Onboard Customers Faster: 6 ways to speed up client onboarding

Your enterprise software is powerful, precise, and... painfully slow to implement.

For companies with complex products, lengthy onboarding cycles are often seen as unavoidable. But do they need to be?

Here's the truth: your customer onboarding process isn't slow because your product is complicated. It's slow because of bottlenecks like over-reliance on live training, fragmented handoffs between teams, and manual personalization.

The good news is that these issues are entirely fixable.

In this guide, we'll show you how leading customer success teams are speeding up implementation without sacrificing quality—and how you can too.

Why is your customer onboarding taking so long?

As soon as you close a deal, the time-to-value clock starts ticking. Unfortunately, for many SaaS teams, this is also where things start to slow down.

Let's look at the most common culprits behind delayed onboarding.

1. Your internal CS processes are creating bottlenecks

Your CSM is building yet another slide deck from scratch, writing the same welcome emails they've written a hundred times before, and manually personalizing documentation that could have been templatized months ago.

It's easy to fall into this trap: CS teams want to provide a high-touch customer experience and assume that the best way to do that is through painstaking personalization.

Without standardized processes and automation tools, your CSMs waste precious time on busy work before customers see any sign of progress.

2. You're over-relying on live training sessions

"Let's schedule a training session next week!"

Sounds productive, right? Until you're juggling calendars across three time zones and trying to coordinate between admins, end users, and department heads. The resulting delays and logistical drudgery kill your post-sale momentum and slow down time to value.

Rachel Provan, Customer Success Coach and Founder of Provan Success, puts it bluntly: live training is "expensive and time-consuming, and it's not necessarily better."

Look, we get it—especially for enterprise clients, live training sessions can feel like table stakes. But unless you’re able to make at least some of your process async, you’ll continue to be at the mercy of everyone’s calendars.

3. Surprise stakeholders keep appearing

We've all been there: You're halfway through implementation when a new stakeholder drops in with "Why aren't we doing it this way?" or "Have you thought about...?"

While you can't completely prevent surprise stakeholders—C-suite execs will always have opinions, and key personnel will leave mid-implementation—you can minimize the disruption.

The key is establishing a mutual engagement plan during the sales process. Without a shared, collaborative document to refer back to, it's much harder to integrate new voices without derailing your timeline.

4. Your customer’s requirements keep shifting

Your onboarding journey might look perfect on paper. Maybe you've even designed it to get customers to value as quickly as possible based on their stated challenges. But if their requirements are a moving target, your carefully planned timeline goes out the window.

This is especially challenging when the shifts come from multiple directions—different departments realizing they have different needs, new use cases emerging during implementation, or stakeholders changing their minds about priorities.

5. There’s no change management process

Even the most efficient onboarding plan will stall without proper change management. If your point of contact isn't empowered to drive adoption within their organization, you'll face delays at every turn.

This shows up in multiple ways:

• Slow internal buy-in from different departments
• Difficulty getting people to complete onboarding tasks
• Resistance to new workflows or processes
• Limited engagement with training materials

Unless you make it easy for champions to drive internal change, your implementation will slowly fall down your customer’s list of priorities—hurting product activation and eventually risking the entire project's success.

‍Is faster onboarding always better?

‍Speed for the sake of speed is never a good idea.

A rapid-fire onboarding process can encourage a copy-paste experience that leaves less time for uncovering the unique pain points of each customer. In a rush to get them “onboarded” and boost completion rates, you might paradoxically increase TTV and hurt retention.

Sometimes, a longer, more intentional onboarding experience is exactly what your customers need. This is especially true if you notice that giving customers more time leads to higher CSAT scores or better product adoption. Like most things in customer success, the ideal timeline depends entirely on your product and customers.

However, as a general rule of thumb, faster is better.

Fast onboarding is often a sign that you're avoiding common problems in the process. Keeping an eye on your implementation speed is a reliable way to pull other churn-influencing metrics—like low product usage and stalled implementations—in the right direction. (Just make sure your speedy onboarding is actually serving critical KPIs like TTV and adoption.)

‍6 tips for faster client onboarding

‍Now that we understand why onboarding speed matters (and when it doesn't), let's explore practical ways to streamline your onboarding process without sacrificing quality.

‍1. Clean up your sales-to-success handoff

‍Sales is sitting on a treasure trove of information that’s relevant to onboarding, like technical requirements, customer needs, and stakeholder concerns.

With a messy sales-to-success handoff, though, much of that goes to waste. Your CSMs end up recreating work Sales already did—and annoy your customers by asking them questions they’ve already answered.

Using a shared Dock workspace solves this problem. When you close a deal, your customer's deal room transforms seamlessly into their onboarding portal. Your CS team gets instant access to all the context they need, and your customers never have to repeat themselves.

Noah Massucci, Director of Sales Engineering and Customer Onboarding at Robin, has seen the impact of this firsthand:

"What's great is all that information stays in Dock. So when it comes to onboarding, not only do we present the onboarding piece of it, but we have all the information that [Sales] has collected beforehand, tying that together better than I thought it would. The thing that's really been great is, yes, we've shortened [onboarding times]—right now they're sitting a little bit over a month long, which is a big win for us—but also we've maintained a very high customer satisfaction score."

