How to Set Up a Hybrid Customer Success Process

There’s a lot of debate about which approach is best for customer onboarding:

1. Self-service onboarding (i.e. automated onboarding)
2. Onboarding via email and Slack
3. Onboarding via video calls over Google Meet or Zoom

Naturally, each approach has its own pros and cons that companies must weigh before settling on the approach to use.

At AiSDR, we wanted the best of all worlds 🌎 That’s why our customer success team combined all three approaches when designing our onboarding and support process 😎

The result? We get customers onboarded in as little as 2 hours while providing clients with the freedom to choose what works best for them.

TLDR: 

• The goal: Reduce customer onboarding to 2 hours
• The tactic: Implement a hybrid approach to speed up customer onboarding
• The result: Customers are live in 2 hours

Step 1: Automate everything you can

The first thing you should do is figure out (1) what can be automated, (2) what has to be managed by a human support agent, and (3) what can be shared.

For AiSDR’s onboarding, we automated the:

• Initial email sent to a client after they subscribe
• Invitation to a dedicated Slack channel with all AiSDR support agents
• Account creation once payment is confirmed

That’s not all though.

At AiSDR, we try to be an AI-first company, which means we also use AI to:

• Summarize what clients do using their website and own answers
• Build first drafts of personas
• Create content for our knowledge base
• Simplify and condense complicated technical explanations
• Translate content into languages not known by our team
• Classify email responses and process auto-replies

Automating all of this allows each support agent to work with a large number of clients in a short amount of time.

Step 2: Set up personalized support channels

Our customer success team aims to deliver white-glove customer experiences.

This involves assigning:

• A dedicated primary account manager
• A backup manager if the primary is unavailable due to illness, vacation, etc
• A member of our team to be on call for the week outside standard business hours, such as on weekends and holidays

This set-up means our team is available 24/7 year-round, which allows clients to contact us when they need our help instead of having to wait until the next business day.

Step 3: Provide the opportunity for calls

Sometimes explanations over email and Slack don’t get the job done, and the client needs a live walkthrough of a feature, such as how to set up a new domain or connect our email warm-up tool.

When this occurs, it’s important for clients to have the option to schedule a call and go over the issue in real time.

All AiSDR clients receive a Calendly link that they can access and use to set up calls.

Similar to questions sent over email or Slack, clients who set up a call will typically speak with their primary account manager. And when the primary is out, they’ll talk with the backup or on-call manager.

Calls are also a fast and easy way to:

• Get on the same page with clients
• Collect client feedback about the product (i.e. what’s good, what’s bad, and what are nice-to-haves)
• Receive suggestions about how we can improve the customer experience

The Result

Although clients get on the platform and are ready to launch their first campaign within 2 hours, we’re constantly looking for ways to optimize our customer onboarding process to make it faster.

The shorter we can make onboarding without sacrificing quality, the faster customers enjoy time to value.

On G2, many past and current clients mention our customer success team as an advantage, citing our:

• Personalized support
• Timely responses (we strive to keep time to respond under 10 minutes)
• Willingness to ideate and bounce ideas together