---
name: customer-onboarding
description: Use when asked to design or write a customer onboarding plan — the process of getting a new customer from purchase to first real value — distinct from [[employee-onboarding]], which ramps a new hire rather than a new customer.
---

# Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is the process of taking a newly signed customer
from purchase to first real value from what they bought. It's a
deliberate sequence — not just "let them log in and explore" — because
a customer who doesn't reach value quickly is a customer at risk of
churning before they ever got real use out of the product.

## Key phases

- **Setup and implementation** — the technical or administrative work
  to get the customer live: account configuration, data migration,
  integrations, user provisioning. Necessary, but not itself the goal.
- **First success milestone** — the point where the customer actually
  experiences the value they bought for, not just where setup is
  technically complete. A configured account nobody has used
  successfully yet is not a finished onboarding.
- **Handoff to ongoing support** — a defined transition from the
  onboarding team or contact to whoever owns the relationship
  afterward (support, customer success), with context carried over
  rather than the customer having to re-explain themselves to a new
  face.

## Key components

- **Time to first value target** — a concrete, defined target (e.g.
  "first successful report generated within 7 days") that lets the
  organization measure whether onboarding is actually working, rather
  than treating "onboarding complete" as a self-reported checkbox.
- **A named point of contact** — one person the customer knows to reach
  during onboarding, rather than routing through a generic queue while
  they're still learning the basics of the product.
- **A checklist** — an explicit, ordered set of setup and adoption steps
  the customer (and the vendor) work through together, rather than
  leaving the customer to explore and figure out what to do first on
  their own.

## Common pitfalls

- **Onboarding that ends at setup** — declaring onboarding complete once
  the account is configured, without confirming the customer reached an
  actual success milestone, hands off a technically-live but not yet
  valuable account.
- **No clear owner** — a customer who falls into the gap between sales
  (who closed the deal and moved on) and support (who hasn't been
  briefed yet) gets no one actively driving them toward value during
  the critical early period.
- **Generic onboarding regardless of what was bought** — running every
  customer through the identical sequence ignores that a customer who
  bought one module needs a different setup path, and different early
  milestones, than one who bought the full platform.
- **No time-to-value target** — without a defined target, there's no way
  to tell a customer who's on track from one who's quietly stalling
  before they ever get real use out of the purchase.
- **Overloading the customer up front** — dumping every feature and
  configuration option into the first session overwhelms a customer who
  just needs a fast path to their first success milestone.

## Learn more

- [[customer-success-plan]] for the ongoing relationship that follows
  once onboarding is complete.
- [[employee-onboarding]] for the parallel process of ramping a new
  hire rather than a new customer.
- [[customer-journey-map]] for placing onboarding within the customer's
  full path from first contact through renewal.
- [[customer-persona]] for tailoring onboarding to what a given type of
  customer actually needs.