What you'll learn:
- How to develop strong processes and workflows that make onboarding a strategic advantage for your business
- How leveraging onboarding data as a key piece of decision-making can help optimize onboarding and drive down time-to-revenue
- How significant reduction in time-to-activation for customers can drive scale that facilitates strong business partnerships
What you'll need:
- A software platform that needs to onboard a high volume of users (like A2Z)
- A strategic business partner looking for fast, scalable activation
- A digital customer onboarding platform (like OnRamp)
Intuitive Onboarding: Guiding Customers and Teams to Success at Every Step
Create experiences customers actually want to engage in, with proactive, step-by-step direction that reduces work and builds trust and partnerships.
The Challenge
A2Z is an integration hub for car dealerships, connecting various systems such as CRM, dealer management systems (DMS), and credit applications to create a smooth online-to-in-store car buying experience. In 2024, A2Z partnered with a major online retailer to support its new car marketplace initiative, providing the technology backbone to integrate the retailer’s online platform with in-store dealership processes.
A2Z knew that the new partnership would require them to rapidly scale operations and partnerships with dealers across the United States. A2Z faced inefficiencies in their onboarding process that would inhibit growth at the scale necessary to support the partnership. Without a scalable solution, A2Z was unable to onboard dealerships effectively due to:
- Lack of strategic focus on onboarding, piecing together disparate spreadsheets, documents and project management tools reactively
- Long, drawn out implementations due to lack of clarity, accountability, and customer engagement
- Challenges maintaining momentum due to lack of real-time visibility into onboarding progress and issues
"Before OnRamp, we had no visibility into time-to-activation across customers as we scaled. OnRamp isn’t just a tool we use. It’s the heartbeat of our implementation team."
Seth Ritz, Chief Operating Officer at A2Z
The Hypothesis
A2Z knew they needed to reduce their onboarding time significantly in order to scale effectively and meet the demand of their new partnership. They believed that the best way to do that was through process automation and clearer onboarding journeys for dealer partners. In order to cut time-to-activation down to a place that was scalable and sustainable, they needed to:
- Provide a consistent, repeatable onboarding approach that minimized ad-hoc manual processes for internal teams
- Guide dealerships through a step-by-step process to keep them engaged
- Have access to onboarding data that would enable them to create custom views to analyze onboarding optimization
The Solution
1. Embedding OnRamp into Implementation Strategy
The A2Z team wanted to ensure OnRamp was embedded into every piece of their implementation strategy right from the start. They needed to take a consistent approach across teams and build a strong foundation that would scale with rapid future growth.
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The flexibility of the platform to create playbooks that span across use cases, collaborate and communicate with dealerships directly in the product, and track progress across implementations helped OnRamp become deeply engrained into their strategy early. And the ability to embed forms and collect dealer information without leaving the platform has driven significant time savings.
Teams across the organization have been able to leverage OnRamp to quickly activate dealerships and drive down time-to-revenue for A2Z – so much so that “OnRamp” has become a verb within the organization. When anything onboarding-related comes up in conversation, it’s not uncommon to hear someone say, “Just OnRamp it”.
2. Unlocking Actionable Data Visualization
To ensure smooth and efficient operations while scaling, another key piece of the platform was the ability to unlock necessary data visualizations. In-platform reporting into bottlenecks, project progress and time-to-completion allows A2Z leadership visibility to understand what accounts are stuck, see where the root causes are, and determine how to resolve the issue and improve the process.
The ability to export onboarding data for further analysis through integration into other Business Intelligence tools is also critical to scale at the pace needed. This allows A2Z to provide detailed reporting and visibility into dealer onboarding status to their partners, so they can go live on the marketplace site as quickly as possible. Being able to easily create custom views enables the team to make onboarding data a key piece of strategic decisions.
3. Leveraging OnRamp Beyond Onboarding
While the primary intent of the A2Z and OnRamp partnership is to get dealers onboarded and activated on the retailer’s site as quickly as possible, A2Z does occasionally need to offboard dealerships no longer participating in the program. Due to the success of OnRamp in onboarding dealerships effectively, A2Z has also started creating and using Playbooks to offboard dealers, when needed. Due to the flexibility within OnRamp to achieve various outcomes and the pervasiveness of the platform throughout A2Z, the team is always looking for new ways to bring added efficiency and ease to internal employees and partners at both marketplace partners and dealerships.
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The Impact
A2Z’s partnership with OnRamp has driven meaningful scale – and additional revenue – for A2Z. Their partner relationships are thriving due to the ability to source and onboard high-quality dealerships fast. For A2Z, OnRamp is more than just another tool in their tech stack – it is a strategic lever used to drive down time-to-revenue and maintain a strong, competitive advantage. Leveraging OnRamp as an integral part of their onboarding strategy, A2Z has:- Improved time-to-activation from 90+ days down to 22 days
- Successfully scaled onboardings from 2-3 dealerships per month to ~50 dealerships per month
- Enhanced onboarding efficiency by ~85%
