- Onboarding
- The first 90 days that determine whether the customer stays or churns. Your most important retention investment.
Customer Onboarding
A strong onboarding experience is the most important investment you can make in retention. After all, customers who do not achieve rapid value churn at a significantly higher rate.
Most organisations design onboarding from their own perspective: "What does the customer need to know about our product?" The right question is the customer's: "When do I experience my first concrete benefit?" Indeed, everything before that point is the danger zone.
The three phases of onboarding:
- Setup: Technical setup and configuration
- Training: Learning and capability building
- Adoption: Use of core features and realisation of first benefit
Onboarding CSAT
Measure CSAT at day 7, 30, and 60 to identify bottlenecks and at-risk customers early. Specifically, low CSAT during onboarding is the strongest predictor of first-90-days churn.
Frequently Asked Questions
Onboarding starts the moment the customer signs the contract, not day one on the platform. It ends when the customer consistently uses core features and has experienced their first clear benefit. If you cannot define that moment, your onboarding is probably too unstructured.
CSAT at day 7, 30, and 60. Time-to-value (when does the customer achieve their first benefit?). Feature adoption rate. First-90-days churn. Low CSAT at day 30 is the strongest warning signal for early churn.
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