You've finally won the deal: an exciting conclusion to the involved sales process that may have taken weeks or months. Yet, it's only the beginning of earning the confidence of customers and seeing the benefits. During customer onboarding, you lay the foundation of trust and a positive relationship with your customer, which directly impacts retention.
Optimizing the onboarding journey is essential in a B2B software world where customer satisfaction is an ongoing process. Establishing and keeping track of the right metrics is critical to accomplish this. Unfortunately, analyzing and innovating your onboarding process without comprehensive data and insights is like navigating without a map.
These customer onboarding metrics are easy to put in place and start tracking on a regular basis.
10 Customer Onboarding Metrics You Should Be Looking At
1. Deal Close-to-Onboarding Start Timespan (Backlog)
A backlog is the total number of days between when a customer signs up for your services and when they begin the onboarding. Management should always be aware of this metric, as an overly lengthy backlog can decrease customer satisfaction and lead to higher attrition rates.
Many variables can impact the backlog. For instance, a high-performing sales team is a good problem to have but nevertheless, a problem to be managed. Whatever the root of the backlog is, it's critical to identify and address it so customers are onboarded efficiently.
Also, keep an eye on the next metric in conjunction with the backlog. It’s possible to assign an onboarding rep to start working with the customer as soon as the deal is signed, making the backlog issue “go away.” Still, if the onboarding rep is overwhelmed with the number of concurrent implementations, this will impact the completion timeline.
To measure your backlog, use the following formula:
Backlog of a Single Customer = Date of the start of the onboarding project - date of the close of the contract
You can opt to track only business days, discounting holidays, staff days off, and weekends, but this metric should give you a pretty good idea of where you are.
Track this for every customer and maintain a log of the average number of days it takes to start onboarding from the signature date. If that number starts to grow or you notice that you are losing customers because the wait is too long, it’s time to do something about it!
2. Average Onboarding Project Timespan
The implementation time span is the total time it takes to set up a customer and have them start using your product or service. Generally, this process includes onboarding, training, data integration, configuration, and other related activities.
This customer onboarding metric provides insights into the cost, level of effort, and time investment for your onboarding team to get customers up and running. Establishing and tracking this baseline metric allows you to determine if any given onboarding project is taking too long. That could reflect an onboarding rep’s limited capacity or performance, unexpected deal scope, poor customer cooperation, or other issues.
A more granular review offers support in the market sector as well as customer profiling, staff training, and capacity management, among other factors. For better accuracy, it’s helpful to keep track of the reps working on a project and the customer’s industry and size.
Use the following formula to assess the onboarding timespan:
Onboarding Timespan = Date of the completion of onboarding project - date of the start of onboarding project
As with the backlog, capture this data point and incorporate it into the overall average calculation of the onboarding timespan. Get as granular and as detailed as you can.
3. Onboarding Completion Rate
This metric represents the percentage of onboarding completed from start to finish. It's important to know where your process fits in terms of completion rate as it helps create a benchmark to measure progress further down the line.
When identifying a red flag in your onboarding completion percentage, you'll want to dive into exactly where in the onboarding process customers are dropping off and why.
Here’s the formula you’ll want to use:
Onboarding Project Completion Percentage = (# of customers who completed the onboarding / # of customers who closed the deal) * 100
4. The Cost of Onboarding
One of the most difficult metrics to measure is the cost of onboarding—and for a good reason. Managing the costs of the onboarding process requires diligent tracking and analysis. It's not easy to do this without tools to help assess and track the cost of onboarding accurately and, on a granular level, to take actionable steps to improve it.
Businesses endure many hidden costs when onboarding new customers, including labor, training, and administrative fees not typically accounted for. Knowing the true cost of onboarding is essential to understanding if the process is successful and profitable.
Start with a basic calculation of your onboarding staff’s compensation against the number of onboarding projects completed, continuing to refine it. Customer onboarding automation tools are a game-changer in making this elusive metric readily accessible.
5. Onboarding Staff Satisfaction
It's not enough to monitor the quantitative metrics of customer onboarding—the qualitative aspect is just as important.
