For the second consecutive year, OnRamp surveyed customer success, onboarding, and implementation leaders across B2B SaaS, healthcare tech, logistics, and professional services to understand how companies are approaching post-sale customer onboarding. The 2026 State of Onboarding Report captures insights from 161 leaders, including Heads of Customer Success & Onboarding, Implementation, and Revenue operations.
The findings tell a clear story: customer onboarding has moved from a back-office function to a boardroom priority. But while the recognition is there, most teams are still operating with significant gaps in visibility, automation, and organizational structure.
Below are key findings from the report. For the full metrics, methodology, and analysis, download the complete 2026 State of Onboarding report.
The single most consistent theme across the entire survey is the lack of onboarding visibility. Despite widespread investment in customer success tools over the past decade, the majority of onboarding leaders still cannot answer a fundamental question: where does this customer stand right now?
62% of CS leaders lack real-time visibility into customer progress during onboarding.
This is not a minor inconvenience. Without real-time visibility, teams cannot intervene when a customer stalls, cannot identify patterns across their portfolio, and cannot provide leadership with accurate forecasts about customer health.
The survey revealed three specific dimensions to this visibility gap:
1 in 3 leaders admit they don't know where customers stand in onboarding at any given time. This means a third of CS teams are managing onboarding without basic progress awareness, relying on anecdotal updates from CSMs rather than structured data.
What this means: Visibility is not a feature to be added later. It's the foundational requirement that makes every onboarding improvement possible. Teams that invest in real-time tracking and centralized dashboards report dramatically better engagement, in fact, 96% of teams using real-time tracking reported increased customer engagement.
For years, onboarding was treated as a customer satisfaction issue. The 2026 data makes clear that it is, in fact, a revenue issue, and the impact extends well beyond churn.
57% of leaders say onboarding friction directly impacts revenue realization.
Friction during onboarding delays time-to-value, which delays when customers start seeing ROI, which delays when expansion conversations can begin. In consumption-based models, friction slows adoption and creates a trailing lag in the revenue you already forecasted.
The consequences of underinvestment are equally clear:
57% of companies that reduced their onboarding investment saw churn increase within six months.
This is one of the most striking findings in the report. When companies cut onboarding budgets, often under cost pressure or reorganization, the impact shows up in churn metrics within two quarters. It's a direct, measurable cause-and-effect that makes onboarding one of the most defensible investments a B2B company can make.
The three biggest operational blockers to scaling onboarding compound the problem: misalignment between sales and CS during handoff, manual hand-offs and duplicated effort, and fragmented data and ownership across tools. Each of these blockers introduces friction that delays revenue and degrades the customer experience.
What this means: If your CFO or CRO is looking for the most direct lever to protect existing revenue and accelerate time-to-revenue for new deals, onboarding is it. The data shows the ROI case clearly: companies that invest in structured onboarding protect revenue; those that cut it see the impact in their churn numbers within months.
Perhaps the most significant structural change revealed in the 2026 data is how companies are reorganizing their onboarding teams. The days of onboarding sitting inside a generalist CS team are ending.
|
Organizational Shift |
What the Data Shows |
|---|---|
|
Reporting structure |
57% of onboarding teams now report into the CRO or Revenue Operations |
|
Team specialization |
69% of companies have built dedicated onboarding functions rather than relying on generalist CSMs |
|
Automation investment |
26% are actively investing in onboarding automation — low adoption, but accelerating |
Source: 2026 State of Onboarding Report
This shift reflects a growing understanding that onboarding directly influences revenue outcomes, not just CSAT scores. When onboarding reports to the CRO, it gets measured by revenue metrics: time-to-revenue, expansion readiness, and renewal probability. When it reports to a VP of CS alongside renewals, escalations, and QBRs, it competes for attention with too many other priorities.
The 69% figure on dedicated onboarding functions is equally important. Specialization allows teams to build repeatable playbooks, develop deep onboarding expertise, and create consistent experiences regardless of which team member is assigned. This is the organizational foundation that makes frameworks and automation possible.
What this means: If your onboarding team is still embedded within generalist CS and reports to a VP of Customer Success, you are operating against the trend. The best-performing companies are treating onboarding as specialized, revenue-accountable function with its own leadership, metrics, and technology stack.
Despite clear evidence that automation improves outcomes, the majority of B2B companies have not yet automated their onboarding processes.
Only 26% of SaaS companies are actively investing in onboarding automation.
That means 74% of companies are still running onboarding through some combination of spreadsheets, email threads, project management tools, and recurring meetings, systems that were never designed for customer-facing onboarding.
The data on outcomes tells the other half of the story:
Teams that digitized their onboarding process cut time-to-value by 25% or more. Moving from manual coordination to a structured digital platform has a direct, measurable impact on how quickly customers reach their first milestones.
60% of companies still use four to six different tools for customer onboarding. Tool fragmentation creates friction for both internal teams and customers, and makes it nearly impossible to get a unified view of progress.
Only 13% of SMBs use a purpose-built onboarding solution. The vast majority rely on tools that were built for internal project management, not for guiding external customers through a structured journey.
What this means: The gap between automated and manual onboarding teams is widening. Companies that invest now gain a measurable advantage in time-to-value, team efficiency, and customer experience. Companies that wait will find themselves competing against teams that can onboard faster, scale with fewer resources, and intervene earlier when customers stall.
