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.
Company Overview
Kenect is an AI-powered communications platform purpose-built for dealerships. Serving automotive, marine, powersports, and specialty dealers, Kenect helps businesses reach their customers more effectively through texting, reputation management, payment collection, and AI-driven service lane automation. The platform integrates directly with dealer management systems (DMS) and CRMs, making it a central hub for customer communication and engagement across the dealership.
Corbin King, Director of Business Applications, leads go-to-market systems at Kenect, overseeing the software and solutions that power each team across the organization. Having been with the company for over seven years, Corbin has deep visibility into the operational needs of every department, including the onboarding teams responsible for getting new dealer customers live on the platform.
The Challenge
Onboarding a new dealer onto Kenect’s platform is a multi-step process that involves multiple stakeholders. Because Kenect integrates with phone services and texting solutions, each new customer must complete A2P 10DLC compliance—a telecommunications registration process that requires specific brand information, legal details, and carrier registration. On top of that, Kenect needs credentials to connect with the dealer’s management system, and administrator users need to be set up and logged in.
Before OnRamp, this information-gathering process was handled almost entirely through email. A new customer would receive an email with setup instructions, and what followed was a long chain of back-and-forth messages—collecting credentials, explaining where to find certain information, answering questions, and waiting for responses.
As Corbin explained, “One of the things we were specifically looking for was a portal that let customers self-service their onboarding—see their tasks and complete them on their own with minimal handholding from our team. With OnRamp, we're getting customers into the onboarding process within minutes. It's a significantly better experience for everyone."
“You weren’t trying to be an everything-to-everyone project management tool that we’d have to shoehorn ourselves into; you provided a focused solution to the specific challenges of post-sales.”
Corbin King, Director of Business Applications at Kenect
Why OnRamp
When evaluating solutions, Kenect wasn’t looking for another generic project management tool. They needed a platform specifically designed for customer-facing onboarding—one that provided a clean, intuitive portal where non-technical end users could complete tasks independently without needing to create new accounts or learn a new system.
For Kenect, OnRamp stood out because of its focus on customer engagement. “You guys knew exactly what you were doing,” Corbin noted. “You weren’t trying to be an everything-to-everyone project management tool that we’d have to shoehorn ourselves into; you provided a focused solution to the specific challenges of post-sales.”
Salesforce integration was also a critical factor. Kenect relies heavily on Salesforce as their system of record, and OnRamp’s ability to write onboarding data back to Salesforce meant the team could pull out information easily, build reports, and maintain full visibility of project progress across both platforms.
Operational Improvements
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Significant time savings for onboarding reps. Instead of manually emailing every single customer, reps now only need to follow up with those who are unresponsive. As long as expectations are set upfront that the customer will receive an OnRamp portal with their steps clearly listed, the majority of customers complete their tasks independently. “The portal and progress reports have eliminated the need for us to chase down every customer,” Corbin shared. “Each of our team members is saving over 10 hours per month, which is time they can allocate to more complex projects or those customers who need extra support or a friendly nudge.”
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Clear visibility across all active onboardings. Onboarding reps can now see all of their projects at a glance—how far each customer has progressed through their steps, which ones need attention, and where blockers exist. With roughly seven stages per onboarding, multiple tasks per stage, and work being tracked across three different groups (the customer, the pre-setup team, and the onboarding rep), this visibility is essential for keeping projects moving forward.
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A simpler, cleaner experience for customers. User feedback has highlighted the simplicity of OnRamp’s interface. For dealer customers who aren’t accustomed to working in complex software systems, the clean, straightforward portal reduces friction and makes the onboarding process feel manageable and prescriptive instead of overwhelming and scattered.
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Support for a more complex onboarding motion. As Kenect has grown—adding new products and bringing on more customers—OnRamp has allowed them to scale a more sophisticated, multi-team onboarding process without adding operational overhead. Tasks that run in parallel across internal teams and customer-facing steps are now coordinated in a single platform, removing the manual and disjointed processes that previously slowed things down.
Looking Ahead
With OnRamp as the backbone of their onboarding workflow, Kenect is well-positioned to continue scaling their dealer onboarding operation. The combination of a customer-facing portal, Salesforce integration, and cross-team visibility has turned what was once a manual, email-driven process into a structured, efficient motion—one that delivers a better experience for Kenect’s team and their customers alike.