Onboarding

Accord Onboarding Playbook

Successfully onboard new customers and their teams and align on the long-term partnership.

It’s often a big lift for companies to successfully implement and get value from a new solution in a reasonable timeframe. Dave Le Corre, CX Lead at Accord, uses this onboarding playbook to keep the onboarding process on track and moving toward an agreed-upon end goal.

Why should I use this playbook?

Use this playbook to align with your new customers on the desired outcome of the onboarding process, establish a timeline, and keep both sides accountable to it. This will help prevent deadlines from being pushed back and onboardings being stalled.

If you start with the end goal and align on why it’s the end goal (and when it needs to be accomplished by) you can work backwards and set deadlines for all the other tasks needed to get there. Then you can use the agreed-upon end goal to hold your customer accountable: if they haven’t completed a task, you can remind them of its importance and how it affects everything else in the process.

What’s in this playbook?

This playbook outlines all the steps required in the Accord onboarding process:

1. Onboarding – kickoff, playbook building, documentation, integration setup, etc.
2. Team Launch – roll out to the full team and introduce the first customers to Accord
3. Success – office hours, meeting links, product feedback, gifts & referrals
   

The summary page in this playbook is a flexible space to align with the customer on goals and outcomes. It might be used to outline the key deliverables, recap the customers’ requirements, or whatever else is most useful for both sides during onboarding.

Who is this playbook for?

This playbook can be used for a wide range of deal sizes, typically in the $10-50k range, with roughly a 4-6 week onboarding period.

In the top end of the range, there are often multiple teams to roll out the solution to. Dave might manage those deals in one Accord workspace, or create multiple if new stakeholders are involved.

How should I use this playbook?

Overall, you need to clearly define what the onboarding and success relationship will look like between your company and your customer. Make sure you build out the right sequence of self-serve resources to help them onboard smoothly.

When customizing this playbook, it’s important to understand the different end user groups of your solution and represent them effectively in the plan. Understand when in the process you need to integrate your solution with other tools, if required, and adjust the timeline accordingly.