Onboarding at Scale: How to Do it and Why You Need It

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) have long been critical in helping companies build and grow customer relationships. A good CSM not only forms a strong bond with customers but also finds ways to improve their lives — and generate additional revenue for the company.

But there are plenty of challenges in the average CSM’s day. Chief among them is the downright arduous process of onboarding customers.

This Article is About Onboarding at Scale — I am CEO of AirDeck, so I’ll Mention Some of its Benefits

The onboarding process is all too familiar (and challenging) for the average CSM. It’s a steady stream of presentations, education, and, unfortunately, saying many of the same things over and over again to each new customer. It’s not the customer’s fault, but it’s the nature of onboarding.

Still, the best CSMs find ways to personalize that onboarding process. Sure, all companies may say the same things repeatedly, and they tailor that pitch to their customers. But, along the way, they start to form that critical bond that ensures success.

Customers may also grow weary of the onboarding process.

Customers often sit through protracted presentations and get all kinds of information thrown at them. Along the way, they fail to fully comprehend everything they could (and should) know about the product and may find their utilization drop simply because they don’t know how to use it in any measurable way.

It’s helpful to understand how vital CSMs are to a company’s success and to find the must-have solution. Better solutions will allow a company to do everything they need to succeed while saving valuable time onboarding customers at scale.

A company must, with the flexibility — onboard at scale.

The onboarding must be accomplished without losing the personalization that is so important in onboarding customers. Meanwhile, customers can benefit from the onboarding message on their own schedule and in their own way. The result? A more effective onboarding experience for everyone involved.

What is ‘Onboarding at Scale’?

One of the biggest challenges CSMs face is not creating a personalized onboarding experience but, instead, saving time. With all the time it takes to create an onboarding presentation and then actually hold that presentation, precious little time is left for other critical activities CSMs engage in.

For years, CSMs have been seeking a way to actually onboard their cohort of customers at scale. Educating customers at a time is a resource- and time-intensive effort lacking value. It causes onboarding teams to fall short of expectations and customers to lose time and effort trying to learn a product.

Flipping the Script on Onboarding

Onboarding at scale flips the script. It allows customer success managers to create presentations for their entire cohort of customers and then tailor a slide or two to the individual customer. The process provides customer success managers to onboard customers in bulk and effectively get them up to speed on their timetable.

AirDeck has become a valuable tool in helping customer success managers onboard at scale while maintaining the personalization CSMs desire.

With AirDeck, CSMs are uploading presentations and crafting video and audio narration for each individual slide. Once complete, they send the document to their customers, allowing them to watch the presentation when they see fit.

Most importantly, through my company, AirDeck, CSMs can easily personalize each presentation and keep the standard content in place with a slide-by-slide editing option. So, CSMs who may have the same classic presentation for most of their slides can keep those and their associated narration in place.

But each company can also swap out the few slides specific to the customer, record a new voiceover, and deliver a genuinely bespoke presentation to the customer. So please do not mistake that customers can discriminate between a standard template and something you have made especially for them.

A Game-Changer for Doing Business

CSMs must quickly communicate with scores of customers and spend far less time onboarding those customers. The result? A CSM who has more time to do all of the critical tasks CSMs engage in throughout the day. For their companies, it also translates to more revenue and improved relationships with existing customers.

Onboarding is a necessary but time-intensive exercise for CSMs. Therefore, creating new opportunities to save time is a must and is genuinely appreciated by your customer.

CSMs must save time by allowing each company to personalize their onboarding at scale. It’s a game-changer. And it’s one that CSMs should consider.

Check out all demos to choose the best CSM for your company.

Ready to learn more? Most solutions for CSM will show you a demo, and AirDeck has an excellent demo for you so you can see the difference.

How to Onboard at Scale

The foundation of onboarding at scale is creating a clear, highly-compelling presentation. It may seem overly simple, but this is key for shepherding new customers through your onboarding process. It gives the customer a clear understanding of the value of your product and services and sets the stage for an enduring customer and company relationship.

Curate Compelling Content

To curate highly-compelling presentations that enable you to onboard at scale without sacrificing personalization, CSMs are seeking platforms that deliver sophisticated audio and video narration capabilities.

