Insider is onboarding clients 35% faster with Flowla

We sat down with Jonathan Lewell, Senior Customer Success Manager at Insider, to discuss the challenges they were previously facing in their customer onboarding process, and how they implemented Flowla to cut down on time to value while providing a seamless, easy-to-follow experience to their clients.

Complicated and long onboarding processes

Insider has 12 different products in their suite, each with its own list of tasks to complete during the client onboarding process.

Therefore, ensuring a seamless onboarding experience to each and every customer can get tricky - especially when a client purchases multiple products at once.

“Life before Flowla was rather chaotic. When a client buys 10 different products at once, you get a very complicated onboarding process in your hands. And we were using spreadsheets. So you can imagine 10 different products, multiple different stakeholders all using a spreadsheet. It ends up getting rather chaotic.”

Spreadsheets are not built for it

What was making the onboarding process so chaotic wasn’t just the involvement of multiple products and stakeholders, but also the lack of a proper tool that could handle these complex onboarding processes with minimal friction for everyone involved.

John explains that there’s a lot of collaboration needed between their internal team and their clients, both sides having a set of tasks to complete for a successful kickoff.

But spreadsheets aren’t exactly suited for task management. They can be overwhelming and confusing for clients, especially if they have a lot of rows and multiple tabs, like in Insider’s case. They also have no way of ensuring tasks are being completed before deadlines, because there is no task management or notification system.

“We pretty much needed to project manage the entire onboarding process ourselves manually, nudging clients when they’re late to send something over, telling them where to find something, updating the spreadsheet, updating CRM, updating clients on progress. It was a lot of busy work.”

Considering John has a pretty large portfolio of enterprise and semi-enterprise clients, it wasn’t making sense for their CS team to spend so much time on busy admin work just to ensure the process was running smoothly. And there was definitely room for improvement in terms of their new clients’ time to value.

“Onboarding is easily one of the most critical stages of a client's lifecycle, and this would last sometimes three to six months, not a good experience overall. And that's why we were looking for a solution on the market, and that's when we came across Flowla.”

One link for the entire client journey

John says they aim to maintain the same flow for the entire lifecycle of a client - from the first touch and sales, all the way to retention. This way, clients have a single link for all-things Insider. 

It’s easier for clients to find what they’re looking for, and easier for John and his team to see where they stand with each and every client.

This, of course, makes handoffs a very smooth process across teams.

“We use Flowla pretty much from day zero. So sales initially create the flow. That gets populated with all of the information about the deal. And then we, as customer success managers, are able to use that exact same information after it gets passed to us. So there's a lot of visibility, a lot of transparency across teams during handoffs.”

Crafting easy-to-follow guides for clients

John says Flowla acts as a collaborative onboarding hub during the onboarding & implementation part of their process. They use it to hold all of the resources their clients need, and also to project manage everything via Mutual Action Plans.

But his favorite is the layout - he loves the easy navigation it provides for his clients.

“I think most importantly, Flowla is able to show everything in a very linear process, which is very client-friendly for our clients. All the steps in the onboarding process are linked together in a very easy to follow linear guide.”

Onboarding clients 35% faster

John lists many benefits they’ve seen with Flowla - but among all, one stands out the most: quicker client onboarding.

He mentions that not only are things moving at an increased pace, but he’s also having a lot less tedious administrative tasks that he needs to handle, which is a huge improvement.

“Previously, updating CRMs like Salesforce took me ages, manually filling in each field, I’m sure everybody else who’s had to do it would know this. Now these fields get automatically populated from Flowla via CRM sync.”

Customers love the ease & visibility

The Customer Success field is all about providing the best possible experience to clients, every step of the way. That is the ultimate priority, so incorporating a new client-facing tool that will affect that experience in any way might be daunting for teams. 

On this matter, John reports only positive results - their customers love the linear process, and how approachable flows are compared to complex spreadsheets.

He also highlights the visibility as a big advantage both for clients and their own team. 

“Clients can log in and easily see where something is, for example in the integration process - they can click there and see the materials. And it’s very easy for me to see exactly where any process is, with which technical team member the process stands. It’s very transparent.”

Getting Onboarded to Flowla

We made sure to ask John what his own onboarding experience with Flowla was, especially as a Customer Success Manager himself.

“Onboarding to Flowla was very easy. I was very busy with my own work as well, but when it came to onboarding with Flowla, it was very seamless, to be honest. They onboarded us to Flowla using Flowla, and I very much enjoyed the experience.”

Closing Remarks

John notes that overall Flowla has been a wonderful addition to his tool stack, positively affecting everything across the board: from their KPIs, to their clients’ experience, to his personal workflow, as well as their cross-team collaboration.

“At the end of the day, every client wants extremely fast time to value. As customer success managers, that's pretty much the first thing that we want to give our clients. We’ve been able to do that with Flowla.”