Using Drag for Customer OnboardingHow to set up Drag for Customer OnboardingHow to operate Drag for Customer OnboardingPro tips
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Managing customer onboarding requires at least an inbox, a calendar and a task manager. With Drag, you can manage them all directly from Gmail.
This guide will run through the steps and best practices on using Drag to onboard your customers in the most streamlined way possible.
Contents:
How to set up Drag for Customer Onboarding
- Create Drag boards to track customer onboarding activities.
- Categorize and organize onboarding emails and tasks.
- Turn the most used emails into shared templates.
- Create automations to save you time.
- Define how you will reply to emails.
- Define where email replies will load on Drag boards.
How to operate Drag for Customer Onboarding
- Control when and by whom which customer is being onboarded.
- Add further context to tasks with notes, subtasks and internal chat .
- Track Customer Onboarding activity.
Pro tips
- Share tasks across different teams.
- Manage your schedule in Google Calendar without leaving Gmail
- Read a real case study on how customers use Drag for Customer Onboarding.
Here's how to customize Drag according to how you usually handle your customer onboarding processes.
The first thing to do is create boards to manage your onboarding tasks and emails. But first, let's talk about two important planning concepts:
When it comes to structuring your boards, we recommend you plan first how you want to organize your onboarding workflow. For example, you may want to create different boards for each product, if your company offers more than one. You may also need to create shared boards between Customer Success and other teams, such as sales or marketing, for handover of information, for example. Once you plan how your workflow will work in Drag, it will be easier to create your new boards.
Drag boards are versatile and can be adapted to your workflows. For example, some companies have a dedicated onboarding@company.com inbox to deal with customer onboarding matters. For them, it makes more sense to plug the shared inboxes into Drag boards. Other companies prefer to have an empty board and manually move specific customer conversations into it. Others prefer all of the above (which can also be achieved with Drag đ).
Now that you are aware of these concepts, it's straightforward to create Drag boards:
Create a board.
Invite team members to the board (if you need to manage a shared workflow with your team).
Add incoming emails (if you want emails from a Shared Inbox or Google Group to load in real-time on that board).
Here's a step by step to create a new board.
This is how a Customer Onboarding board typically looks like:
In Kanban view:
In List view:
Here's how you can change between kanban or list views.
If you go for the Kanban view, don't forget to customize the width of the columns by dragging and dropping them like in a spreadsheet cell đ.
It's better to know exactly what is the status of an onboarding process at the moment, if someone is working on it, if itâs already finished, without having to ask around or dig in for information.
You can create a workflow for onboardings in 3 ways using Drag:
Customize columns (if you use Kanban view) or lists (using list view) to adapt Drag to your task management workflow. For example, you may want to split your tasks into stages like these:
New handoffs from sales
Welcome Sent
Schedule demo
Follow Up scheduled
Fully onboard
To rename the columns/lists, simply click on their titles (on the top left). There will be an inline editing input field, just type the desired title and click outside the input field. The names will be auto-saved.
Create Drag's shared tags to segment tasks based on crucial information. For example, you may want to tag cards according to the priority level of a customer being onboarded, the plan the customer has purchased, or even in which timezone they are. This makes it easier to handle your appointments, and on knowing how exactly to help customers during the onboarding step.
You can easily filter your boards by tags, which is very handy when there is a mix of different emails on a board.
You can also organize your cards visually with color-coding. Each color can represent the type of task in a card. For example, you can attribute just a color to cards that deserve special attention, leaving others white, for example. Or you can color-code them with the media necessary for the onboarding process, for example, demo video call, phone call or just send a video.
Extra tip: Create a fixed card with the colors and respective meanings to quickly help the team get used to them.
If you have a standardized and structured processo to onboard new customers, you probably send the same emails very often. For example, a welcome email, a follow up email, an email to schedule a call, and so on.
With Drag, you can turn these most used emails into templates and share them with your team. It means once you have created all the necessary templates, you won't need to worry about spreading them around. They will be automatically available for everyone and the communication across the team will be aligned as a charm đ.
Here's how to set up shared templates.
What about stopping to do so many manual processes while handling your emails and tasks? You can automate several actions inside your boards to save you time. Our automations allow your team to put lots of things in auto pilot.
A few examples include:
Tagging cards as "Priority" if sent from a specific email address (like a VIP customer).
Assigning tasks to a specific team member based on the emailâs content. For example, if they have talked to that sender before.
Moving emails automatically to a specific board or column based on which alias they were sent to when many teams were involved on the same project (e.g., onboarding-us@ vs. onboarding-eu@).
Your onboarding boards contain emails, to which you can reply from your user@ email address or a shared email address such as onboarding@.
More than that, you can choose a "Reply Default" for your emails. If you define onboarding@ as your default reply email, all replies will come straight from that email address (yes, even if you are logged in to your account!).
