Share article
I’ll start with a specific number that haunted me for a long time. Years ago, when I was doing CX at a SaaS company, we properly looked for the first time at when our customers were leaving. Most churn (customer departures) did not happen in the sixth month, nor after a year. It happened between the 30th and 90th day after signing the contract. That is, at a time when we were convinced the customer was “ours.” They had signed, received access, gone through a kick-off call. Done, let’s go acquire another one.
Mistake.
Onboarding is the most expensive phase of the entire customer journey. And most companies don’t know it, because they don’t even measure it as a separate phase.
Why the first 90 days decide everything
There is a concept called the “first value moment” – the moment when the customer first experiences the value for which they bought the product or service. If this moment happens quickly, the chance that the customer stays increases dramatically. If it doesn’t happen within the first weeks, the customer mentally disconnects. They may still pay for some time, but the decision to leave has already been made.
Wes Bush, who wrote the book Product-Led Growth, formulates it this way: “If the customer doesn’t experience the value of the product during the first week, they probably never will.” It’s not just in software. The same principle applies to a bank, an insurance company, telecom, a fitness center, a B2B service, and a subscription e-shop.
Bain & Company, in its often-cited study (the one from which the well-known claim comes that increasing retention by 5% raises profit by 25 to 95%), has long argued that acquiring a new customer costs five to seven times more than retaining an existing one. And yet. When you look at the budget of a typical company, marketing and sales have several times more resources than onboarding and customer success combined.
I see this disproportion in practice all the time. A company spends hundreds of thousands on performance campaigns to bring in leads. The sales team has bonuses tied to signing the contract. And then? Then the customer gets a welcome email with access details and… silence. No owner, no plan, no metric.
Why companies underestimate it
I recently spoke with a colleague from a mid-sized B2B company. She told me: “We have onboarding. We send a welcome pack, we have training, documentation.” I asked whether they measure how many customers actually open that documentation. She didn’t know.
And this is the core of the problem. Onboarding is confused with activation. Activation is “we gave them access.” Onboarding is “we led them to actually use the product and see value in it.” That is a fundamental difference.
The second reason companies underestimate it is organizational. Sales “hands off” the customer to customer success or customer care. In that handoff, context gets lost. Sales promised X, customer success knows about Y, the customer expects Z. A classic situation that repeats over and over again.
The third reason is metrics. NPS (Net Promoter Score, a metric measuring willingness to recommend) is usually measured in the stable phase of the relationship. CES (Customer Effort Score, a metric measuring how easy it was to get something done) is measured after a specific interaction. But onboarding requires its own metrics – Time to First Value, Activation Rate, Onboarding Completion Rate. Few people have these in their reports.
What actually works (and what doesn’t)
I’ll be specific here, because this is an area where there is a lot of vagueness.
What works:
Having an onboarding owner. Someone who is responsible for its success and has a metric tied to it. Without that, it belongs to everyone and no one.
Defining what “successful onboarding” means for your specific product. Not in general. Specifically. In SaaS it can be “the customer performed action X three times within the first 14 days.” In a fitness center, “they came five times within the first month.” In a subscription e-shop, “they opened the second box and used at least half of the items.” Without this definition, you have nothing to measure.
Proactive contact at critical points. Not monitoring, but help. If I see that the customer didn’t log in during the first week, I don’t send “did you forget about us?”, but “I noticed you haven’t logged in yet – do you need help?”. A small difference that works.
Segmenting onboarding by customer type. A large client paying ten times more cannot go through the same process as a self-service user. Personalization here is not a luxury, it is a necessity.
What doesn’t work:
Overloading the customer with information in the first days. Almost everyone does this. Welcome email, documentation, onboarding video, FAQ, webinar invitation, support contact, newsletter, prompt to fill out a profile. The customer closes it and doesn’t return. It sounds simple. It isn’t.
Relying on the customer to “reach out if something comes up.” They won’t. Most dissatisfied customers never speak up. They just quietly leave. A study by Esteban Kolsky, often cited by HubSpot, shows that only about 1 in 26 dissatisfied customers complains. The rest leave silently.
A one-time “welcome” action and that’s it. Onboarding is not an event, it is a process. Ninety days, not ninety minutes.
How to measure it if you don’t have resources for big research
This is probably the most common question I hear. Here are three things you can do immediately and cheaply:
- Calculate in which month your customers most often leave. Excel is enough. If you have a spike in the first three months, you have an onboarding problem, not a product problem.
- Ask customers who stayed for a year or more what helped them most in the first weeks. And ask those who left within the first 90 days what they were missing. A short phone call is enough. From ten calls you will learn more than from a big study.
- Introduce a simple onboarding survey on day 30 after the start. Not NPS. A question like “Do you feel that the product/service is starting to pay off?” with a scale of 1–5. If the answer is 3 or less, you have a problem there that you need to solve now. Not in half a year, when the customer has already left.
What to take away from this
Acquisition brings in the customer. Onboarding decides whether they stay. And yet it is the phase that most companies have no one owning, don’t measure with their own metrics, and invest only a fraction of what they spend on acquisition.
If you are to solve one thing in CX next quarter, let it be this. It will pay off more than another campaign. I guarantee it.
And if you think of the objection “we have good onboarding, this isn’t a problem for us,” try answering four questions as a test:
- who in your company is responsible for onboarding,
- what is your definition of successful onboarding,
- how do you measure Time to First Value,
- what percentage of customers leave in the first 90 days.
If you hesitate on any of the answers, we have something to talk about.
Don’t want to miss another article? Download the X Pulse app and have new articles always at your fingertips.
