How this Customer Operations Manager onboards and automates for success

Onboarding is no joke: it's your first act of trust. Once the contract is signed, you only get one shot at a good first impression, and how you prepare your customer tools will make all the difference. Outreach Customer Operations Manager Sarah Foster illustrates how she prepares triggers and sequences to start off on the right foot:

Hi, my name is Sarah Foster and I am Manager of Customer Operations here at Outreach. And today I'm going to walk you through our account onboarding process and how I go about setting this up for our customer success and account management teams. So first thing I'll do is go through and I'll create a new sequence with our new sequence blueprints.

Establishing triggers

And I can do that by going to Add Sequence, using a blueprint, look for account onboarding. And then create a sequence. So now that we have our customer onboarding kickoff sequence built out, I'm going to walk you through how I would set up the triggers. So once any close opportunities meet this criteria, it will prompt our team to go ahead and add their customers into the sequence. So we'll go into our administration.

And I'll walk through our triggers. Before our opportunity triggers, we want to ensure that anytime a customer is a new customer with us, that we get them connected with their CSM within a certain time period. So for this, our triggers allow us to have a scheduled trigger based on a specific date and time that our team will get a notification to reach out to this customer. So how we do this is it also allows us to create a trigger to assign it to a specific team or owner.

So in this case, I want to make sure that my CSMs are assigned an action item to go ahead and start account onboarding.

Branching conditions

The other thing this trigger allows us to do that I want to set up is account for other teams. So we can also use our branching conditions. So I now have two action items for this one trigger.

If you're a CSM on this part, it's going to go trigger this action. And if you are a CSM on another team, it's going to trigger a separate action simultaneously without any work being done on my part. So we can continue to have a positive customer experience as they join. I'm going to walk you through the process for our teams to go ahead and execute on the task. And we do this with our Success Plans.

Integrating Success Plans

So here at Outreach, we want to make sure that customers have a fluid experience from the time that we start talking about becoming a potential customer to contract close and they sign with us and they're connected with a CSM or an Account Manager. So what that task does is lets our team know to go in and finish out the Success Plan that's tied to the opportunity.

So we have our account managers, our AEs or CSMs using the same success plan.

And they can see the historical data of what happened, what's important to the customer, any conversations that were had previously and use this to close the loop and kick off the next post sales journey with the customer through this Success Plan. And that's how we do account onboarding Outreach.