Read here the step by step to set your reply default.
When you receive replies to existing emails on Drag boards, you can choose if those replies will stay on the same column where they were left or go back to the first column of that board.
For example, if your board is divided into "New handoffs from sales,â "Welcome Sent,â "Schedule demo," âFollow Up scheduledâ and "Fully onboard," and you receive a reply to an email that is under the "Fully onboard" column, that card may need further actions. In this case, it can make more sense for you to change the board configuration to move replies back to the initial column.
Learn how to set up replies in this article.
You have set up all your Customer Onboarding boards in Drag, great! đ Now, it's time to learn the best way to use it daily.
Now that you have your board all set up, emails and tasks start coming in. Task assignments and due dates help you ensure your team wonât miss any deadline or let any step of the process fall through the cracks.
Assign tasks to your team members so everybody knows who is responsible for which customer to be onboarded. Oh, and you can see what emails are assigned to you in 1 click with the "Assigned to Me" view under each board.
Due dates can be very handy for customer onboarding, especially when your onboarding flow is comprised by multiple stages and milestones. Assign due dates to cards and have them displayed on your card. More than that, automatically generate events in your calendar from the due dates so you never miss an important event (e.g. a demo meeting).
Onboarding teams need to be on the same page while working on tasks, and Drag's collaboration features help you and your team achieve that. Read more about these features here.
Notes and Task tabs
You can type all the essential information you need to complete a task on the tabs "Tasks" and "Notes" inside a task card. Both tabs can be found on the top of the email detailed view, next to the email title.
Example:
In the example below, a company is onboarding a new customer to their help desk software and has a series of milestones to be reached in the onboarding process.
In the "Tasks" tab, they can all the steps that need to be performed by the new customer to be successfully onboarded (e.g. kick off call, install and set up software, train staff, integrate software to existing systems via API, 2nd follow up call, etc).
In the "Notes" tab, the user can have the notes from the last call with the customer instead of making those notes on a notebook or another note-taking platform. Or write down all the details about the customer needs, expectations with your product and their use case.
This way, all the information the company needs to complete that onboarding is in one central place.
And you don't need to go inside each card to read the context about it. Just use the dropdown arrow on each card to have this visibility right from your Drag task board.
Internal team chat
There's an internal team chat inside each card where you can talk to any teammate about any specific task. Instead of going to a chat app to talk to them and giving all the context, you need to complete that assignment. Then, you can simply mention them on the chat box and start talking about it.
Example:
If you are going through an onboarding with a client of the Finance industry, and you know your teammate Duda has helped a similar team in the past. Go to the chat inside the card and simply mention @Duda and ask her for insights on it. She'll read it, have all the context she needs, and quickly reply directly into the card, instead of needing to refer to notes somewhere else and to communicate back with you in a completely different tool.
With Drag reports and analytics, you can visually track the volume and activity in your Onboarding team. Click here to learn how to use analytics and reports.
Many times it's necessary to move emails or tasks across your organization and receive collaboration from other teams. Instead of forwarding emails around or creating duplicate tasks, Drag allows you to share them across various teams within your organization very quickly.
Example 1: Customer Onboarding & Sales
Your Sales team operates a Drag 'Sales CRM' board. As soon as a lead converts to become a paying customer, they can just move their respective cards into the 'Customer Onboarding' board. This way, the Customer Success Team starts well equipped - with all the context and historical correspondences with that specific lead - to successfully onboard those new customers.
Example 2: Customer Onboarding & IT Support
Your Customer Success team manages customer onboarding in a specific Drag board. However, one of your customers being onboarding starts getting technical issues with your product. You can then move this customer to the 'IT Support' board, shared with your Technical Team, to quickly support that customer.
Instead of using a third-party Calendar app, you can use Google Calendar to manage all your onboarding appointments. Better yet, you can do it without having to open another tab. Go to the vertical menu on the right of the screen and click on the Calendar icon.
Then a pop-up will open with the schedule minimized per day. There you will me able to manage and check all your appointments, including the ones youâve create using Dragâs due dates.
If you want to learn more about you can do with Google Calendar, read this article.
Wondering how all of the above works in practice? Read how Waste Logics, an online waste management software solution in England, turned their customer onboarding 125% faster with Drag.
And there you are! You can now use Drag to onboard clients seamlessly đ.
Still need help? Our Support Team will love to help at support@dragapp.com.
Updated on: 11/06/2021
Managing customer onboarding requires at least an inbox, a calendar and a task manager. With Drag, you can manage them all directly from Gmail.
This guide will run through the steps and best practices on using Drag to onboard your customers in the most streamlined way possible.
Contents:
How to set up Drag for Customer Onboarding
- Create Drag boards to track customer onboarding activities.
