Welcome to the Onboarding Network @SihleM! We’re happy to have you join! 

This is a great question and there are a lot of ways you can look at it. I’m curious - where are you in your Onboarding journey? Are you looking to revamp your current experience completely, build it from scratch, or just seeing what others are doing?

Anywho - now to answer your question.

I love this question because it shows that you care about ensuring that your customers have a positive experience and achieve their desired outcomes with your product or service. By establishing KPI’s you can track progress, identify areas for improvement, and demonstrate the value you're delivering to your customers. Here are my 6 favorite KPIs to consider when measuring success in customer implementation and onboarding:

1. Time to First Value (TTFV): This measures the time it takes for a customer to start realizing the value of your product or service after signing up. A shorter TTFV indicates a more efficient and effective onboarding process. Notice that this is NOT measuring kickoff to onboarding graduation. It’s measuring kickoff to first AHA moment.

2. Completion Rate: Track the percentage of customers who successfully complete the onboarding process. This could involve setting up their accounts, configuring settings, and completing initial setup tasks. This data is important to help you find a trend of why accounts churn, lose momentum, etc and it can also be used to help Sales and Marketing define their ICP better.

3. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score: Gather feedback from customers about their onboarding experience and ask them to rate their satisfaction. This provides insights into the quality of your implementation process and helps you identify areas for improvement. We just had a lively discussion on this found here: 

4. Churn Rate: Monitor the percentage of customers who cancel or discontinue their subscription shortly after onboarding. A high churn rate might indicate that customers are not finding value quickly enough. Having a playbook here as well is important (what does offboarding experience look like?)

5. Time Spent in Onboarding: Measure the average time customers spend completing the onboarding process. This helps you gauge the complexity of your onboarding process and identify potential bottlenecks. Do you find your customers stalling at a certain phase? If yes, then maybe it’s time to revisit that spot.

6. Retention and Renewal Rates: Assess the percentage of customers who continue using your product or service beyond the initial onboarding phase and renew their subscriptions. This data can be powerful in helping you understand what worked and didn’t work in onboarding.

Keep in mind that the specific KPIs you choose to focus on should align with your company's goals, customer expectations, and the unique characteristics of your product or service. Regularly analyzing and optimizing these KPIs can help you refine your customer implementation and onboarding processes to drive success and improve customer satisfaction.

Hope this helped!

Elan captured most of the metrics we use in our tracking. One factor we used in a previous role that is different from a churn rate is a no-start rate. If your contract uses a no-fault withdrawal (client can leave without penalty during implementation) then you use a no start rate as well. That is typically the sum of the ARR of your no started clients divided by the sum of the ARR for completed projects during a set timeframe. 

Utilization can be another factor depending on the service or product. If you sell based on seats then what % of those seats are actively being used and how frequently. If you sell 100 seats and 20 are used but on an inconsistent basis then that is a very low threshold that is likely to lead to churn.

These are some really good ideas - thank you all for sharing!

We have two additional we look at… 

• Delta … how is project tracking compared to planned end date?
  • Calculation: Forecast/Actual End Date - Planned End Date
  • Acceptable Value: Negative is great, but you can establish a above-zero threshold that works for your industry
• On Time Rate…. percentage of active projects within the “on time” threshold on Delta calcs
  • Calculation: (Number w Acceptable Delta) / (Number Active Projects)
  • Acceptable Value: Up to you!