How to Automate Client Onboarding: 6 automation tips for CS

When you’re onboarding new clients, a million little repetitive tasks take up hours of time — from countless follow-up emails to gathering files and signatures, creating personalized slide decks, holding training calls, and scheduling (and rescheduling) meetings. 

So it’s tempting to want to automate absolutely every onboarding task you can think of, but that’s not always the best approach to making a great first impression.

Meaningful interactions with your new customers during onboarding are wonderful for building trust, creating momentum, and continuing to sell them on the value of your product — so you don’t want to automate all of onboarding.

But most of those time-sucking tasks? Not vital.

They’re stealing away valuable time you could be spending with your customers (while crushing the souls of your CSMs because of the endless repetition). 

If you want to save time and eliminate manual processes — and build a better, more consistent onboarding experience — by automating your client onboarding process, here’s how you can do it. 

What role should automation play in a high-touch customer onboarding process?

The key to getting client onboarding automation right when scaling a high-touch onboarding program is to be strategic about what you automate. 

• You don't want to turn your managed onboarding into a self-service SaaS experience by automating everything. 
• You do want to reduce busy work and bottlenecks for both you and your clients, and build a repeatable onboarding process that scales.

When it comes to automating CS-led onboarding, here are few tips to keep in mind:

• Start small. A little automation goes a long way. Don’t start by trying to automate your onboarding process end-to-end. Pick a few painful and time-consuming tasks to start with. Many small changes add up to a big difference. 
• Iterate. When you work with customers, things often don’t go to plan. Experiment, learn, and iterate to find the right approach to customer onboarding automation.
• Automation isn’t the only way to save time. Simple things like giving customers a client portal can save a lot of back-and-forth emails. 
• Aim for asynchronous. While it may not technically be automation, shifting from all face-to-face meetings to asynchronous interactions can also save a ton of time and create a more scalable onboarding process. 
• Don’t automate the valuable human touchpoints, like building rapport and learning about your new customer’s challenges. Automation should remove the tedious tasks to open up more meaningful conversations—not eliminate the one-on-one conversations that drive renewals.

You should think of using automation as freeing up your onboarding team’s time so they can double down on solving customer problems.

6 steps for to an automated client onboarding process

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork for onboarding automation, let’s dive into the specific ways to streamline your customer onboarding process. 

1. Centralize everything in an onboarding hub

Onboarding is a messy experience for new clients. A centralized onboarding hub not only simplifies the client experience, but also gives you a base for all your onboarding automation.

Most onboarding teams send lengthy emails with attached training materials and convoluted onboarding spreadsheets. These resources often get lost in clients’ cluttered inboxes, leading to repeated resends and follow-ups. 

Your team also likely wastes a lot of time building out custom slide decks and onboarding presentations for each new customer they’re onboarding. This is tough to scale.

A more efficient solution is to build a templated onboarding hub that becomes a one-stop shop for everything you and your clients need for a great onboarding experience.

Dock makes it easy to create an onboarding workspace. Here's a quick tutorial on how to use Dock for onboarding:

What should you include in an onboarding hub?

So what should go in your onboarding hub?

• A clear table of contents and navigation
• A visualized implementation timeline
• A customer success plan that covers key stakeholders, product roles, and key metrics and milestones
• A customer intake form for gathering files and data
• Admin setup instructions, including video tutorials and to-do lists
• A customer onboarding checklist or implementation plan, broken into digestible phases
• A product university and resource center
• End-user enablement materials, like FAQs, tooltips, common challenges and solutions, helpful webinars, product tours, and whatever other customer enablement resources you have.

👇 Steal this template: You can even use our pre-built customer onboarding template, customize it to fit your workflow, and then reuse it to onboard each customer.

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‍💡Pro tip: Don’t be afraid about uploading too much content to your template. You can always use hidden sections to hide content from the start and then reveal it when the customer gets to the next phase.

2. Automate onboarding hub creation

Once your onboarding template is ready, you can use Dock’s automation rules to trigger the creation of a new onboarding hub whenever a deal reaches a certain stage in your CRM.

