Workflex.
Is that something that you think would be possible? Is that something that we should put as a KPI? Right? So you really have to also show them what kind of value the product gives them because sometimes for them it's hard to put it into number. And that's actually very salesy.
Speaker 1 (35:00.846)
So really picking those KPIs that maybe also your sales colleague said that is important for the clients, picking them up, especially also in your onboarding and make them really tangible and really showing the client, hey, this is now what you've saved. Right? And I think that's sometimes something we forget during the onboarding because we sometimes just think, I just want to get them live as soon as possible and as quick as possible.
a low time to value, right? And then they're live and then I have them live and now they can use the product. And then I see what kind of adoption I have and then I'll reach out in case the adoption is not good enough and then I'll take care of that. But really showing them straight away, hey, this is now what you've achieved already during the onboarding. This is your second wow moment, right? After the first login. I think that's really key.
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Speaker 2 (37:19.704)
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I love that. I love those two things that you said that really just made my heart so happy. One is that you really asked a measurable outcome. I think sometimes, like you said, and I think this comes from CS being more of a support driven function rather than a salesy or revenue driven function, which is we tend to take the first answer our customers give us like, I want to see more logins, for example. And like, but what is more? Like 10 more?
50 % more, like what is the metric that's gonna make you say, yes, this onboarding was worth it, like you just said. Cause sometimes we don't wanna come off too pushy or too salesy or whatever stereotype we have in our head and we just wanna please the customer and we just want the customer to be like, Kara is such a great CSM at WorkFlex and I had such a great happy experience. But as we all know, happy experiences don't necessarily renew. When you have
outcomes that deliver value or a strong KPI that's tied to usage and metrics, that's when a customer is like, yeah, duh, we're going to renew because it's a no-brainer now that WorkFlex is showing all this value to us, which again, harder for some of our CSMs to do because it is doing a level of discovery that we're not necessarily trained on. But for those listening, don't just take your first customer's answer. Dig a little bit deeper. I always say,
You have to ask three follow-up questions to get to the true reason why someone is saying something. Because whether you work with HR customers or CFOs, they might just give you a surface level answer, which is fine. But you know, and I know, that that's not going to actually result in good KPIs or ROIs or value, et cetera. But it's so important to ask those deeper questions. So I love, love, love that you said that. The other thing that you said that I loved, which is like you did kickoff calls with
Speaker 2 (39:38.324)
all your customers, which is so, so important and probably gave you a lot of that data that you analyzed and decided, okay, now we're going to take it this way, or we're not going to say this with this type of customer or this segment of customers only going to get digital kickoff calls or whatever it is you analyze, which is a tough job to do because sometimes when you're building onboarding, a lot of people don't know where to segment or they don't decide what
requires human touch, like every customer getting a kickoff, or which one requires automation. It's really, really tough when you're building out a process. So when you started designing that whole onboarding journey, what moment for you made you realize, okay, we need to segment differently and we need to now onboard differently? What process did lead to that for you?
Yeah, that's a very good question. And actually that's something that I'm currently in, right? So we're more and going into the enterprise segment at Workflex and enterprise obviously is totally different onboarding than to the customer base that we had before. It takes longer, is more complex, needs much more human touch, maybe even face-to-face visits, et cetera. Where did I see
that I needed to maybe segment into different kind of onboardings was when I had actually an internal need to automize more. So I had maybe 6K ARR clients receiving the same onboarding as 40K ARR clients. And that's not efficient.
So the customer success manager was spending a lot of time and almost the same time on a 40K ARR client, then on a 6K ARR client. And that's where we sort of started with, like we have OKRs, obviously a work flex, like all the startups, where we said, okay, maybe we should try out some kind of.
Speaker 1 (41:48.012)
sort of self-on-bring for smaller clients, right? And that wasn't actually an easy call and I didn't like it, right? Because I like to have the customer success percentage, that dedicated customer success for each client because I know how successful the clients then are when they have this human touch, but you cannot do human touch for all clients. You cannot. And the time that they were spending on a 6K client was time that they were losing on a 40K client to push upsell, cross-sell, expansion, et cetera. So.
