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Managing high-value, complex customers can feel like a balancing act. You know they need more than just a standard onboarding process – they require hands-on, personalized attention to truly succeed.
But how do you provide that level of support without overwhelming your team or slowing down operations?
The challenge of balancing high-touch onboarding with scalability is something many Customer Success Managers (CSMs) grapple with. You’re expected to reduce churn, cater to each customer’s unique needs, and offer practical onboarding advice, all while ensuring your process remains efficient.
It’s easy to feel stuck between delivering a personalized experience and keeping up with the demands of a growing customer base.
In this blog, we’ll cover what high-touch onboarding really means, how to build a scalable process, key strategies you can apply, the common challenges you’ll face along the way, and how to overcome them.
What is high-touch onboarding?
Before discussing how to build a high-touch onboarding process, let’s define what it actually means. High-touch onboarding is a hands-on approach that provides each customer with personalized attention, frequent check-ins, and customized onboarding plans.
Unlike a one-size-fits-all method, this approach is tailored specifically to the customer’s needs, ensuring they fully understand and adopt your product. You’ll typically use high-touch onboarding for enterprise clients or customers with complex workflows.
These customers often require more than a few tutorial videos or automated emails – they need one-on-one support to help navigate the nuances of your software and make it work for their specific use case.
In contrast, low-touch onboarding relies on automation and self-service resources. While this may be enough for smaller or less complex customers, high-touch becomes necessary when the stakes are higher.
Now that we’ve defined what it is, let’s look at how to build a successful high-touch onboarding process.
Building a high-touch onboarding process
A good high-touch process balances personalization with efficiency, ensuring every customer receives the attention they need without overwhelming your resources. Here are some key elements to consider when creating your high-touch onboarding process:
1. Create tailored onboarding plans
Every customer has unique needs, especially enterprise clients or those with complex use cases. Start by mapping out a custom success plan for each customer, outlining specific milestones, tasks, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This ensures that you and your customer are aligned on goals from day one. If you’re using a CS tool like Velaris, you’ll be able to do this directly on the platform and measure progress in real time.
2. Automate repetitive tasks without losing the personal touch
Repetitive tasks like scheduling meetings, sending follow-up emails, and tracking task completion can eat into the time you’d rather spend building customer relationships. By automating these routine tasks, you free up space for more personalized interactions.
Velaris’ drag-and-drop automation builder allows you to standardize your process without sacrificing the personal engagement required by high-touch onboarding.
3. Establish clear communication and collaboration channels
High-touch onboarding relies on seamless communication between your internal teams and the customer. By bringing all communication into one centralized platform, you ensure that everyone stays aligned.
Velaris’ communication tools allow you to manage all customer conversations and internal collaboration in one place, so nothing slips through the cracks.
4. Track customer health and proactively address issues
Successful onboarding isn’t just about guiding the customer; it’s also about keeping them on track. Monitoring customer health can help you identify potential issues before they become problems.
With Velaris’ customer health score tracking, you can flag signs of disengagement early and take proactive steps to keep customers on the path to success.
Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for a strong onboarding process, let’s explore some strategies to make that process as effective as possible.
Key strategies for effective high-touch onboarding
After setting up your high-touch onboarding process, the next step is ensuring that it’s not only effective but also continuously improving. Here are some strategies to help make your high-touch onboarding process even more successful:
1. Set clear goals and expectations early
From the very beginning, it’s crucial to align with your customer on their specific success goals. By establishing clear objectives upfront, both you and your customer know exactly what to aim for.
Review progress regularly to ensure that those goals are being met, adjusting the plan as needed to keep things on track.
2. Personalized training and resources
Each customer has unique requirements, so a one-size-fits-all approach to training will not work. Tailor your training materials to each customer’s specific use case, incorporating industry-relevant examples to make them more relatable.
3. Ongoing check-ins and feedback loops
Frequent communication is a must for effective onboarding. Schedule regular check-ins to review progress, address any challenges, and gather feedback. To stay consistent without adding too much manual effort, Velaris’ automated email sequences allow you to maintain timely follow-ups that feel personalized.
4. Leverage data for continuous improvement
Gathering data throughout the onboarding process helps you understand what’s working and where improvements can be made. By building and analyzing surveys through Velaris, you can capture customer feedback and use it to refine your process over time.
Next, we’ll explore the common challenges that often arise in high-touch onboarding and how to navigate them effectively.
Common challenges with high touch onboarding and how to overcome them
Even with a strong onboarding process in place, high-touch onboarding comes with its own set of challenges, especially as your customer base grows. Here are a few common issues and how you can overcome them:
1. Scalability
As your customer count rises, scaling a high-touch onboarding approach without sacrificing the quality of interactions becomes difficult. To address this, you can leverage automation to handle repetitive tasks like follow-ups and reminders while keeping essential, personalized touchpoints intact.
2. Alignment across teams
Onboarding often requires input from sales, support, and product teams, leading to miscommunication or delays. Misalignment across teams can easily disrupt onboarding. To avoid this, it’s crucial to centralize data and ensure everyone involved has visibility into the process.
Velaris integrates data across sales, marketing, Customer Success, and support, ensuring that each team has up-to-date, consistent information about the customer’s progress.
3. Keeping the customer engaged
Some customers may disengage or lose focus, slowing down their time-to-value. Proactive communication and real-time insights can help keep customers on track. Velaris’ AI-powered insights flag disengaged customers, allowing you to take timely action and re-engage them before the onboarding momentum is lost.
Now that we’ve covered the common challenges, let’s summarize how a well-executed high-touch onboarding process can set your customers – and your business – up for long-term success.
Conclusion
High-touch onboarding can make a big difference for complex customer needs, but it requires thoughtful planning, efficient processes, and the right tools to balance personalization with scalability.
By setting clear goals, automating where it makes sense, and keeping communication seamless, you can provide your customers with the tailored experience they need to succeed.
Along the way, keeping an eye on common challenges like scalability, team alignment, and customer engagement will help you stay on track.
Velaris is built to help you navigate these challenges, offering automation and centralized communication to scale high-touch onboarding without losing the personal connections that matter.
If you're looking to streamline your onboarding process while maintaining a strong, personalized approach, book a demo today and see how Velaris can support your team and your customers.
