How Ethico Boosted Client Engagement – and Got Their Time Back

A Manual Process That Couldn't Keep Up

Ethico's onboarding process is inherently complex. No two implementations are exactly alike. Customers buy different combinations of products, roll them out in phases, and bring varying levels of technical sophistication. Compliance officers and attorneys, Marissa's primary counterparts, are demanding, detail-oriented, and expect clear visibility into project timelines and milestones at all times.

For years, Ethico managed implementations through Freshservice, with a closed deal triggering a ticket that the implementation team used to coordinate the project and communicate through email. This worked well for smaller onboardings. But as Ethico's clients grew and implementations became more technical, projects required more detailed plans, defined milestones, and clearer visibility into what needed to happen next. Coordinating that level of detail through ticket and email conversations made it difficult to provide the structured, visual project plans and milestone-based experience that larger implementations required.

The need for a more structured approach

• Project visibility was limited. Ethico used Gantt charts and other project-tracking tools internally, but keeping status updates current was largely manual. Clients didn't have a dedicated place to see project progress, upcoming milestones, or what was needed from them. Much of that communication still happened through email threads.
• GuideCX introduced some improvements, but also added friction. Project setup was time-consuming, sometimes taking up to an hour and a half for a single project, with limited HubSpot integration options. Clients also found the GuideCX experience confusing and frequently chose not to use it, resulting in more communication through email. Random access failures, slow load times, and a bug that could reset checklists further complicated the experience.
• Phased implementations were difficult to track consistently. Enterprise customers often purchase multiple products and activate them in phases over several months. Tracking progress and time-to-value across those phases required manual calculations, spreadsheets, and workarounds, making it harder to maintain a consistent view of the overall implementation.Implementation data wasn't flowing back into HubSpot. Milestone completions, go-live status, and onboarding risk signals weren't automatically available in HubSpot, limiting visibility for RevOps, billing, and Customer Success teams.

A Better Fit for Ethico’s Implementation Process

After evaluating OnRamp, Marissa — self-described as the skeptic in the room — became one of its strongest advocates. What convinced her wasn't just the feature set. It was the flexibility to build something that actually fit how Ethico works.

A Modular Playbook Built for Their Business

Instead of one massive, rigid template that required stripping dozens of items out for every new client, Ethico built a base playbook covering their two most common product lines — MyCM and EcoCheck — and moved all other modules (API integrations, campaign management, risk assessment, e-learning, and more) into OnRamp's library. Implementation specialists now pull in only what's relevant for each client's contract, turning what used to be an hour-and-a-half setup into a 35-minute or less workflow.

A Client Portal Clients Actually Use

One of Ethico's most persistent challenges was getting clients to engage with their project platform rather than defaulting to email. With OnRamp, the client portal is clean, simple, and intuitive enough that clients navigate it on their own. Marissa's team now actively redirects email inquiries back to the portal, and it's working. Since go-live in May 2026, Ethico has seen near-100% invite-to-login rates across its active projects.

Structured Data Collection – With Accountability Built In

Marissa is using OnRamp's task and subtask builder to embed data collection directly into the onboarding workflow. Required subtasks, things like submitting lists of licensed users, completing a pre-churn risk and needs survey, or filling out a CSAT, can't be skipped. Clients have to complete them to move forward. For an implementation team that used to chase these items via email, this alone represents a significant shift.

HubSpot Automation Closing the Loop

With OnRamp connected to HubSpot, project creation is now triggered automatically when a deal is marked closed. Milestone completions and go-live status can be pushed back to HubSpot, giving RevOps, billing, and CS teams real-time visibility they never had before. The integration has also opened the door to automated risk scoring, surfacing early signals about challenging accounts before they become churn risks.

More Time, Better Visibility, Happier Clients

Since moving all new onboardings into OnRamp in May 2026, Ethico's implementation team has seen meaningful improvements across the board.

Project setup that used to take Marissa and her team up to 90 minutes now takes 35 minutes or less, even while still managing some manual steps as the HubSpot automation is refined. As that automation matures, setup time is expected to drop further.

Client engagement has shifted dramatically. Nearly 100% of invited clients have logged into the OnRamp portal, a stark contrast to the previous platform, where clients regularly refused to use the tool and defaulted to email. Marissa's team now fields a fraction of the "where are we?" questions they used to receive, and troubleshooting sessions related to platform access are effectively gone.

Internally, specialists report that the platform is easier to navigate and more reliable than their legacy tool. The clear separation of internal and client-facing tasks has reduced confusion, and the absence of the bugs that plagued the previous system has restored confidence in the data they're looking at.

And the end result of this improved internal and external onboarding engagement is higher customer satisfaction and better retention rates.

Turning Onboarding Into a Strategic Asset

Ethico is just getting started. With a stable foundation in place, Marissa's roadmap is focused on turning OnRamp into the connective tissue across her team's entire client lifecycle.
On the near-term horizon: fully automated project creation from HubSpot, risk scoring that surfaces early churn signals back into HubSpot from onboarding survey data, and automated CSAT collection embedded directly into the project workflow. Longer term, Marissa sees OnRamp as the platform that finally gives her team and Ethico's leadership real visibility into implementation performance: where projects stall, which tasks are bottlenecks, and how time-to-value is trending across the book of business.

For an implementation manager who once spent 90 minutes manually setting up a single project, that future is a long way from where things started – and OnRamp is what's making it possible.