What we did is, and that was also a process and it's still the process. We drafted a self-on-building and tried it out for the first five clients, right? Got received again, lot of feedback and it wasn't perfect in the beginning. It's still not perfect and we still need to improve it. But that's sort of what led me into segmentation and segmenting the customers. Because in the end, as, that goes a little bit back to,
I cannot hire always more CSMs when I close more clients. It's just not possible. It's not efficient and it's the economics. You know, I cannot sell that business case. So, and I think that's where you also probably, it goes back to the 20 % again. Well, maybe that self-onboarding. I hope it's good. We've had some good experiences. Some clients got it straight away and loved it. Some clients hated it and gave us feedback and said,
I sign, I'm paying 6k and you guys don't even have time to sit down with me 30 minutes and explain the software to me. then you're, God, that's probably.
I pay you whether I pay you hundreds of thousands a year or one dollar a year. it's super fair. I paid you so I need the service that I pay for.
Speaker 1 (43:36.046)
Exactly. it's super fair. And in the end, gosh, yes, you're right. Probably we should have time for you. But maybe also probably I have a gap in my self-onboarding, is, so in the self-onboarding they can book sort of like office hours with the CSM team. Well, maybe I wasn't clear enough. You can book a meeting with us in a self-onboarding, but maybe it wasn't clear enough. So I think it's trying yourself out.
And also bad feedback that you get is good for you, right? Any bad feedback that we get on our onboarding, I'm totally appreciated. And sometimes it's always, or sometimes it's even me calling that client and asking especially, okay, what went wrong? What could we have done better? Because in the end, it's only going to make your onboarding better, right? If everything's fine and everybody's just like, yeah, it was a ride and yeah, fine, move on, then.
You know, you're probably missing out on something or somebody's being too quiet and not honest enough.
The feedback. Feedback can be super powerful, like you said. And you mentioned feedback multiple times while building out an onboarding process. And I'm sure it's helped you really shape your entire onboarding program today is all the feedback, like you said, from those 6K clients that really felt like they didn't get enough attention. So I'm sure even some clients were like, we get it. Leave us alone. Like, it's great. Like, I'm sure you've got the full scale of feedback.
And sometimes as customer success professionals, we get a lot of feedback and it's a lot to digest and it's a lot to decide what's important to improve. you can, like you said, you can mobile improve your digital onboarding program, or maybe it's for enterprise because that's the new market you're going into. So when you were getting all of this feedback, how did you gather it? And then how did you know what to go and improve first?
Speaker 2 (45:34.402)
Because as you're building from scratch, everything is important, right? So how did you take the feedback and prioritize really?
I linked it to ARR. So I was really looking at, and that's where the revenue driven kind of approach comes back, right? So probably I gave priorities to enterprise onboardings over the last couple of months because I knew, you know, a hundred K account or 250 K account is going to harm more my...
AOR, then maybe a 6K account that I might lose because they haven't received the perfect onboarding. And that's a tough decision to make.
It is not easy. Sometimes even the higher ARR might necessarily not be the right focus because maybe you have 100 more of 10k and they're going to expand to 100k, but you just didn't put time into those 10k accounts.
Totally, and totally green. it probably be, probably also going to be in a point where you probably didn't do or make the right decision. Right? I think there it's it's just a, yeah. And, and, and, and then it's just, well, take the learning and next time you, you probably make the, make the decision on a different basis or do another analysis, et cetera. So, but I try to always link it to the big number, right?
Speaker 1 (47:01.526)
So, and that's where you have to see, okay, you know, I don't have time for everything. So I'm just going to take the risk and choose and see what happens.
Yeah, exactly. And I think that sometimes you do have to weigh out the risks and the benefits and what makes sense for your company at the exact moment you're deciding to build a process. when onboarding, much like any other part of customer success, is something that I consider is a journey and it's something that's going to keep going around and around depending on the maturity of your customer base, the maturity of your company.
how much your product costs versus what market you're entering. All of this affects your customer journey and it definitely affects how you decide to prioritize onboarding and how you're building it. yeah, I agree. And mistakes are normal. I think anyone listening, like when you're building anything from scratch, I'm pretty sure I counted more mistakes that I experienced than probably wins. I will remember the wins, but there was tons of mistakes when I built onboarding from scratch. And Cara, you mentioned you
totally.
Speaker 2 (48:03.934)
are looking at tooling right now, or do you actually use separate tools, templates, or workflows for specifically just onboarding? Because there's tons of tools out there, especially with AI now. There's every type of tool under the book. But do you guys use specific tools, templates, workflows for onboarding only? And what are they, if you are using any of them?
