Increasing onboarding completions
When a customer is excited about your product, you want to seize that interest as quickly as possible. Online ordering system HungryHungry knows this well, as Head of Operations Scott Fox explains:
“We used to have this problem of failures to launch, where a customer would sign on with us and never end up using our product.”
Some merchants just weren’t the right fit. But often there’s another culprit: “We lost engagement with the customer through them sitting in onboarding too long,” Scott says.
HungryHungry knew they had to do more to guide customers through the sometimes complex steps of this critical stage: “Speed to value for us really is the onboarding pipeline.”
To increase onboarding completion, HungryHungry would have to engage customers early, help them where they stumbled, and improve speed to value for new clients, all while onboarding more customers at once.
Consolidating onto one platform
HungryHungry has used HubSpot since the very beginning, with Service Hub their platform to manage support tickets and move new customers through the onboarding pipeline. While there’s no “before” HubSpot at HungryHungry, Scott remembers the frustration of trying to work across multiple systems at previous companies.
“The amount of effort required to jump between multiple systems to do one task can easily be underestimated,” he says. “That alone places a lot of cognitive load on people.” Data syncing issues can also emerge between different systems.
HungryHungry wants to simplify work. “We want to get rid of as much friction as possible so people can just get on with their jobs,” Scott says. “Having it all on one system really helps with that.”
Service Hub is that single source of truth for customer interactions at HungryHungry, giving Scott’s team full visibility into everything that’s happening, all in one place.
Gaining visibility across teams
To improve onboarding completions, HungryHungry wanted to simplify work even more for their salespeople, onboarders, and CSMs who guide their customer through the stages of signup, setup and ongoing success. “The way we work is super cross-functional,” Scott says. “You’ve got an onboarder who looks after the customer, but there’s also a salesperson or CSM who’s invested in that customer as well.”
Everyone wants to keep the customer motivated, knowing that people often lose steam on more complex steps, like integrating with third-party payment platforms. But maintaining visibility into customer progress created hours of additional work. The answer can’t be to hire infinitely more onboarders. “We have to be cleverer about using the people we’ve got,” Scott says.
HungryHungry turned to HubSpot's essential apps for customer service to automate workflows and connect different tools, allowing people to focus on their most valuable work.
Integrating with Arrows
Onboarding varies from one customer to another. HungryHungry uses Arrows as part of its onboarding, providing customers with a full view of every step they need to complete to go from signed deal to launch.
With the Arrows app for HubSpot, customers automatically receive their customized plan on signing, sometimes even earlier. “It allows us to start collecting information from the customer and build off that early excitement right away,” Scott says.
It also gives the team greater visibility into how the customer progresses through their onboarding checklist, from uploading menus and promos to connecting with payment platforms. “Everything the customer does in Arrows is reflected back in HubSpot,” Scott says.
Pushing notifications to Slack
“When we’re not in HubSpot, we’re in Slack,” says Scott. Rather than people spending hours manually checking the status of every new customer, the Slack app for HubSpot sends push notifications to the team Slack channel.
Whenever the customer does something important, like completing their onboarding or stalling at a certain stage, the team is alerted. “It’s not just the onboarder responsible,” Scott says. “The whole team can get involved and help if there’s a blockage.”
HubSpot workflows allow Scott to get the greatest value from apps through automation. “Any process that can be automated, we’ve automated,” he says. If a customer is stuck on a task, for example, they receive an email with an explainer video for extra hand holding. “We’ve seen that we don’t always need to get involved. The system can help people through.”
Onboarding in half the time
Since HungryHungry implemented these apps, their average customer completes onboarding twice as fast, the difference measured in weeks.
Nearly all customers successfully onboard, too, with the completion rate increasing 18 percentage points from its lowest point. “We have definitely gotten rid of that early churn,” Scott says.
Every onboarder and CSM saves at least two hours per week not having to manually scroll through tickets to see where customers are at. Salespeople even more, according to Scott’s estimate. Multiply by team size, and that’s a lot of time saved through automation.
The biggest change since introducing these apps is that team members have more time to focus on the customer. Onboarder productivity has increased 2x–3x, with onboarders becoming like “mini CSMs,” in Scott’s words.
“They spend more time nurturing the customer through onboarding, but also after they’ve launched, with adoption.” Has the customer considered adding photos to their menu, setting up cross-sells, or running a launch campaign to encourage orders on day one? “Onboarders still have a lot of communication with the customer, but that’s the good, value-adding stuff we want them doing,” Scott concludes.
“It was a massive, night-and-day shift, putting in this process."
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