In this interview, Jeff Epstein discusses how SaaS companies can dramatically improve their customer onboarding to reduce churn and accelerate revenue. He emphasizes that onboarding is often an under‑utilized function that should be given dedicated resources and placed under the Customer Success organization. Epstein outlines the need for full‑time onboarding coaches who act as the glue between sales and account management, and he describes the key performance indicators that demonstrate onboarding’s ROI, such as churn mitigation, days‑to‑launch, customer satisfaction scores (including NPS), and the ratio of stalled versus active implementations. He also tackles the tension between highly customized onboarding experiences and scalable, turnkey solutions, advocating for templated yet easily customizable checklists that can be automated to retain the personal touch while preserving efficiency. Throughout, he provides practical operational advice—centralizing tasks, reducing email friction, and leveraging software to automate checklist creation—to help SaaS businesses build a repeatable, high‑impact onboarding process.
Chapters
There's directly— there's a direct impact on user churn, which I believe you say is the number one factor of our product if the customer onboarding experience isn't great. What are the most common areas that you see where SaaS owners could drastically improve their onboarding process, and how do we start to look at that internally to start improving it?
Yeah, and first thing I'd like to say is it's one of the things that we learned at Ambassador, and we're taking that and applying it to Onboard, is that on the onboarding function of most companies tends to be both the unsung heroes of the organization, but also I think really underutilized and, and unfortunately neglected in a lot of cases, and companies need to be more proactive and spend more time thinking about the onboarding process internally for their own teams, but even more importantly is how does it affect the customer experience, because the customer experience has already started, probably through the sales process, but if not, it's definitely starting As soon as they log into your app for the first time. And so that really is where you need to be proactive, and it starts with planning and having processes. And it's surprising how little process many companies have, even big companies. And so for us, thinking about, you know, what are— if you, you know, articles all over the internet that say really poor onboarding experience is one of the, you know, the primary number one or number two reason for customer churn. And If you are a SaaS business relying on subscriptions, you need to keep your customers. Everything you do from a business perspective relies on customers staying with you, right? Like, because otherwise the whole dynamics of your business have to change. So I think the number one thing to think about from an onboarding perspective is build process and invest in your onboarding practices. from an organizational perspective, which usually means having people that do it full-time. That's the first, sort of the first step I think that we did when we got to about 20 people at Ambassador. We had someone who their whole job was to onboard customers, and I think that's really important.
Okay, so there's— so you mentioned there's a salesperson, it starts from sales and then all the way until activation of when they actually use your product. Who would you say is the best to own the onboarding experience process and continue to improve it? So in your case, you had one person full-time, What is their role? Is that, is that the CEO? Is that the CEO and SDR? Is that a customer success person? Who are you looking to hire or put that onto?
Yeah. So what we did again at Ambassador was the onboarding department lived under the success team. So the success department really had 2 different functions. One was onboarding and one was account management. And we globally called that customer success. So I would imagine in most companies that are 10 to 50 or 100 people are going to have an onboarding department with several people. You know, we had 4 or 5 onboarding coaches is what we called them that exclusively just helped companies get launched, right? So it was taking them from point A, which is contract signed or sign up, to point B, which is go live. And so those are the types of— that's where that, again, I'm feel pretty strongly that that department should live in the customer success world. But ultimately, the onboarding folks, they float and they work with the sales team, right? They have to understand what's coming down the pipeline, and they also work very closely with their success counterparts, the account managers, who are really interfacing with the clients on a day-to-day basis. But that typically happens after they get going, right? After they get implemented, after all the nitty-gritty details get ironed out. So That's where onboard has this really unique function of living right in the middle of 2 pretty material processes. They're the ones that sort of hold everything together. They're the glue.
Got it. And then when you're talking about metrics, so now looking to hire, like, say, a full-time customer success to own that, or under the customer success team, you're bringing on a full-time person. How do you measure and justify the ROI on a customer success as an investment of your budget, especially where SaaS businesses models that are easy to replace? And maybe, you know, what are some key metrics that you would look at to track and then, you know, tie that back to ROI?