Yeah, very nice question. we actually used a tool which is called, you know, just name out the tool. It's called Value Case. And they started with deal rooms for sales, like a website. Early in the sales. Yeah, exactly. it looks like a website just for the customer with their logo and different kinds of tabs and information, et cetera. So we use that in sales already.
So it's
Speaker 1 (48:54.822)
And funnily enough, that startup actually then also realized, hey, clients are also starting to use us post sales. So maybe we should also go into the kind of more onboarding customer success area. And that's actually something that I used straight from the start. So I really enjoyed having, and I also could see really the value for the customer of having.
one place to go where they could find everything for onboarding. And I wasn't like emailed in every, you know, every week or, or things like that. So was one website for them. had all information, they had videos, had click guides, had materials, et cetera. And that's something that probably has contributed a lot to our onboarding process and the success of our onboardings.
because it was just a very nice experience for the client, right? And they didn't get I love that. And you can actually even see what they clicked. You can give them tasks. So they also have sort of like a task and then they click and they have the tasks done, which is also nice, right? For all the ones that like to click tasks and they have their to-do list done. And that's something that we still use at the moment. all segments, actually. So we use it for cell phone, but also for enterprise.
Okay. And it's sort of our place to go with our customer. And we're also now thinking of maybe even using this further, like after onboarding, now it sort of cuts it onboarding because then we like our customers to be more on the platform. But still, I think that was definitely a tool that has helped us a lot during our, or planning our onboarding process.
Yeah, I love that. I love that basically your onboarding slash customer success plan is built in the sales cycle, which is so important, by the way. Customer outcomes or even goals or milestones don't happen once a customer actually signs a sales contract. It happens from the second they hit your website and a marketing person qualifies this as an ICP client. That is when your customer is already thinking about
Speaker 2 (51:05.87)
their goals, what they're hoping to get and achieve with your product. And if you're a salesperson and capturing it, A, that's awesome because most people complain salespeople don't capture anything. But B, it just makes that whole journey easier for all teams to really understand and see, hey, a customer was saying this in the sales cycle. Now during implementation, we're going to actually check things off that list of what they want to do and see. But I think that's awesome that you guys kind of work cross-functionally in that way.
It made me think actually, how do you make onboarding less repetitive? Because I think sometimes for your team, especially when onboarding is a quote unquote checklist, you create the same website. Like you said, you're trying to get them up and running as quickly as possible. But for a team, that could be a little bit, I don't want to say boring, but a little bit boring and a little less strategic because onboarding can feel very...
repetitive. So how do you kind of keep your team motivated slash interested in onboarding different customers?
Such a good question, And it's a difficult one to answer because I don't know when you worked in sales, but when I worked in sales, I also got bored about demoing every day the same thing. And I always said the same sentences and I couldn't hear myself anymore and it was horrible. I like to give CSM sometimes a little bit of an onboarding free time.
Yeah. Where they have maybe like a month or two, but I don't onboard any client and they can fully concentrate on, you know, being more strategic and, and, you know, working more on upsells and cross-sells. I even had CSM reach out to me. I'd like to onboard a new client again. Can I have the next client? And, I think that was, yeah, quite, quite a good approach because,
Speaker 2 (52:51.902)
your reach
Speaker 1 (53:05.856)
In the end, I always try to have my team not to full capacity, but I always have a little bit of capacity. just in case also because we know, know, sales forecasts are not always a hundred percent, then at end and quarter, just comes in a big time. Actually, first of all, to give them the time to be strategic, but also to give them the time to miss things. And then what I've also done is I've given them onboarding problems.
so they can actually work on processes for the onboarding themselves. Of course, in the beginning it was me, you know, doing the entire process, setting up from scratch, blah, blah, blah. But now it's the CSMs that are actually improving the onboarding. It's the CSMs that see gaps. It's the CSM that see processes that are not quite straight. It's the CSMs that see things that work and they show it with the others, they share it with the other CSMs. It's not me, yeah, because I'm not onboarding anymore.
