White-Glove Onboarding Guide: 5 ways to scale your process

If the term “white-glove service” brings to mind an English butler, you’re spot on.

A century ago (before being co-opted by the business world), white-glove service described the refined level of care and attention provided by butlers and other posh service providers.

SaaS providers, inspired by this elite association, tend to assume that a white-glove onboarding experience requires over-investing in long meetings, 1:1 walkthroughs with CSMs, and other forms of resource-intensive hand-holding.

But the reality is much more nuanced.

With the latest onboarding tech, you can offer a white-glove, personalized experience at scale—without investing tons of your team’s time.

The question, then, isn’t “Should I invest in white-glove onboarding?” Rather, it’s “How white-glove should my onboarding be?” 

For the answer, look to your product, your industry, and your customer segment—and read on.

What is white-glove onboarding?

White-glove customer onboarding is a concierge-like approach to onboarding and implementation that’s personalized to each customer’s unique needs.

High-touch onboarding processes, like 1:1 meetings and hands-on product walkthroughs, are one manifestation of a white-glove approach to onboarding.

But white-glove onboarding can be scaled in a low-touch or hybrid environment, too. Your onboarding process can feel white-glove without requiring significant time, resources, or 1:1 interaction.

For example, Brittany Soinski, Manager of Onboarding at Loom, says that video works wonders for giving scaled customers a white-glove onboarding feeling:

“We use [a two-minute video] to introduce ourselves, add a human face and voice to this experience—even though this is for our scaled customers who we're not working with in a white-glove manner. But by having a video, we have found that our customers have been much more engaged with the tool and with all of the steps during onboarding.”

Whether your process is high-touch or low-touch, technology is a powerful enabler of white-glove onboarding. 

With software like Dock, for example, you can create a co-branded onboarding hub with templates that personalize the user experience for each customer.

7 questions to ask when building a white-glove onboarding program

Before jumping straight into white-glove tactics, it helps to get strategic about who your customers are and what your product experience looks like. 

Ask yourself the following questions to understand the onboarding approach that makes sense for you and your customers.

1. How do you get the customer to value?

As soon as your customers decide to sign up, the clock starts ticking. They need to see value fast to avoid post-purchase remorse. 

No one conveys the risk and urgency of this moment better than Gillian Heltai, Chief Customer Officer at Lattice:

“[Customers] get so excited when they're buying. We're selling them the dream. If you don't deliver a great onboarding, it's like this trough of disillusionment where it's like, ‘Oh, I thought it was going to be this. And now this is so sad.’”

Getting customers to value is urgent, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be complicated. Just ask what “value” means for you and come up with a relevant (and simple) milestone for your customers to hit. 

For example, Dock customers first experience value when they close a sale or onboard a customer with a Dock workspace.

So we design our onboarding process around getting them to build their sales or onboarding template as quickly as possible. 

2. Does onboarding start in sales?

If you offer a free trial or a freemium version of your product, your customers are already using your product before the deal closes—which means they’ve already started self-service onboarding.

Your role in this case is two-fold: first, build on the momentum created during the sales process, and second, create a seamless transition between sales and onboarding.

If you wait until after the sale to provide access to your product, onboarding looks different. Since customers have never seen your product before, buyer’s remorse is a bigger risk: you don’t want customers to say “this isn’t what I expected” once they finally try your product’s features. 

Take your time to show them around, focusing on functionalities that will quickly add tangible value for them.

3. How easy is it to start using your product?

Easy-to-start products should rely more heavily on product-led onboarding. Customers rarely need to talk to a human. Self-serve onboarding, through a combination of product tool tips, video tutorials, and your knowledge base and in-app chat, is usually enough to get started.

If your product is harder to use, a high-touch onboarding approach becomes more critical. Often you'll need human-led onboarding along with personalized project plans and a series of kickoff calls and working sessions. (Enterprise onboarding frequently requires a high-touch approach—even when your product is easy to use).

Keep in mind that you might have both of these in your business—a lightweight self-start option and a more enterprise-focused human-led option—with each requiring different onboarding considerations.

