Key Responsibilities: What Does a Customer Onboarding Specialist Do?
Customer onboarding specialists are masters at increasing product adoption and enabling customers’ success through in-depth product understanding. They greet new customers in onboarding calls, often with a CSM present, and offer product tours, assist in setup, and aid in implementation.
Onboarding is a crucial point in the customer journey. In many cases, it determines whether a customer stays or leaves. The customer onboarding specialist is, therefore, a vital part of the CS team, particularly for tech-touch cases or companies attempting to scale onboarding and customer success.
Key Responsibilities:
- Conducting onboarding meetings, product tours, company presentations, and product demos.
- Understanding customer context and goals and providing product information to best serve those goals.
- Educating customers and optimizing their product setup for the quickest path to success.
- Eliminating roadblocks in the way of customers’ goals: product issues, poor implementation, support issues, or customer knowledge gaps, or simply poor product understanding.
- Improving product adoption, customer retention, and helping foster positive customer relationships that create a loyal customer base.
- Assisting customer support with customer issues and requests.
- Providing materials to help customers learn best practices to achieve their desired outcomes faster and more efficiently.
Skills and Competencies
Here are the necessary skills to be a good customer onboarding specialist:
- Minimum of 1 year of experience in communications, customer service and support, sales, account management, or customer success. Customer success courses / training are good to have.
- High emotional intelligence and empathy skills.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to follow customer narratives to understand their point of view and find workable solutions to their issues.
- Ability to de-escalate customer support requests and maintain a positive, goal-driven customer relationship.
- Strong analytical and goal-oriented mindset.
- Advanced IT&C knowledge and capabilities and ability to learn new software tools on the job.