topic Re: Onboarding Tickets? Anybody have experience with setting these up? in Tickets & Conversations

Onboarding Tickets? Anybody have experience with setting these up?

rvass — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 23:40:59 GMT

Looking for best practices on setting up Onboarding Ticket pipeline. Wondering about things like:

What properties to include?
I want our CSMs to be assigned by rotation based on new Deals - workflow should handle this, right?
One of stages will be "Adoption and Usage" where the CSM will need to look at a few different systems to find customer data. Where should this land on the Contact record where it can best be used in this stage of the onboarding ticket?
I'm thinking of using "Customer Persona" as a stage as well - it's an attractive option because of the reporting possibilities. Any ideas on how to best do this?

Thanks!

Re: Onboarding Tickets? Anybody have experience with setting these up?

sharonlicari — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 10:58:02 GMT

Hi @rvass

Welcome to the Community!

Thank you for sharing all this information. I'm curious to know what our experts have tried or recommend in this scenario.

Hey @Josh @darynsmith @louischausse any suggestions about this?

Thanks

Sharon

Re: Onboarding Tickets? Anybody have experience with setting these up?

darynsmith — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 12:13:02 GMT

Hi @rvass - my answes to your questions

What properties to include?
- It depends on the process you have mapped out - what information do the people that will be doing the onboarding need without having to switch between different systems.
- Always spend time mapping the process, before starting to configure HubSpot.
I want our CSMs to be assigned by rotation based on new Deals - workflow should handle this, right?
- Yes, you can use the Rotation action in a workflow.
One of stages will be "Adoption and Usage" where the CSM will need to look at a few different systems to find customer data. Where should this land on the Contact record where it can best be used in this stage of the onboarding ticket?
- How often will they check adoption and usage?
  - If only once, then make this a Ticket stage that the ticket moves into.
  - If every quarter/month/annually - then rather use a whole ticket pipeline for this so that you can see how usage changes over time.
I'm thinking of using "Customer Persona" as a stage as well - it's an attractive option because of the reporting possibilities. Any ideas on how to best do this?
- Not sure what you are trying to achieve here, are you trying to get the CSM team to identify what type of customer this is before they can move to the next stage?

Re: Onboarding Tickets? Anybody have experience with setting these up?

rvass — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 15:56:36 GMT

Thanks, Daryn! Regarding personas, I'm just wondering if anybody out there has tried this with a Ticket pipeline. Perhaps a stage in the pipeline where specific data from Hubspot (hubspot score? product line subscriptions, etc.) identify the customer as a specific persona.

Re: Onboarding Tickets? Anybody have experience with setting these up?

GBedard — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 13:27:33 GMT

It may serve you better to leverage Lifecycle Stage and a specific 'Customer Persona' custom field as opposed to using a Ticket Pipeline, although using the Ticket Pipeline for onboarding does sound appealing (and would allow you to easily report on different stages of onboarding). Through workflow automation, you can use a Custom Hubspot score to move the other custom fields about as well, but it is hard to give a full recommendation without understanding 100% what you are looking to achieve.

Let me know if I can help further, and have a great day!

Re: Onboarding Tickets? Anybody have experience with setting these up?

rvass — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 15:49:37 GMT

Thank you for your input! I like the idea of a Customer Persona contact property.

Re: Onboarding Tickets? Anybody have experience with setting these up?

stuartbalcombe — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 20:49:18 GMT

Love how you’re thinking of using a Ticket Pipeline for onboarding. Would absolutely recommend this approach vs adding onboarding data in custom properties because pipeline movements will always be timestamped making reporting much easier. We wrote a guide on how to set deal pipelines which equally applies to tickets here. And you’ll have a visual way to see the progression of companies through onboarding and quickly identify bottlenecks. Here’s a example pipeline for onboarding:

Ticket pipeline for onboarding

To breakdown your specific questions:

1. What properties to include?
This will definitely depend on your product and sales motion but a few that I would definitely consider including both on the ticket record itself but also consider showing in a board view.

a) Next step: A text field with a short description of the next action to take for this customer to help them make progress - include whether this is on your team or the customer.

b) Goals/Success Metrics: A text field with a summary of what the customer is trying to achieve by using your product - this may be collected during sales discovery or in onboarding but keeping this easily accessible makes it easier to frame the work they need to do in the context of the goals they are trying to achieve.

c) Persona: A dropdown field which could be populated when they sign up or selected manually that shows which persona they are (and can be used to segment educational content, onboarding plan, level of support etc).

d) Target Date: If you have a go live date or an end date for your onboarding plan keeping it accessible in a structured field is helpful for reporting and creating calculated actions relative to it. Eg Escalating customers that have not completed specific steps and are within X days of the target date.

If you have a customer facing onboarding plan then you could also pull more granular data about things like task completion status and progress too.

2. Can I use a workflow to handle CSM rotation? Absolutely - I’d suggest creating a workflow to handle as many steps related to handoffs as possible to ensure they happen repeatably and without things falling through the cracks.

Using a “Rotate record to owner” workflow action is what you need. If you have multiple people or teams who work with customers during onboarding you could also add branching logic to route new customers based on specific properties such as products/services purchased or persona.
Onboarding Handoff Workflow

3. Pulling customer data from external systems into tickets

I’d suggest putting account level data like product usage from external systems in custom properties on the company record and then using a workflow like the one below to copy it to the appropriate ticket in your onboarding pipeline whenever it gets updated. If the data is user specific you could of course do the same thing with a contact record.

The example below show how we pull customer product usage data from our software product into HubSpot company records and then push it into deals (which would work the same way for tickets).

We use Hightouch to pull data from our software’s Postgres database into HubSpot.

4. Should I use customer personas as a stage in the onboarding pipeline?

I’d recommend against using a stage and instead use a custom property with a select field. This way you will be able to use the property value to segment your customers in reporting, workflows and communications.

I created a video walkthrough of using persona’s to segment the onboarding experience that customers get in a workflow based on information provided by the customer and enrichment data provided by HubSpot here.

Let me know if there are any other questions that come up, happy to help think through the best setup for your specific onboarding process!