4. Who are you onboarding?

You'll probably work with both admins and end users at different stages of your onboarding process. Avoid blurring the line between how you onboard these two personas, since each has specific needs.

Alex Kracov, Dock’s CEO, says:

"When you're onboarding an admin, relationship-building is really important. How can you make them your best friend throughout the process so they'll come to you if they have issues? Onboarding admins is also more technical, since you’ll need to get into the weeds of how you’ll set up specific systems.”

End-user onboarding should happen after admin onboarding, and it needs to be a lot simpler. 

By focusing on quick wins that help users get tangible value in their day-to-day roles, your product will be adopted faster and become stickier across the organization.

5. What resources do you have (or need)?

For each critical touchpoint in your onboarding process, you’ll want some kind of explainer content or step-by-step documentation. 

You also want to make sure all these customer enablement resources are available up front: customers will appreciate not having to hunt for answers, and you'll cut down on your onboarding time since there will be less back-and-forth.

Start by running an inventory of the resources you already have. Look through your help center, paying special attention to existing project plans, onboarding checklists, videos, and technical documentation.

Then, gauge what other resources you might need and map out a plan to create them.

6. What’s the right balance between live and async work?

While most onboarding work can happen either live or async, there’s one non-negotiable: all high-touch onboarding processes need a kickoff call. It’s crucial for setting the stage, talking about what the relationship will look like, and outlining a success plan.

From there, though, it's up to you and your customers.

Some businesses want a weekly recurring call to keep things on track. For others, a kickoff call and a wrap-up call are good enough. 

Startups tend to have a more async cadence by default, while enterprise customers often expect more meetings, given the number of stakeholders involved.

You don’t need to go radically async if it’s not right for your customers. Still, converting even one or two meetings into asynchronous onboarding tasks can have a positive impact on your TTV—while reducing the resources you need to deploy for each onboarding.

7. How will you measure success?

Onboarding success looks different for every business, which means there’s more than one way to measure it. Consider using one of these options:

• Product activation: This is what we use at Dock. We define success as the moment that customers publish and share their first workspace.
• Key milestone: For example, once you've rolled out your software to all your end users and conducted an employee-wide training session.
• Onboarding time: Product engagement and time to value are frequently correlated with onboarding time. If your goal is to onboard customers within 30 or 60 days, you can make that your measure of success—which boosts the chances that you actually complete onboarding within your target window.
• Internal resources: Onboarding can sometimes be a cost center. If that's true for you, you may want to connect your onboarding success to the amount of internal resources you've used to onboard an account.

Best practices for a white-glove onboarding process

Looking for white-glove onboarding ideas that don’t involve hiring new CSMs and filling your team’s calendar with 1:1 Zoom meetings? We’ve got you covered.

Here are five best practices for providing white-glove service at scale.

1. Ask customers what kind of onboarding experience they want

Not every customer wants hand-holding, especially if they’re highly self-directed, engaged, or technically proficient. At the same time, plenty of customers value walkthroughs so they don’t have to figure things out themselves.

The solution? Ask your customers. At Loom, Brittany Soinski’s onboarding team uses Dock to understand the level of interaction each customer prefers:

“We started asking our customers, ‘Would you like to do this async, or would you like to have a meeting?’ This is a really good way to instantly show our value during onboarding.

We’ll say, ‘We're going to do this asynchronously so that we can save us all 60 minutes from hopping on a meeting to walk through your workspace settings. We've pre-recorded this. You can watch this at 1.5 speed.’”

2. Use personalization to scale the white-glove experience

Branding and co-branding is an easy place to start personalization at scale. Make sure your logo, and your customer’s logo, are present throughout your onboarding process. It feels more white-glove, but more importantly, it becomes immediately clear to customers that you’ve given thought to their onboarding—and aren’t just running them through a boilerplate experience.

Onboarding templates can take your scaled personalization efforts a step further. End users and admins have different onboarding needs; so do startups, enterprise customers, and the various industries you work with. 

By creating onboarding templates for each user persona, you can create a relevant onboarding experience at scale. (As a bonus, you’ll avoid reinventing the wheel each time you onboard new users.)

