What is the primary focus of the Onboarding stage as identified by the Customer Success Manager?

The primary focus of the Onboarding stage for a Customer Success Manager is to validate business outcomes and key stakeholders. During this critical phase, the emphasis is on ensuring that the customer understands the expected outcomes they want to achieve with the product or service and identifying the key stakeholders who will be involved in the process. This helps to create a clear alignment between the customer's goals and the solutions being offered, facilitating a smoother transition into the product’s usage and ensuring long-term success.

Validating business outcomes helps set the right expectations and establish success metrics that reflect the customer's needs. Recognizing key stakeholders is essential to ensure that the right people are engaged throughout the onboarding process, fostering collaboration and commitment to achieve the desired results. This foundational step is crucial as it directly influences the customer's future satisfaction and utilization of the product.

In contrast, while identifying business challenges and solutions, assessing customer satisfaction levels, and training customers on product features are all important aspects of the overall customer journey, they typically occur either before or after the Onboarding stage. Onboarding specifically focuses on aligning the customer's business goals with the service or product usage, which is pivotal for a successful partnership moving forward.