ClientSuccess Scales Onboarding and Reduces Time to Value with AirDeck
ClientSuccess is revolutionizing the way SaaS companies manage, retain, and grow their existing customer base. They help SaaS companies proactively manage customer relationships, measure customer health, minimize churn, and maximize revenue. The ClientSuccess platform is a simple yet sophisticated solution that CSMs and executive teams need to proactively manage their customers. The platform delivers deep analytics, metrics, and reports to provide a comprehensive view of the health of their SaaS business.
Because the platform is so comprehensive, It’s incredibly important to Kristi Faltorusso, ClientSuccess Chief Customer Officer, to nail the customer onboarding process. She held a webinar with AirDeck’s founder and former CEO to discuss how she leveraged AirDeck to enhance her company’s onboarding program. “We’ve put a lot of effort into our onboarding experience and really focusing on scaling it and nailing it. A lot of that work would not be possible if it wasn’t for AirDeck,” Kristi explained.
Why AirDeck?
“We are not the biggest company, we don’t have the biggest budgets, or access to every single tool. But it’s important to understand why we thought it was critical to include AirDeck in our tech stack, specifically within the confines of onboarding,” said Kristi.
ClientSuccess considered five value drivers before adopting AirDeck. They included:
- Supports the ability to scale: AirDeck allows you to record a video or voice over modularly to your document. You can record an entire onboarding guide slide-by-slide using voice or video and easily just update the first page with a custom intro. Kristi shared, “I like to make it easier for my team, so I have one template and then give them the flexibility to change specific elements without needing to change the whole thing. That personalization really resonates well and changes how our customers receive it.”
- Decrease time to value: “I don’t know a company out there who isn’t paying attention to how long onboarding takes and quickly getting to that time to value. AirDeck actually allows us to move quicker through that onboarding process. We’re not getting held up on those meetings. If a customer can’t come to a meeting, we just send a pre-recorded version of the deck. So, the customer has that context and in the next meeting, we can answer questions and then hop into the next topic. It’s critical to keeping us on time and keeping that pace of onboarding,” explained Kristi.
- Asynchronous communication: Customers want flexibility in regards to how and when they communicate. “AirDeck allows us to keep things moving asynchronously instead of coordinating timelines for meetings that are almost impossible. Our customers really love the optionality that this provides because we don’t necessarily have to have the meeting,” said Kristi.
- Rich analytics: When you don’t know if a customer viewed your content, it hinders your ability to keep things moving. You can’t have the right conversations. AirDeck allows you to fill in those blind spots and understand if customers watched it, for how long, and how they engaged. “If I record something on zoom and send it, I don’t have any insight. I don’t have the ability to understand how or if my customers engaged with it. AirDeck provides a level of analytics and insights that we didn’t get before. This level of depth allows me to see how our customers engage, which has helped fill in those blind spots as we’re trying to move our customers through these processes,” said Kristi.
- Improve training and enablement: When you need to train more end users, you don’t need to schedule more meetings. Or, when new hires come onboard, you don’t need more onboarding. “With AirDeck we’re able to facilitate and improve training and enablement. Obviously adoption of your product is key to your long-term success, and AirDeck helped us scale because we didn’t need to schedule more meetings. We have one meeting and if you can’t come, we have the AirDeck.
How ClientSuccess leverages AirDeck to enhance customer onboarding
Kristi leveraged AirDeck in five key areas of her onboarding program to facilitate a change in the customer experience.
- Partnership kickoff meeting: This is the first meeting with a customer, where Kristi’s team gets alignment on goals and sets expectations to ensure everyone is on the same page. Kristi explained, “We were effectively having the same conversation every time. Now, we’ve got a standardized deck template with pre-recorded voice overs that we use to facilitate the conversation. We make sure that we hit on all important points and very clearly articulate the value for each of these slides. We now send that in advance of the partnership kickoff meeting so before we’ve done anything else, these meetings are now 30 minutes instead of 60.”
- Onboarding follow-up one-pagers: After completing an onboarding session, a customized one-pager is sent to the customer that highlights the progress they’ve made. “This was a very dry email that lacked engagement. I don’t even know if the executives read it. We transformed it from this flat email to a piece with a contextual narrative that says how we’re advancing through this formal program. The design remains the same, and we make some edits to the voiceover narrative. I know our executives are looking at it because when there is an uncompleted status, they follow-up,” elaborated Kristi.
- Onboarding audit: This is an in-depth audit of how customers have set up and configured ClientSuccess before concluding onboarding. It also includes a list of prescriptive recommendations on how to get the most value from the product. “Instead of having a 60-minute meeting, we built standardized content and the CSMs added voice over narratives to each page to provide context. This allows customers to consume it when it’s convenient for them. We actually get more engagement now because I find that people listen to these and come back with more thoughtful questions,” said Kristi. “Plus, we get more visibility across the entire business because we have the ability to send the deck with narration and eliminate the need for a meeting.”
- Post-onboarding review: This stage is a formal wrap-up of onboarding. “Historically, this is a 60-minute meeting. Now, we give the option to just send an AirDeck. Optionality is super important when we’re creating different and unique experiences for customers, but also scale. My team has saved hours by giving customers the option to not have this meeting,” said Kristi.
- Journey stage alignment: After onboarding, ClientSuccess sends a presentation to customers to introduce them to what happens next in their journey stage. “This is exclusively a prepared presentation. It’s four to five slides long with an audio overlay that we send with AirDeck to introduce our customers to the next stage of the process. It’s a fluid way to keep our customers knowledgeable about what’s happening and removes any ambiguity. I always say if there’s a lack of narrative, someone’s creating one and you don’t want them to fill the blanks,” explained Kristi.
How ClientSuccess harnesses analytics to improve conversations
AirDeck allows you to upload over 120 file types and track engagement. Understand engagement time, which content resonates, and geo-location data for regional analysis. Users can also track engagement at the page level and forwarding and sharing activity. The data can be exported in CSV or Excel format, and AirDeck integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.
Kristi shared how AirDeck’s analytics help her team come more prepared to the partnership kick-off meeting. “The ability to review analytics helps us come into this conversation better prepared because we know who’s watched it. Now, I’m having a personalized dialogue because I know who saw and who didn’t. I make sure important points resonate and we use the time effectively. We no longer spend a lot of time on items they’ve seen. We can sometimes skip right to goals and that’s where the meat of the conversation is anyway.”
The future with AirDeck
AirDeck helped ClientSuccess avoid unnecessary meetings, accelerate processes, drive alignment among teams, enhance executive engagement, and optimize in-person conversations. As far as what the future holds, Kristi explained that the use cases are vast.
“I know that those are not the only use cases by any means. I think we’ve seen really awesome use cases from all functions of our team including marketing, sales, and product. I’m excited to see how we can creatively use AirDeck in different ways,” said Kristi.
“Right now, our next step is embedding our AirDeck assets into the onboarding portal to enhance and enrich our customer experience.”
AirDeck is honored to collaborate with ClientSuccess as they explore creative ways to use the product cross functionally. To view the full webinar on this topic, click here. Get started with AirDeck for free today.
