Smart Sheet for tracking customer onboarding process for Saas company

LDD

Hello Smartsheet community members,

 

I am on trial and trying to learn ways to setup smartsheet in order to track customer onboarding process. 

 

My company is creating and selling software to customers (Saas) and we are looking for ways to improve our internal communication to help our customer adaping our software quicker and easier using Smartsheet.

 

To start, I have created a "customer onboarding template" that contains every little step that our support team has to do to get our customers adapting our software. (e.g. Send welcome email, conduct web app training, send how to videos....etc). Not all steps are to be completed in order and we are trying to be flexible with the way we operate; which is why we have decided to give Smartsheet a try. 

 

I am planning to use this template and apply it to every customer we have onboarded to track where they are in the process but wondering if any of you are using Smartsheet in a similar way that I am planning to use.  

 

I'd like to hear suggestions and feedback from you all to improve my Smartsheet setup.

I am also looking for ways to generate a report that tells me what to do each day with all customers we have.

 

Looking forward to hear back.

 

Thanks! 

Richard Rymill SBP

Hi LDD 

You are defintely on the right track with what you are doing, this is a very popular use of Smartsheet and dozens of companes we work with use it for just that (among other things). 

A good tip would be to create one sheet for all your OnBoarding process ( archive what is finished) which will probably create a very big sheet that is great because it is just one source of the latest situation, then create a dasboard within that sheet to analyse progress, use Cell linking to create a high level management KPI view sheet. Then  use Reports that become your To Do Lists and drive the work forward, on any device. 

We are just doing this work with a New York Gym group and it works well.

so yes you are on the right track. 

RichardR

Smarterbiz

 

 

J. Craig Williams

LDD,

 

RichardR is correct, you are on the right track.

 

If you already have a well defined process (and it sounds like you do), then I would suggest looking at each piece and asking a few typical questions:

1. who does this?

2. when (is there a triggering event?) is it done?

3. is it done more than once?

4. can it be automated? 

5. are there follow up actions?

6. what if it isn't done?

 

Smartsheet can help with all of that. 

 

[I just wrote and deleted a very long discussion, that upon review I realized was likely off topic. You are welcome]

 

This is the onboarding checklist template for my team:

- contained actions that needed to be done by me, by someone else on my team, or by someone else in the company, everything we could think of was in the checklist

- some actions were weeks before the person arrived, some the day before, some the days and weeks after the person started. 

- the type of person, not an actual person, to do the task was listed in the template.

- the dates were all tied to a single "start date" so that once that was updated, everything would cascade to the correct current date.

- the template was revised whenever something was found to be missing. 

- once a person was hired, the template was changed to the persons record and the assignments made for who needed to do what.

- the template/sheet was set up to use Resources, so we could see that if there was a conflict in the normal timeframe for the training

- everyone assigned to an action was shared to the sheet or the workspace where it resides.

- the sheet was set up to send out alerts and reminders - so everyone got an initial email after the start date and assignments were made.

- and then I or a designee would track this along with the new hire.

 

I would suggest sharing as much of the Smartsheet process with the customer as is feasible. Probably not as much as onboarding a new hire.

 

Reports can be used to consolidate all tasks from all sheets for a single person or for a single customer. It depends how your team works.

The person doing the task can update status from the report or from Update Requests. Both are worth looking into.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Craig

 

 

LDD

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the tip. I didn't think of creating a dashboard within a list to analyse progress. This is exciting! Will try and build this  

Best,