‍2. Break onboarding into bite-sized wins

‍Everyone loves a quick win. Instead of hitting customers with a massive multi-step implementation plan all at once, break your onboarding into focused phases that each deliver real value.

Even if you think your product is too complex for a bite-sized approach, it’s probably not, as Rachel Prova emphasizes:

“Make it easy. Make it quick. Even if it’s a complicated product: little bites. You don’t have to serve them the entire product and show them how to do every single little thing in there.”

You might also consider steering customers toward your stickiest features first to encourage product adoption. This is how Eloise Salisbury, Chief Customer Officer at AutogenAI, approaches phased implementation:

“We did a lot of investigation into what features demonstrate the highest stickiness effect. Then we broke our implementation out into, okay, these are the four top features. Are they using them? And only once they were using them did we graduate them from implementation.”

3. Keep everyone on the same page with a shared onboarding plan

‍Start by getting customer buy-in on your onboarding plan, then make it visible to everyone involved. 

With Dock, you can easily create a joint customer success plan that lives in a shared-access onboarding workspace.

When both teams can track progress in real time, implementation naturally moves faster.

One reason for this is accountability, as Noah Massucci of Robin explains:

“The first thing that caught my eye was the project list. The fact you could tie it to the different stages and see, ‘Hey, you're halfway there’ or ‘You're three-quarters of the way there’ was so awesome because it helped our team track it, but more than anything, it helped the customer be on the same page with us and understand if we’re going to hit those goals and deadlines we had talked about in the kickoff.”

‍‍You may also find, as Joyce Golden did as CMO of Assistantly, that additional time savings comes from fewer back-and-forth questions:

“I would say the exact moment we knew Dock was key to our business was when we stopped getting questions from our clients.”

‍Steal our template: Get started fast with our comprehensive customer onboarding template. It tracks launch dates, milestones, key stakeholders, tech stack information, and everything else you need to stay on the same page with customers.

‍4. Make your kickoff calls strategic, not administrative

‍No one wants to sit through a 20+ slide PowerPoint deck. Yet many CS teams still spend precious kickoff time "talking at" customers instead of learning what success looks like for them.

At Loom, Brittany Soinski’s team takes a different approach. They start with simple but powerful questions: 

• What does a day in the life look like for somebody on your team?
• Wave a magic wand. What should look different?

Rather than talking about Loom, Brittany’s goal is to get customers talking about themselves.

Of course, customers still need to learn your platform and complete their onboarding tasks. 

But keep those details in a self-service onboarding hub—like Dock—where customers can access them anytime. Save your live conversations for what matters most: uncovering how your product can transform their work.

‍5. Shift to async training where possible

‍Live training feels reassuring. Rachel Provan attributes this to the “butts in chairs” effect: “You can have the sense that people are there, and therefore they’re definitely going to get trained because their butt has to be in the seat.”

But is it actually effective? Not really, says Rachel: “We forget 90% of any trainings or any instructional stuff within 24 hours.”

Async training offers a better way. It keeps the momentum going after your kickoff call without the scheduling headaches. 

And while you might worry about losing that "white-glove onboarding" feel, many customers actually prefer learning at their own pace. Brittany Soinski at Loom recommends a flexible approach: 

"Have different tracks available—different strokes for different folks. Our IT admins, for example, don't want to hop on a 60-minute call with us to walk through workspace settings. So we pre-record a walkthrough of everything they need to know."

This async-first strategy lets you:

• Save live time for strategic discussions
• Keep implementation moving between live sessions
• Let customers learn at their own pace (pausing to take notes, or watching at 1.5x speed)
• Reduce onboarding time (Loom saves 2 hours per customer)

6. Boost adoption with customer enablement

‍Your internal champions are busy. Your end users are busy. Your implementation project is one of dozens competing for attention. Without a clear path forward, your onboarding will stall—no matter how excited everyone was during the sales process.

To combat this, you’ll need two sets of customer enablement assets:

1. "Train the trainer" assets: Give your champion everything they need to drive internal adoption. We're talking ready-to-use training agendas, communication templates, and best practices. Make it easy: provide copy-and-paste messages they can drop into Slack or email.
2. End-user resources: Build a central hub of end-user resources. Training videos, tutorials, webinars, templates, product guides—keep everything in one place so team members aren't hunting across different platforms to find what they need.

With Dock, you can house all these resources in one user-friendly workspace and track what's actually being used. This helps you spot where new customers get stuck and improve your resources over time.

For example, you can create a product university page in their Dock workspace.

Speed up your onboarding with Dock

‍Faster onboarding shouldn’t mean sacrificing quality or personalization.

With Dock's customer onboarding template, you can create a repeatable process that gets customers to value faster while still delivering the high-touch experience they expect.

The template includes everything you need to accelerate onboarding:

• A shared success plan that keeps everyone aligned on goals and timelines
• Built-in intake forms to capture essential information up front
• Clear setup guides and checklists to make technical integrations easy
• A visual project tracker so everyone can see progress
• Self-paced training materials for different learning styles
• One central spot for all your guides and documentation
• Tools to help your customers drive adoption across their team

Ready to decrease onboarding time? Get started with Dock's customer onboarding template and see how much faster you can offer value to your customers.