You can also scale personalization for the smaller details of your customer experience. For example, Dock’s “relative due dates” feature populates each customer’s onboarding timeline with task due dates based on the onboarding start date, where the task falls in the process, and how long each task normally takes.

3. Keep customers engaged throughout the onboarding process

Madison Kochenderfer, Dock’s Customer Success Lead, boosts engagement by adding introductory videos to the top of each customer’s Dock onboarding workspace. 

For higher-touch accounts, she also records personalized follow-up videos to keep the onboarding momentum going:

“I might give somebody a to-do item before we chat next. And I'll record a little Loom for a minute, just recapping why this is important and how to go about doing it so they don't even have to read an article. It's specific to them. I'm saying their name in it. It takes me one minute to record. I can do it between calls.”

No matter how personalized your onboarding process is, some customers will inevitably struggle to make progress. If you’re using slide decks, emails, and project management software to manage onboarding, it’s hard to know who’s falling behind. 

With Dock, you can track each customer’s onboarding engagement. The Dock activity feed shows you who is (and isn't) engaged, so you can reach out and nudge them along. (You can also see your customer service managers’ activities to understand whether they should allocate more time to those accounts.)

For Ingrid Murra, CEO of Two Front, tracking onboarding activity has become an essential part of guiding her clients through the onboarding process:

“Now we can see if a [client] hasn't gone in there. We've connected Dock to our Slack channel, and we just get notified all day, every day, who's looking.

So that's been tremendously useful because we can kind of call them out.

We're like, ‘Oh, of course, you're not getting any results. You haven't even looked at this. You’ve gotta go into your portal and get rolling. Take a look at what we've provided there for you to get onboarded.’”

With Dock’s reporting tools, you can get a bird’s-eye view of customer onboarding metrics across all your Dock workspaces, including:

• Average time to completion
• % of implementations completed on time
• Customer engagement: views, actions, and average unique customers
• Most engaged customers

4. Avoid information overload by delivering your onboarding in phases

Rather than aiming for comprehensive training, consider narrowing the scope of each phase of your onboarding.

Focus on achievable, practical tasks that have an immediate impact. For example, Eloise Salisbury, Chief Customer Officer at AutogenAI, suggests designing a phased implementation process that steers customers toward your stickiest features first to encourage product adoption.

Will Yang, Head of Growth & Customer Success at Intrumentl, found that creating a bite-sized onboarding process helped his customers build confidence and boosted engagement:

“We found that people were more likely to actually use the training if it was delivered in small chunks. This way, they could do one piece at a time and feel like they were making progress on their new skillset.”

With Dock, you can avoid onboarding overwhelm by showing and hiding onboarding content. As users complete each phase of your onboarding, you can unlock the next step.

5. Create a unified sales-to-success portal for seamless handoffs

The sales-to-customer success handoff is famously tricky territory. Sloppy execution can sour customers on your onboarding process before it starts. There’s plenty to be said about how to manage this process more seamlessly, from aligning CSM and AE incentives to ensuring Customer Success gets all relevant deal information from Sales.

But internal alignment will only get you so far—especially at scale. 

With Dock, you can create a digital sales room that morphs into a customer onboarding portal. When the deal closes, you can unhide the onboarding content. That way, your customers don’t have to learn a new tool, and the onboarding experience has full continuity with the sales experience.

With a unified sales-to-success portal, your CSMs will spend less time spinning up onboarding portals for each new account. And since all of the information collected by Sales still lives in the same portal, you can save even more time by automatically populating your onboarding pages with relevant account information.

Create a white-glove onboarding experience with Dock

A white-glove onboarding experience is a crucial part of any effort to boost product adoption, get customers to value realization quickly, and reduce churn.

It doesn’t require lengthy customer meetings or a huge investment in your Customer Success team. With a thoughtful onboarding process, along with the right tools, you can give even low-touch customers a white-glove experience.

Get started with Dock’s customer onboarding template to see how you can give customers a white-glove, personalized onboarding experience at scale.