For instance, when your sales team moves a deal to the Closed-Won stage, Dock can automatically create a new onboarding workspace, personalized to the new customer—all with zero effort required from your onboarding team. 

You can even set it up to pull customer data directly from custom CRM fields—like products and pricing — and use dynamic variables to automatically personalize your new client portals.

Automating these technical elements saves significant time, allowing your onboarding team to focus on building strong client relationships and making the process more enjoyable for both your team and your clients.

3. Streamline data collection & file uploads

Every CSM knows the constant back-and-forth of asking clients for employee lists, brand guidelines, or other files can be a nightmare for delaying kickoffs. Clients forget to attach files to emails, or email attachments would get lost in lengthy forwarded threads. 

Sharing customer questionnaires via email is equally frustrating, with clients skipping required questions or losing the questionnaire in their inbox altogether.

There are a few ways to solve this challenge:

a. Use a client onboarding form

Within Dock, you can embed client onboarding forms directly into your onboarding workspace. This lets you gather essential customer details without needing to send your customer to another tool. 

b. Request file uploads

Instead of asking for files over email, give your customers a spot in your onboarding portal for uploading files.

You can either use Dock’s file widget that gives customers a drag-and-drop spot for dumping all their files…

…or you can add an “Upload files” action button to your onboarding plan checklist, where clients can upload files as part of their onboarding steps.

4. Auto-assign onboarding tasks

Onboarding a new client requires that both your team and your customer complete a million little tasks—like aligning on implementation goals, signing documents, setting up integrations and workflows, providing training, creating users, and more.

Trying to coordinate all of this via email is a nightmare, so most companies try one of two options:

• Using project management tools like Asana or ClickUp. These tools are designed for project and task management, so you’d think they’d fit the bill. But while they allow you to build a backlog of action items, assign owners and deadlines, and communicate around those tasks, they’re often cumbersome and hard to learn for clients. And while these tools typically offer many automation capabilities, they can be overwhelming for less technical customers. They also often require your clients to create a separate account and login, which adds an extra point of friction to the onboarding process.
• Using spreadsheets or Google Docs to manage the onboarding process. While these free tools can work alright if you're just starting out, they are clunky, not user-friendly, and don’t offer a great customer experience. 

You can use a wrench to hammer in a nail, but it’s less than ideal.

Dock’s onboarding checklists offer a great middle ground. Customers don’t need a login, there’s virtually no learning curve, and you can effectively manage onboarding tasks at scale.

When you’re using an onboarding template in Dock, you can pre-create a checklist of common tasks that a client has to complete. 

Auto-assign task owners

You can auto-assign task owners (from your side or the client’s side) directly from the template, so that when you create a new onboarding hub for a new client, all the tasks will already be pre-assigned.

Auto-assign relative due dates

You can also set key project dates and use relative dates in tasks to auto-populate due dates for each task. 

For example, you can set up a task with a due date relative to the onboarding kickoff date, and it will be scheduled automatically when you set the onboarding start date while launching a new workspace.

It’s a simple way to automate your customer onboarding, but the end outcome is that your customers and onboarding team members always know the next steps in the implementation process. When you’re onboarding new customers at scale, getting that kind of clarity automatically is priceless. 

Send automatic due date notifications

Dock can also automatically send due date notifications for each task, taking those reminders off your plate and improving your relationship with customers as you no longer have to nudge them yourself.

Dock’s progress bars give you an automatic way to visualize and report on onboarding progress while also creating a more engaging experience and adding an element of gamification. They help your clients see the headway you’ve made without any extra work for your team.

5. Automate onboarding emails

While many onboarding tasks can be automated or handled asynchronously within an onboarding hub, email communication will still remain essential for regular check-ins and answering questions.

Person-to-person contact helps build relationships and trust, which is crucial in the onboarding stage of the customer journey.

Fortunately, much of this can be automated too, allowing you to reserve more time for thoughtful, personalized chats and your most strategic initiatives.