The 2026 report reveals a striking disconnect between where onboarding teams are today and where they expect to be within 24 months.
70% of CS leaders expect AI to handle half of all onboarding tasks by 2027.
This is not a distant aspiration, it's a near-term expectation from the majority of leaders surveyed. The specific tasks they expect AI to manage include progress summaries and status updates, milestone triggers and automate next-step assignments, early risk detection and proactive alerting, routine customer communication and follow-ups, and data entry and reporting automation.
What makes this finding notable is the contrast with current adoption. While 70% expect AI to transform onboarding within two years, only 26% are actively investing in automation today. That gap represents either a massive wave of investment that's about to hit, or a significant number of teams that will be caught unprepared when competitors move faster.
What this means: AI in onboarding is not theoretical, it's on every leader's roadmap. The teams that will benefit most are those that built the foundational infrastructure (centralized data, structured workflows, milestone tracking) now, so that AI has something meaningful to optimize when it arrives.
For deeper data on how teams are already using AI in onboarding, see our AI in Customer Onboarding & Success Report.
The report also establishes benchmark targets based on data from top-performing onboarding teams. These metrics provide concrete thresholds that any company can use to evaluate their current performance.
|
Metric |
Best-in-Class Benchmark |
Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
|
Time to First Value |
Less than 14 days |
Predicts renewal likelihood — customers who see value early are far more likely to stay |
|
Onboarding Completion Rate |
Greater than 80% |
Indicates adoption depth — incomplete onboarding correlates with lower usage and higher churn |
|
Post-Onboarding CSAT |
4.5 out of 5 or higher |
Serves as an early satisfaction signal — low scores predict churn within the first year |
Source: 2026 State of Onboarding Report
If you are below these benchmarks, the gap represents both a risk and an opportunity. The report includes additional benchmarks and diagnostic tools to help teams identify where they sit on the Onboarding Maturity Model, a four-stage framework (Manual, Guided, Automated, Intelligent) that maps your current capabilities to a clear path forward.
The trends in the report are consistent with the outcomes companies are already achieving when they invest in purpose-built onboarding infrastructure.
Qualia doubled its onboarding volume without adding headcount. Their completion rate increased from 92% to 99%, and go-live time dropped by 53%. This is what happens when you move from manual coordination to a structured, scalable framework.
Flosum reduced onboarding time by 73%, allowing their team to shift from administrative coordination to higher-value customer engagements.
AGS Health cut onboarding time by 30%, accelerating revenue recognition by an average of three months, a direct line from onboarding efficiency to revenue.
These are not outliers. They are representative of what the data in the State of Onboarding Report predicts: companies that invest in structured, visible, and automated onboarding consistently outperform those that don't.
The 2026 report is designed to be actionable, not just informative. Here is how to use it depending on your role:
If you lead CS or Onboarding: Use the Onboarding Maturity Model to assess your current state and identify the one-stage improvement that will have the highest impact. Start with visibility if you are at the Manual stage, add automation if you are at Guided.
If you lead Revenue Operations: The org structure data (57% reporting to CRO, 69% dedicated onboarding teams) provides the benchmark context to make the case for restructuring onboarding as a revenue function with its own metrics and accountability.
If you're presenting to the C-suite: Lead with revenue impact data: 57% churn increase from cutting onboarding budget, 57% of leaders tying friction to revenue realization, and the customer proof points showing 30-70% time reductions translating directly to revenue recognition.
The findings above represent highlights from the complete 2026 State of Customer Onboarding Report. The full report includes the complete dataset, additional benchmarks, the Onboarding Maturity Model diagnostic, and the First 90 Days Playbook.
Download the 2026 State of Onboarding Report to see how your organization compares and identify your next high-impact investment.
The 2026 State of Onboarding Report is based on survey responses from 161 onboarding and customer success leaders across SaaS, healthcare tech, logistics, professional services, and other B2B industries. Respondents include Heads of Customer Success, VPs of Onboarding, Implementation leaders, Directors of Revenue Operations, and C-suite executives. The survey was conducted by OnRamp in Q4 2025, see the full report.
A: The five key findings are: 62% of CS leaders lack real-time visibility into onboarding progress, 57% of companies that cut onboarding investment saw churn within six months, 57% of onboarding teams now report to the CRO or Revenue Operations, only 26% are actively investing in automation, and 70% of leaders expect AI to handle half of onboarding tasks by 2027.
A: OnRamp's 2026 State of Onboarding Report is based on survey responses from 161 onboarding and customer success leaders across SaaS, healthcare tech, logistics, professional services, and other B2B industries.
A: The biggest challenges are lack of real-time visibility (62% of leaders lack it,) onboarding friction impacting revenue (57% report direct revenue impact,) and the operational blockers of Sales-CS misalignment, manual handoffs, and fragmented data across tools.
A: According to the 2026 State of Onboarding Report, best-in-class teams achieve Time-to-First Value in under 14 days, onboarding completion rates above 80%, and post-onboarding CSAT scores of 4.5 out of 5 or higher.
A: Increasingly, yes. According to the 2026 report, 57% of onboarding teams now report into the CRO or Revenue Operations rather than traditional Customer Success, and 69% of companies have built dedicated onboarding functions rather than relying on generalist CSMs.