- Categorize and organize onboarding emails and tasks.
- Turn the most used emails into shared templates.
- Create automations to save you time.
- Define how you will reply to emails.
- Define where email replies will load on Drag boards.
How to operate Drag for Customer Onboarding
- Control when and by whom which customer is being onboarded.
- Add further context to tasks with notes, subtasks and internal chat .
- Track Customer Onboarding activity.
Pro tips
- Share tasks across different teams.
- Manage your schedule in Google Calendar without leaving Gmail
- Read a real case study on how customers use Drag for Customer Onboarding.
Here's how to customize Drag according to how you usually handle your customer onboarding processes.
Create Drag boards to track customer onboarding activities
The first thing to do is create boards to manage your onboarding tasks and emails. But first, let's talk about two important planning concepts:
Boards structure
When it comes to structuring your boards, we recommend you plan first how you want to organize your onboarding workflow. For example, you may want to create different boards for each product, if your company offers more than one. You may also need to create shared boards between Customer Success and other teams, such as sales or marketing, for handover of information, for example. Once you plan how your workflow will work in Drag, it will be easier to create your new boards.
Boards dynamics
Drag boards are versatile and can be adapted to your workflows. For example, some companies have a dedicated onboarding@company.com inbox to deal with customer onboarding matters. For them, it makes more sense to plug the shared inboxes into Drag boards. Other companies prefer to have an empty board and manually move specific customer conversations into it. Others prefer all of the above (which can also be achieved with Drag đ).
Now that you are aware of these concepts, it's straightforward to create Drag boards:
Create a board.
Invite team members to the board (if you need to manage a shared workflow with your team).
Add incoming emails (if you want emails from a Shared Inbox or Google Group to load in real-time on that board).
Here's a step by step to create a new board.
This is how a Customer Onboarding board typically looks like:
In Kanban view:
In List view:
Here's how you can change between kanban or list views.
If you go for the Kanban view, don't forget to customize the width of the columns by dragging and dropping them like in a spreadsheet cell đ.
Categorize and organize onboarding emails and tasks
It's better to know exactly what is the status of an onboarding process at the moment, if someone is working on it, if itâs already finished, without having to ask around or dig in for information.
You can create a workflow for onboardings in 3 ways using Drag:
1. Customize columns/lists
Customize columns (if you use Kanban view) or lists (using list view) to adapt Drag to your task management workflow. For example, you may want to split your tasks into stages like these:
New handoffs from sales
Welcome Sent
Schedule demo
Follow Up scheduled
Fully onboard
To rename the columns/lists, simply click on their titles (on the top left). There will be an inline editing input field, just type the desired title and click outside the input field. The names will be auto-saved.
2. Use tags for easy segmentation
Create Drag's shared tags to segment tasks based on crucial information. For example, you may want to tag cards according to the priority level of a customer being onboarded, the plan the customer has purchased, or even in which timezone they are. This makes it easier to handle your appointments, and on knowing how exactly to help customers during the onboarding step.
You can easily filter your boards by tags, which is very handy when there is a mix of different emails on a board.
3. Color coding
You can also organize your cards visually with color-coding. Each color can represent the type of task in a card. For example, you can attribute just a color to cards that deserve special attention, leaving others white, for example. Or you can color-code them with the media necessary for the onboarding process, for example, demo video call, phone call or just send a video.
Extra tip: Create a fixed card with the colors and respective meanings to quickly help the team get used to them.
Turn the most used emails into shared templates
If you have a standardized and structured processo to onboard new customers, you probably send the same emails very often. For example, a welcome email, a follow up email, an email to schedule a call, and so on.
With Drag, you can turn these most used emails into templates and share them with your team. It means once you have created all the necessary templates, you won't need to worry about spreading them around. They will be automatically available for everyone and the communication across the team will be aligned as a charm đ.
Here's how to set up shared templates.
Create automations to save you time
What about stopping to do so many manual processes while handling your emails and tasks? You can automate several actions inside your boards to save you time. Our automations allow your team to put lots of things in auto pilot.
A few examples include:
Tagging cards as "Priority" if sent from a specific email address (like a VIP customer).
Assigning tasks to a specific team member based on the emailâs content. For example, if they have talked to that sender before.
Moving emails automatically to a specific board or column based on which alias they were sent to when many teams were involved on the same project (e.g., onboarding-us@ vs. onboarding-eu@).
Define how you will reply to emails
Your onboarding boards contain emails, to which you can reply from your user@ email address or a shared email address such as onboarding@.
More than that, you can choose a "Reply Default" for your emails. If you define onboarding@ as your default reply email, all replies will come straight from that email address (yes, even if you are logged in to your account!).
Read here the step by step to set your reply default.