CSMs need to personalize content with the power of their voice. This empowers CSMs to add new levels of clarity to their content and establish an instant connection with their customers.

Does Your Customer Zone-Out During Your Presentation or Wordlessly Click Through Slides?

Unlike silent, static PowerPoint decks or Keynote presentations, you want to create dynamic content that captivates the viewer from the first contact with your company. 

For example, you can overlay documents and slide decks with audio and video narration. In addition, CSMs can create content that feels hyper-individualized. This adds an extra personal touch to the content and helps encourage the audience to engage and interact with your content.

And with the right tools, building these presentations with curated audio or video narration is seamless — even when onboarding at scale.

Your onboarding starts with building a single, high-quality presentation.

In onboarding, there is typically standard information you need to deliver to every incoming customer, no matter who they are.

To effortlessly onboard at scale — you will be guided to make a compelling, easy-to-navigate template. Then, you can build the evergreen slides that clearly articulate your products and services, then record your audio narration. Straightforward and easy-peasy. 

With our process, you’ll duplicate your standard presentation and do our simple slide-by-slide editing option.

You’ll be able to make precise, calculated edits to create new versions that are custom fit for each customer. Your team will rearrange specific slides, delete some, and add others. With ease, you’ll record new audio clips where needed, such as the introduction and conclusion, for sincere personalization.

Use the Template — but Leverage Unique Abilities for Your Unique Customer

By working with a template and leveraging unique audio and video narration features, you can effortlessly create content to onboard at scale without compromising on the personal customization you know your customers crave.

Deliver Custom Content Far and Wide

After creating cont curated for each of your incoming customers, preparing to share these presentations can be daunting. After all, there are only so many hours in the day to schedule and host Zoom meetings, which can seriously inhibit your ability to onboard large swaths of customers at once.

A New Way to Share Content

Truly onboarding at scale means ditching repetitive meetings. Instead, CSMs need new ways to share their content with as many new customers as possible as quickly as possible.

Cut Down Time Invested

With one-click, on-demand access, you can deliver dozens of presentations a day without ever having to be on a call (and without having clunky email attachments, too. Instead, because you can share your curated, customized presentation with a simple link, you’re empowered to cut down the time to delivery and effortlessly reach scores of customers in a single day.

Track and Analyze Viewer Activity

After delivering your presentations to customers, you can further use CSMs to take onboarding at scale to the next level by leveraging tracking and data analytics that give you an inside look at viewer activity. You’ll want to gain a deeper understanding of how your customers are progressing through the onboarding process.

Create powerful presentations and reach dozens of customers in a single click but then analyze your presentations to measure their specific impact.

Track and Analyze in Real-Time

For example, after you send your presentation to new customers, you can track how they’re engaging with your content in real-time so you can see:

• when they opened the presentation
• how many times have they viewed it
• which slides they considered the most, etc.

With these powerful insights, you can make informed decisions to tweak and sculpt your presentation. You’ll easily edit layouts of different slides and adjust the content where needed. You’ll now be able to create the best-performing presentation for your customer onboarding process.

Why Onboarding at Scale is Important

To successfully onboard new customers, you need carefully curated presentations that help you form tight bonds with incoming customers and put you on the right track for enduring professional relationships.

Not only are CSMs tasked with developing and strengthening these bonds with new and existing customers, but they’re also pressed to do so while still economizing time and money. As a result, each new process generates revenue for the company quickly.

Onboarding Customers Under Time and Budget Constraints

Successfully onboarding a handful of customers under time and budget constraints is a challenge (even for seasoned CSM pros).

Onboarding dozens of new customers only further complicates the process. So for CSMs who have to create, share, and manage a steady stream of presentations to an increasing roster of customers, the ongoing quest is how to find new ways to reach their goals more quickly.

You want to deliver better results fast than ever before — all without going over budget.

Mastering onboarding at scale is a top-tier priority for CSM teams.

Do More in Less Time with Fewer Resources

Successful onboarding at scale means you can maintain touchpoints with a growing number of customers while still upholding your high standards for personalization and attentiveness. If done correctly, you can get onboard many customers at once while still ensuring that each customer feels like you’re giving them your unique attention.

It all comes back to content creation.

It’s a no-brainer that creating more engaging content is vital in helping you onboard new customers more effectively. Onboarding is a critical phase of the customer journey and can often make or break your relationship with new customers.

