Run the same onboarding for every customer

The situation

Every customer goes through the same five or six steps: kickoff, data load, training, go live, a review a month later. The steps are identical each time and the progress is different for every account, which is exactly the shape a CRM should hold and traditionally does not.

So it goes in a spreadsheet, one tab per customer, and by the third month nobody can tell you how many customers are stuck before go live without opening all of them.

What must be true when you are done

• Onboarding steps are records, not rows in a document.
• Each step belongs to an account and you can ask for one account's steps.
• You can ask how many are still open, across every customer, in one question.
• Completing a step changes the answer to that question.

Describe the thing once

Tell the agent what an onboarding step is. Two details in this description are doing real work, and both are easier to get right now than to change later.

That last sentence is the important one. A field you want to filter or count by has to be declared that way when the type is created. Ask for it up front and it costs nothing; discover it later and you are changing the shape of a type that already has records in it.

The second detail is the account link. Saying each step belongs to a company creates the reference, and you ask about it by the name you declared: the steps belonging to an account is a filter on the account. Worth stating only because the alternative is guessing, and guessing at a name is how people conclude a thing cannot be asked at all.

Create the set for a new customer

Ask the two questions this exists for

One account, so you can walk into their call knowing where they are:

Then the same question across every customer, which the spreadsheet could never answer:

Both are the same shape of question, and the second one is the reason to do this at all. It is the number that tells you whether onboarding is a process or a queue.

Complete one and watch the count move

Five to four. That is the whole test of whether this is a real record or a decoration: the number somebody reports on has to change when the work happens, without anybody remembering to update a second place.

Verify it

• Ask for another account's steps. You should get none, not everybody's. If a filter on the account comes back with every step in the workspace, it is not being applied and every count you take from here will be wrong in the same direction.
• Try to set a step outside the list. It should be refused. An enum that accepts a sixth value is text, and within a month you will have "go-live", "Go Live" and "golive" as three different answers.
• Count the open steps before and after completing one. If it does not move, you are looking at a cached answer or the wrong filter.

Run it again

Once per new customer, which the agent can do from the closed deal without being told the step names again. If the steps themselves keep changing, the type is wrong rather than the process, and describing the thing properly is worth another twenty minutes. When onboarding goes badly, the escalation has to reach the account team, which is a different problem than tracking it.