Define where email replies will load on Drag boards
When you receive replies to existing emails on Drag boards, you can choose if those replies will stay on the same column where they were left or go back to the first column of that board.
For example, if your board is divided into "New handoffs from sales,â "Welcome Sent,â "Schedule demo," âFollow Up scheduledâ and "Fully onboard," and you receive a reply to an email that is under the "Fully onboard" column, that card may need further actions. In this case, it can make more sense for you to change the board configuration to move replies back to the initial column.
Learn how to set up replies in this article.
You have set up all your Customer Onboarding boards in Drag, great! đ Now, it's time to learn the best way to use it daily.
Control when and by whom which customer is onboarded
Now that you have your board all set up, emails and tasks start coming in. Task assignments and due dates help you ensure your team wonât miss any deadline or let any step of the process fall through the cracks.
Task assignments
Assign tasks to your team members so everybody knows who is responsible for which customer to be onboarded. Oh, and you can see what emails are assigned to you in 1 click with the "Assigned to Me" view under each board.
Due dates
Due dates can be very handy for customer onboarding, especially when your onboarding flow is comprised by multiple stages and milestones. Assign due dates to cards and have them displayed on your card. More than that, automatically generate events in your calendar from the due dates so you never miss an important event (e.g. a demo meeting).
Add further context to tasks with notes, subtasks, and internal chat
Onboarding teams need to be on the same page while working on tasks, and Drag's collaboration features help you and your team achieve that. Read more about these features here.
Notes and Task tabs
You can type all the essential information you need to complete a task on the tabs "Tasks" and "Notes" inside a task card. Both tabs can be found on the top of the email detailed view, next to the email title.
Example:
In the example below, a company is onboarding a new customer to their help desk software and has a series of milestones to be reached in the onboarding process.
In the "Tasks" tab, they can all the steps that need to be performed by the new customer to be successfully onboarded (e.g. kick off call, install and set up software, train staff, integrate software to existing systems via API, 2nd follow up call, etc).
In the "Notes" tab, the user can have the notes from the last call with the customer instead of making those notes on a notebook or another note-taking platform. Or write down all the details about the customer needs, expectations with your product and their use case.
This way, all the information the company needs to complete that onboarding is in one central place.
And you don't need to go inside each card to read the context about it. Just use the dropdown arrow on each card to have this visibility right from your Drag task board.
Internal team chat
There's an internal team chat inside each card where you can talk to any teammate about any specific task. Instead of going to a chat app to talk to them and giving all the context, you need to complete that assignment. Then, you can simply mention them on the chat box and start talking about it.
Example:
If you are going through an onboarding with a client of the Finance industry, and you know your teammate Duda has helped a similar team in the past. Go to the chat inside the card and simply mention @Duda and ask her for insights on it. She'll read it, have all the context she needs, and quickly reply directly into the card, instead of needing to refer to notes somewhere else and to communicate back with you in a completely different tool.
Track Customer Onboarding activity
With Drag reports and analytics, you can visually track the volume and activity in your Onboarding team. Click here to learn how to use analytics and reports.
Share tasks across different teams
Many times it's necessary to move emails or tasks across your organization and receive collaboration from other teams. Instead of forwarding emails around or creating duplicate tasks, Drag allows you to share them across various teams within your organization very quickly.
Example 1: Customer Onboarding & Sales
Your Sales team operates a Drag 'Sales CRM' board. As soon as a lead converts to become a paying customer, they can just move their respective cards into the 'Customer Onboarding' board. This way, the Customer Success Team starts well equipped - with all the context and historical correspondences with that specific lead - to successfully onboard those new customers.
Example 2: Customer Onboarding & IT Support
Your Customer Success team manages customer onboarding in a specific Drag board. However, one of your customers being onboarding starts getting technical issues with your product. You can then move this customer to the 'IT Support' board, shared with your Technical Team, to quickly support that customer.
Manage your schedule in Google Calendar without leaving Gmail
Instead of using a third-party Calendar app, you can use Google Calendar to manage all your onboarding appointments. Better yet, you can do it without having to open another tab. Go to the vertical menu on the right of the screen and click on the Calendar icon.
Then a pop-up will open with the schedule minimized per day. There you will me able to manage and check all your appointments, including the ones youâve create using Dragâs due dates.
If you want to learn more about you can do with Google Calendar, read this article.
Read a real case study on how customers use Drag for Customer Onboarding
Wondering how all of the above works in practice? Read how Waste Logics, an online waste management software solution in England, turned their customer onboarding 125% faster with Drag.
And there you are! You can now use Drag to onboard clients seamlessly đ.
Still need help? Our Support Team will love to help at support@dragapp.com.
Updated on: 11/06/2021
Actualizado em: 08/05/2023
Obrigado!