And don’t forget: Your target audience is likely already up to their ears in PowerPoint decks, Keynote slides, and presentations. As a result, they may tune out your message, despite your team’s best efforts.

Grab the Attention of the Crowd in a Different Way

Moreover, with so many voices in the crowd, grabbing customers’ attention (and holding onto it) takes enticing, informative information.

You already know that creating custom content is at the core of leading a successful onboarding process. But unfortunately, creating customized presentations for each and every customer is overwhelming — not to mention financially and timely infeasible.

Clunky Delivery Challenges

Even if you can put together presentations quickly — you may still be left with delivery challenges. Spending hours scheduling Zoom meetings with each of your customers and then delivering variations of the same presentation ad nauseam throughout the day is not the answer.

When it comes down to it, there are only so many hours in the workday — and yours will soon be clogged up with back-to-back meetings for presentations.

You must stay true to your valuable onboarding and revenue-generating tasks.

Onboarding at scale is paramount to reducing waste and saving money for your company.

CSMs need to shift their focus to new tools and strategies that enable them to efficiently onboard at scale.

When you have new tools and strategies to onboard efficiently at scale, you avoid wasting time laboriously building PowerPoint decks and painstakingly creating and sending calendar invitations for meetings and Zoom meetings.

There is no need to tire yourself out with a marathon of presentations

Achieving a seamless customer onboarding process is a dance, where CSMs are challenged to efficiently balance both time and resources without compromising the quality of personalized content that’s the foundation of good customer and company relationships.

Benefits of Onboarding at Scale

Leveraging the right tools to onboard at scale is the only way to overcome these obstacles and improve your onboarding process.

One of the most significant benefits of onboarding at scale is how much time it saves you and your team.

With few to no meetings to schedule or attend, an onboarding strategy founded on a document-narration platform like AirDeck empowers you to add valuable hours back in your day while retaining the confidence that each of your customers will still feel carefully attended to and valued.

But time-saving gains aren’t just felt by your team; they’re judged by your customers, too.

Win Back Time for Everyone

Allowing you to shift your focus from back-to-back Zoom meetings to narrated presentations that are sophisticated enough to speak for themselves brings a new level of ease to the onboarding process for everyone involved.

After you create your presentation and easily share on-demand access to all relevant customers without ever having to send an email attachment.

Instead, with just one click, you can give your customers the power to view your presentation on their timetable — and as many times as they want — whenever and wherever they may be.

Fewer meetings, more results—it’s the dream.

You can realize new levels of efficiency to cut down on the inessential meetings and enable you and your customers to reach new heights.

By delivering your knock-out presentations without being on a call with a customer, you can truly feel the benefits of onboarding at scale: reaching more customers in less time.

Improve Faster with More Feedback

Onboarding at scale does more than boost efficiency and provide new time-saving gains to you and your customers — it also opens up the door for you to get feedback on a larger scale.

Feedback is a critical component in finding success in onboarding.

Only with regular feedback from your audience can you truly identify the high and low points of your presentations so you can pivot as needed to keep producing better content that yields introductory PowerPoint presentations  — Where’s the feedback?

Sure, you can place your bets and wait to hear your customers’ written or verbal feedback, but even their notes will only tell you half the story.

Actions speak louder than words, so teams who wish to successfully onboard at scale need tools to tap into unique tracking and data analytics insights.

As a fully-trackable solution, AirDeck makes it possible to glean and take advantage of these insights, whether you’re onboarding 30 new customers or 300.

Onboarding your brand-new customer in the past

You carefully build a slide duned to their niche and specific preferences and email it.

Questions

A few days go by. Did they open it? When? Did they view the entire presentation or just a few slides? Which links did they click on? Which slides did they skip? To investigate, you reach out via email or phone to ask your customer-pointed questions and glean as much helpful information as possible.

Now imagine doing this dozen of times more for every customer you’re onboarding.

Without tracking and analytics tools, your questions about viewer engagement and activity are left unanswered—or you’re forced to spend excessive time tracking down whatever information you can.

By onboarding at scale with a platform that’s ripe with tracking and analytic functionalities, you’re no longer left playing guessing games.

Instead, you can see how your customer engages with your content — and this is true for every customer, no matter how many you’re onboarding at once.