Juggling multiple customers at a time, making sure that each is onboarded properly and deadlines are met, can be stressful. Measuring your onboarding staff’s satisfaction verifies they have the tools and resources they need to perform at an optimal level.
Low staff morale could ultimately influence customer retention and loyalty. Survey your onboarding team regularly to understand how satisfied they are in their role and address any issues proactively.
6. Employee Turnover in the Onboarding Team
High turnover in the onboarding team creates disruption both internally and for your customers. New team members require time to ramp up, and customers may lose trust if they’re handed off mid-project.
Alongside onboarding staff satisfaction, tracking employee turnover helps you monitor team health, identify patterns, and intervene early if retention becomes a concern.
Here’s how to measure this metric:
Turnover Rate = (# of onboarding team members who left / Average size of onboarding team) × 100
Measure this metric quarterly or annually, and compare it to company-wide averages.
One way to reduce employee turnover: provide your onboarding team with purpose-built tools that drive engagement and satisfaction. That was the case for Inova Payroll, an HCM solutions provider. With Setuply automating manual processes and providing greater visibility into workloads, Inova was able to reduce turnover by 16.5%. For more details, see the case study.
7. Number of Projects Per Customer Onboarding Rep
This is a valuable metric to help keep track of your onboarding team’s capacity. The number can range, reflecting the project's complexity and staff capacity. It offers valuable insight into implementation efficiency and scalability, and can also provide guidance into your onboarding team’s morale as well as customer satisfaction.
You can also use this metric to support staff recognition, forecasting, and planning.
As with other metrics, there are many ways to go about this. The stage and scope of the onboarding project, customer size, and industry can all play a role. The same goes for an onboarding representative's skillset, experience, and availability.
8. Onboarding Capacity
Onboarding capacity refers to the total number of onboarding projects your team or individual reps can manage effectively without sacrificing quality. It’s different from current workload—it’s about your limit.
Onboarding capacity is one of the most strategic metrics you can track. It tells you when to scale your team, invest in automation, or adjust sales and implementation timelines.
Establish a baseline by analyzing rep performance history and customer types. Then compare each rep’s active workload to that benchmark. If a rep historically completes four onboardings per month successfully, and they’re currently managing seven, they’ve likely exceeded capacity.
After adopting Setuply, Timerack—a provider of time and attendance software solutions—gained real-time visibility into onboarding workloads, allowing them to better assign projects and maintain delivery consistency while onboarding more customers than ever. The result? They’ve increased their onboarding capacity by 200%. See the full case study.
9. Customer Retention
Think of customer retention as the ultimate measurement of success for any business (and onboarding process).
Analyze which customers have returned and which have churned or cancelled their service. The data you uncover will make it easier to determine the success of your onboarding.
One negative experience can cause a customer to drop off. That’s why it’s critical to understand the customer’s journey from the start of the relationship.
Use the following formula to account for customer retention:
Customer Retention Percentage = (# of customers who renew the subscription at the end of the period / # of customers with an active subscription at the start of the period) * 100
Some providers discount “non-starters” or customers who never completed onboarding in the overall retention calculation. However, it’s critical not to overlook this important data point, as it could reflect the future success or failure of new relationships.
It’s best to capture this data at multiple points, from the start of the relationship, through the completion of customer onboarding, during the transition to customer success, and beyond.
10. Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is one of the most vital metrics. The goal of onboarding is to ensure a smooth transition from the moment a customer signs up for your solution. You can measure the satisfaction around this through surveys, customer feedback, interviews, and more.
Whether you use specialized onboarding software or not, make an effort to establish baselines and monitor progress. By doing so, you'll better understand how successful your customer onboarding process is and what can be improved upon moving forward.
At Setuply, we offer the right tools to support a seamless onboarding experience for your new customers. Our purpose-built, AI-powered software helps SaaS providers assess their onboarding program and make changes where they matter the most.
Ready to take control of your onboarding process, deliver incredible experiences, increase team and customer satisfaction, and become more profitable? Request a demo!