Jeremy Huitson

Customer onboarding: getting to value quickly

Business ops
April 23, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has applied the handbrake to much of the business world, but our legal engineer, Jeremy, works tirelessly to maintain the fast-paced nature of Juro’s customer onboarding. 

We catch up with him to learn about the process and how it’s changed since the lockdown. 

Welcome back, Jeremy! 👋

Thank you!

Firstly - what does your job as legal engineer involve? 

My role as a legal engineer sits within the Customer Success team, with a specific focus on onboarding. I also have a hand in customer support, ensuring that product feedback gets to the product team, and running Juro’s professional services offering. 

What is onboarding and why is it important? 

People generally understand the sales journey that takes someone from stranger to customer. The sales team carefully nurtures the prospect; guides them through the sales lifecycle; and eventually closes the deal with a signed contract.

Onboarding is what happens next. The customer transitions from working with the sales team to the customer success team, and the onboarding process helps the customer get value from the product as soon as possible.

It’s important to handle onboarding well, because you have the most momentum to implement a product straight after the deal closes. Striking when the iron is hot allows you to reiterate the problems and inefficiencies that drove the customer to your solution in the first place, and address them quickly.

Customer success depends heavily on relationship management - by getting customers to value at speed, we can start the relationship on a positive note

When the UK went into lockdown, we launched our free Basic plans within two weeks. How did this change how you manage onboarding?

We’ve always worked to be a trusted partner to our customers, and support them for the long-term. This was particularly important during the pandemic, where we’ve had to be flexible and understanding with our current plans. 

Certain industries are hit harder than others - we have customers in the travel industry, for example, who have struggled in the face of COVID-19 and asked for support. We try and offer that support where possible - from reducing limitations on plans to bringing new teams into Juro as quickly as we can.

We also created a help center that made a massive difference. It’s an online resource full of FAQs and material that can help people on their journey through Juro. We’re remote-friendly by design, so customers can have a virtual walkthrough of the product, with automated messages from the design team. Our CPO and co-founder, Pavel, also offers tips and tricks for product usage through regular email campaigns

How fast do you aim to onboard customers? When can they get value?  

Most of our customers get to value before the kickoff call - the templates are set up straight after the deal is closed. We’ve had customers jump into Juro and sign contracts straight after the kickoff meeting, which we aim to have as soon as possible. Our objective is to have our customers fully activated, with integrations and complex workflows, within two weeks; same-day activation isn’t unheard of. We see CLM platforms advertising full implementation within six months, which is confusing - that’s not something we’d be proud to advertise.

It helps that Juro has a visually clean interface that’s easy to grasp and learn, so people can teach themselves, and each other. It means the customer can reach value quicker and we don’t have to spend that long with them.

These little factors make a huge difference. Customer success depends heavily on relationship management, and by getting customers to value at speed, we can prove our competency and start the relationship on a positive note.

What tech do you use to streamline the onboarding process? 

Zoom, Hangouts and Slack are the obvious three, but we also use the following:

  • Trello and Typeform are useful for customer feedback and project management. Integrating them allows us to create a frictionless workflow that prevents data loss
  • Intercom helps to avoid email chains where possible and offer faster responses, especially in the current situation
  • Figma helps us to make our customer interactions engaging and visual, as a useful central repository for Juro-branded visuals. It helps the customer identify our brand, and adds cohesion to the sales and onboarding stages
  • Loom is great for sending video tutorials to our customers - it helps us connect beyond a generic call and offer tailored assistance. You can even use AI video generators for creating videos

How have customers reacted to the free Basic plans?

New customers are seeing results both pre- and post-signature. Post-signature, customers have used Juro’s contract reader feature to upload legacy, PDF contracts. They can tag these documents with key datapoints and renewal reminders. Pre-signature, we’ve seen customers use Basic plans to send out a wide range of contracts - from traditional contracts like NDAs and MSAs to wedding photography documents and motorbike cleaning agreements! 

I received a message recently from a customer around adding signatories. This was on Wednesday - and by Friday she had 22 employment contracts ready to send and sign. It’s really rewarding to be able to help people so quickly.

Never underestimate the importance of your team - especially now, in this strange remote environment, when that collaborative team culture is invaluable

What have been your key learnings from onboarding in lockdown?

Cross-functional collaboration is so important. At Juro, this was especially prevalent when we decided to launch our Basic plans for free. It was a two-day project that involved everyone in the team. In a shared Slack channel, we were agile enough to reach a decision that has benefited a lot of people struggling with contract management. Never underestimate the importance of your team - especially now, in this strange remote environment, when that collaborative team culture is invaluable. 

Juro's Basic plans are now free -  why not use Juro to manage your HR paperwork remotely?

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Jeremy Huitson is Senior Customer Success Manager at Juro

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