One area ripe for automation is the welcome email series that typically includes a welcome message, an introduction to the team, quick-start guides, and links to important resources. 

While this info can also live in your Dock workspace, kicking off your onboarding with a few automated emails that link to that workspace can help customers get used to interacting within your onboarding workspace.

The most straightforward way to automate these emails is to set up a sequence directly within your CRM.

By using email sequencing tools and automated workflows, you remove the need to manually grab templates, adjust them, and send them every time a milestone is reached.

For example, HubSpot Sequences or Salesforce Cadences allow you to send a series of targeted email templates, personalized and automated throughout the onboarding stage, with minimal effort after the initial setup. You can also use marketing automation tools like Marketo to achieve similar objectives.

You can schedule the emails to go out on specific days after the onboarding starts.

Automated email sequences can also help celebrate and acknowledge important milestones in the onboarding process. 

For example, you can congratulate clients on completing the setup process or using a key product feature for the first time. 

“We would trigger automated emails when users reached a certain number of webinar registrations,” says Maryna Parvai, former Manager of Customer Support at Banzai. “That was a huge moment for them that underscored how valuable Banzai was and how much value they were getting from using the product.”

You can even automate personalized check-in emails triggered by behavior, such as inactivity alerts or failure to use a key product feature. Tools like Zapier and Make are really helpful for automations like this.

As you’re optimizing your emails, reinforce that your onboarding hub is the go-to place for any and all relevant information the new client needs by including a link to the hub in each one. 

6. Automate meeting scheduling

Onboarding often involves multiple meetings and training sessions. Scheduling those meetings often involves a lot of back-and-forth emailing, creating calendar events, and Zoom links.

Here’s what you can do to automate this large chunk of manual work:

1. Set up a scheduling tool. Use a tool like Calendly or the native scheduling features in your CRM, such as Salesforce Scheduler or HubSpot Scheduling Software. These tools allow you to connect your calendar, specify the days and hours you’re available for meetings, and share booking links with your clients so they can pick a convenient time. 
2. Add webinar registrations and pre-scheduled training sessions as tasks to the implementation plan of your onboarding hub for convenience. Dock templates are useful here, as they allow you to pre-set deadlines and owners, so you don’t need to enter them manually for each new client when creating a new hub. 
3. Configure your calendar. Connect your calendar with a Zoom account or set up Google Meet to automatically create meeting rooms instead of manually adding them for each event. Alternatively, Calendly can create calendar events and invite participants automatically when a meeting is booked. This helps prevent issues like forgetting to invite participants and having to do more work later.
4. Prepare for training sessions. Instead of using bulky custom slide decks, create a sleek template in your onboarding hub that you can reuse for every new client. With Dock’s dynamic variables, it takes just a couple of clicks to create personalized learning hubs for customer kickoffs. This saves a ton of prep time, while also providing a more engaging experience for your clients.

Create an onboarding experience that scales with Dock

There are a ton of small steps you can take to create an automated customer onboarding experience that drives better retention.

Implementing each of these steps saves your team time, allowing them to focus on what truly matters: delivering high-quality, personalized onboarding experiences and building trust with your clients.

Brittany Soinski, the Manager of Onboarding at Loom, recommends using Dock to automate a high-touch onboarding process.

“You don’t want to teach your customers to learn another tool to learn to onboard them into your tool,” she says. “[Dock] is the perfect place for me to take everything I’ve built and seamlessly put it into this tool.”

By streamlining Loom’s onboarding process through Dock’s onboarding templates and automations, her team has saved “a good two hours per customer just to launch an onboarding.”

(They’ve also seen 20% higher seat allocation rates and a 10% higher number of active users when customers engage with their revamped onboarding in Dock. Check out the full story of how Loom sped up its onboarding process.)

There’s no easier way to automate client onboarding in a user-friendly, satisfying way than to use Dock to create templated onboarding workspaces. 

If you’re ready to automate your customer onboarding, click here to get started and create your first 5 workspaces for free.