With mass amounts of precise customer feedback, you can improve your onboarding process in a way that’s impossible with basic PowerPoint decks or Keynote presentations.

Ultimately, this feedback improves your long-term game, giving you the insights to create content in the future that’s clearer, more concise, and more compelling, soothing pain points in onboarding for better results for both you and your customers.

How AirDeck Can Help You Onboard at Scale

A powerful all-in-one solution for document narration is the saving grace for teams ready to onboard at scale.

With the ability to personalize any document or presentation with simple audio and video narration, CSMs seamlessly onboard more customers for better results.

AirDeck can help you from start to finish.

You’ll have your customer onboarding process that is more effective and efficient. In addition, you’ll want multi-functionality solutions your teams can leverage.

As a company, your team will go from content creation to delivery. You’ll have analysis and a one-stop shop for creating and sharing presentations in one system.

Unique Audio/Video Narration

With content creation, you can be confident that your narrated decks will stand out from the pack. Hooking your audience and making them attentive and energized from the beginning of the onboarding process is significant and essential in your approach.

Engaging Presentations

The Goal: Using unique audio and video narration capabilities that enable you to effortlessly elevate staid documents and PowerPoint slides to sophisticated, engaging presentations that delight customers with personalized narrations. This process can happen with the AirDeck platform. 

Your content creation will be, at once, sophisticated and simple.

Even as you scale your onboarding processes to take on scores of new customers, you can have confidence that will empower you to level up the quality and quantity of your presentations — without substantial time losses.

With this process, you’ll have duplication and intuitive slide-by-slide editing capabilities. You can smartly rinse and repeat your content to continue catering to an increase in customers without taking shortcuts on customization or quality.

One-Click, On-Demand Access

Beyond giving you the tools to produce large swaths of content, you can carry your team through delivery.

You’ll trade clunky email attachments and monotonous Zoom meetings for simple links that deliver on-demand access.

Your team can efficiently guide customers through your onboarding process without slowing down to hold their hands in redundant meetings.

Effortlessly Connect With a Single Click

Rather than spending your time and resources to individually schedule Zoom meetings (or travel to meet in person) and present to every new customer one on one, you’ll effortlessly connect with them in just a single click.

For CSM teams looking for new strategies to help them onboard at scale, think new thoughts, new tools, and a new platform that can enable new efficiencies throughout the onboarding process.

Tracking and Data Analytics

Even after content creation and presentation delivery, your new platform plays a vital role in helping CSMs dive more profound for a more comprehensive understanding of their customers’ activity.

With robust tracking and data analytic capabilities, you’ll have the insights to build presentations that don’t just serve you today but help you continue to grow tomorrow and onwards.

It starts with AirDeck’s slide-by-slide analytics

For example, after you send your presentation to your customers, you can track their activity and engagement in real-time to see how they respond to your content.

For example, you’ll be able to measure when the customer opens your presentation, how many times they viewed it, which slides they viewed the most, which slides they skipped, and which links they clicked on.

Better, more complete information equals a faster, smoother process

This information makes the difference because you’re not just getting it from one customer but from every customer you’re onboarding. Additional feedback means a better understanding of your customers, how they think, and how you can best guide them through your team’s onboarding process.

Change the process only after direct customer feedback

With on-demand access to powerful insights on viewer activity and engagement, you can tweak and massage your onboarding materials based on immediate customer feedback. Now you can strengthen your content and improve your onboarding process over time.

Onboarding customers is no easy task

It takes a dedicated team with the right skills and insights to welcome new customers and educate them on your products and services.

Use the ability to overlay slides with audio and video narrations, grant instant access in one click, and glean customer feedback via sophisticated tracking and data analytics features.

Empower your team to overcome the traditional onboarding hurdles and efficiently scale their processes for the most effective results.

Customer onboarding is a sophisticated, nuanced process — but it doesn’t have to be laborious.

Again, I’m from AirDeck and want you to witness the unique functionalities you can have at your fingertips — please check out our demos. You can easily create, share, and analyze content, seamlessly shepherding your customers through your onboarding process.

We want to help you set the foundation for new customer and company relationships that will endure well past onboarding.

Featured Image Credit: Provided by the Author; Thank you!