Fun fact, I just onboarded now to clients two months ago because I said, hey, I just want to see what it's like. So, and then I also see things, right? And then I work on them and improve the process. So I always like to challenge them also to have a look at, is it working? What would you do differently? Et cetera. And so of course they are always repetitive tasks and you cannot change them. Right. But at least you can try to put in, put in new kind of exciting stuff.
work on new kind of initiatives, et cetera, so that it gets a little bit more exciting, so to say. But I guess also some repetitive work needs to be done sometimes.
No tough year CSMs with the actual onboarding process built because that's great. Because I think anyways, as a leader, you always want to delegate and you want to give more opportunities to your team, but it keeps them motivated and keeps them using their strategic path of like, how can I improve this? Where does the process have gaps? What can we make better? And like you said, they're in it, they're in the trenches and it gives them the opportunity to lead from that position, whether they have a leader title or not.
Speaker 2 (55:14.038)
And it makes them feel like they truly own the process, which can make the entire process just that much more enjoyable for the team in general. I love that you do that. That's amazing. Listen, Cara, we can talk for ages. Probably we can record like four more podcasts after this. But I have one more question, which is, if someone is listening to this podcast today and they were building onboarding from scratch, what would be your like non-negotiable tip?
that they should focus on when they're building from scratch based on all your experience that you shared with us.
think I would say two things. Really put yourself in the shoes of the customer and talk to the customers. Spend that time. It's really worthwhile. I it's exhausting and it takes time, but talk to the customers and really get the insights and the data because otherwise you're going to build a process made out of assumptions and that's not going to be successful. And then second for me, will be the wow moment. Really think what's the first wow moment for the client that you want to deliver.
and make sure it already starts on the right foot, so to say.
Yeah, I love that. And wow moments, we should be doing it all along. But yes, the first wow moment really does impact onboarding. I love that. Okay, Kara, we're going to go into the quick fire questions round where I love to challenge every single one of my guests to answer the next few questions in one sentence or less. Are you ready? God.
Speaker 1 (56:42.734)
I didn't know it was going to be difficult.
Yes, this is a challenge. Don't worry though, everyone usually has a really hard time. So this is your first question, one sentence or less. If you could predict the future of customer success, what do you think customer success will focus on next year?
I think customer success will be even more sales and expansion driven with the and automated, but still with human touch. think this human touch is never going to die.
Yeah, I love that. Also, I love the struggle of your brain working really hard to make it one sentence. Great start, bro. Okay, next question is which app or software do you use every day or every week on your phone or your laptop? It can be CS or not, but what's your favorite app that you use?
WhatsApp. WhatsApp also is on fire.
Speaker 2 (57:47.874)
Yeah, awesome. Cool. Next question is if you could change one thing about CS, what would that be?
that we know better how to celebrate our wins.
and that we're recognized for those wins once we celebrate them.
might edit it. Yeah, there would have been two sentences, so stop.
I know, but I can add more. Okay, final question, Kara, is who should be my next podcast guest?
Speaker 1 (58:16.494)
my God, you've had too many already. I would love you to have a co-founder who really lives customer success as well. I need to find someone for you. I'll ping you.
You can message me some like... Awesome, amazing. Well, Cara, thank you so much for sharing your passion, your insights, your amazing knowledge on everything onboarding in Customer Success. If my listeners want to reach out to you or maybe have a follow-up question or want to continue the discussion, what's the best way to get a hold of you?
Yes, I'm very active also on LinkedIn, so I share some things about customer success. I sometimes also try to be funny and share my life in Spain as a working mom. So you can definitely have a look on LinkedIn. Also feel free to reach out over there. That's probably the way forward.
Amazing. I'll make sure to link Kara's LinkedIn down below. Thank you again, Kara, for this absolutely amazing conversation. yeah, I will catch you soon.
Thank you, Annika. I a great time.
Speaker 2 (59:20.066)
Thanks for tuning in to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I hope you picked up something valuable to take back to your team. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you took just 10 seconds to leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more CS pros like yourself discover the show. And creating new episodes takes a lot of work, so leaving a nice review keeps me motivated to keep creating. And don't forget to hit subscribe on Apple, Spotify,
YouTube or wherever you listen to podcast episodes. I drop a new episode every Wednesday packed with practical tips. And if you've got a topic you'd love for me to cover or want to be a guest on my show, send me a message. All the details are in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. And hey, if this episode helped you share it with a fellow CSM or CS leader. Remember sharing is caring. Cheers to your CS journey and I'll catch you next week for our next episode.