Sure. And there's a couple of things to think about in terms of the value of onboarding. And I would say first is, of course, the actual lessening or mitigation of churn. So if, for example, you have only one person doing onboarding and you have a cohort and you see your churn, and then you have 2 or 3 people doing onboarding and you see your churn, is there a difference, right? What is the delta? And that delta is real dollars. That's the most obvious. And remember that those— that churn sort of cascades infinitely, right? So for every dollar you lose, you're never getting that dollar back in the future, whereas every dollar you keep, it keeps stacking up and growing on itself. So with subscriptions, if you can lower your churn by a half a percentage point, it could be tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year for many sort of mid-sized businesses. So that's the most important metric, but there are more. So I think the other, some other obvious ones are, you know, many companies don't get paid until the customer launches. So time to launch is a KPI, literally is how quickly do you get paid, which is also really important from a cash flow perspective.
Mm-hmm.
And then alternatively, if they don't launch, maybe you don't get paid. There is actually a very specific direct tie to revenue there. So all of those are KPIs. Days to launch is something that we thought about. So how quickly can we get customers to using the product the way it's intended to? That's really important. And there's also the customer satisfaction. I mean, again, they're working with— there's some sort of agreement in place where they're ideally going to continue working with you down the road. How do they feel about this part of your business? How do they feel about this part of your process? That should be trending up as you dedicate more people to doing it well. And so those are some of the KPIs that we would think about, uh, for sure. Uh, how many companies are also moving forward versus like stalled or something like that? Very like a macro metric. Makes sense.
Would you use NPS score as well in there? Would you build that into the process?
Yeah, I mean, I mean, NPS makes sense. I mean, again, it doesn't have to be NPS, so to speak. I think some sort of customer satisfaction, whatever your baseline. I mean, again, it's more about trending up and to the right from a baseline perspective, not necessarily the type of metric. You know, I think if it's days to launch, obviously you want it to be less days. If it's NPS, you want NPS to go up. But yeah, I think any of those work. You know, getting feedback is obviously a very important part of the process as well.
Cool. So we talk to a lot of entrepreneurs that make the choice to provide maybe a lot more customization in their onboarding experience, which is obviously less scalable, let's say, or it just takes a lot more time to onboard versus more of like a turnkey solution because they feel that maybe they provide more value to their clients by spending more time with them. But from a business perspective, which do you believe is the right way? Should you be personalizing that onboarding experience?
Yes, you should. And here's the reason why. There are some you know, applications that you can use that are really, really simple and really lightweight, and you can get up and running quickly, right? And that's like a more general, global, easy to onboard yourself, like maybe like Zoom, right? Like everyone can just kind of onboard themselves. But most business software tends to have a pretty complex implementation that involves multiple people doing multiple things, and in those cases, You should customize it as much as possible, right? And customization doesn't mean doing it from scratch because that's not efficient. Customization in our world, in my opinion, is— and what we're doing in Onboard is creating a template that can be customized for the use case quickly, right? So one of the things we're doing is creating customized checklists in the most automated way, because at Ambassador, when we did this, even though we had templates, And we knew the requirements, it still took a couple hours to sort of pick and choose the things that needed to be done. And so with Onboard, that'll happen in a matter of seconds, right, or a matter of minutes. And those are the types of savings that over the course of dozens of customers saves you days of work, right, and just makes you more efficient, allows you to do more as an onboarding coach or an implementation coach, and ultimately scale your team more. So. I certainly think customization is important, and the balance is how do you automate customized processes, right? And that's— I think that's what you can use software for to make that a lot better than doing it yourself.
And if you already have the process and maybe you have that checklist already internally, is there any tips or suggestions or any additions you'd think that people should add on that checklist to make the onboarding experience, let's say, more Get that wow factor when— for the client?
Yeah, I mean, so it comes down to a few things. One is certainly being, again, being proactive. Providing that custom experience quickly is important. Something that we found is that dealing with customers through email creates a lot of challenges. If you're managing 10 or 15 customers' implementation and then someone's saying, I don't get this, That's really hard to understand what's the context for what they're asking. So, you know, thinking about how do you contextualize questions and comments, how do you make the process smooth instead of going back and forth multiple times, right? So I think those are some of the things that we think about in terms of being more proactive and creating a better experience from the beginning. It's a little bit different for every company based on what actually needs to get done, but I think ultimately Putting everything in one place and allowing them to see all the things that need to be done, all the tasks and assignments and the due dates, that allows for everyone to be on the same page, which is ultimately actually a lot harder than it seems. You know, I mean, it's hard to do it internally, let alone between 2 organizations with lots of different rules and experiences and cultures. So that's something that you really, you want to streamline as much as possible.
