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
Scaling Onboarding without Sacrificing Quality
Qualia, the leading digital real estate closing platform, faced a significant challenge with its onboarding team. The company's philosophy centered on providing a high-quality, hands-on onboarding experience for every customer. However, this approach, which involved assigning a dedicated onboarding specialist to each new customer, was reaching its limits as the company grew.
Brian Thome, Chief Customer Officer at Qualia, explained the core problem: “We were trying to solve how to continue to balance the idea of quality and efficiency with onboarding new customers.” This was especially true for their high-volume SMB (small and mid-market) customers. The manual, one-to-one process, which previously relied on onboarding specialists sending individual emails to each customer with action items and follow-ups, was leading to capacity bottlenecks and causing customers to wait longer than expected to get started on the platform.
To add to the capacity challenges, Qualia announced a major partnership with Old Republic Title earlier this year that resulted in several thousand customers migrating to the platform over a three-years period. Thome noted, “We needed to double our onboarding capacity in three months or less, which is not easy.” The team needed to scale its onboarding process efficiently while maintaining the high-touch, quality experience its customers expected.
“We were trying to solve how to continue to balance the idea of quality and efficiency with onboarding new customers. We needed to double our onboarding capacity in 3 months or less, which is not easy."
Brian Thome, Chief Customer Officer at Qualia
The Solution
A Self-Serve, Action-Oriented Onboarding Platform
Qualia’s search led them to find a suitable technology solution to solve this problem. They selected OnRamp, a platform that could deliver a structured, yet flexible, onboarding experience. Colleen Grande, a Senior CS Operations Analyst, highlighted the main differentiator: “OnRamp’s overall strength is project planning functionality – having that functionality extremely robust and suited for our needs was the biggest differentiator for our team.” This product was a significant step up from their previous system, which was more for internal task tracking and lacked a polished, customer-facing component.
Grande emphasized its user-friendliness, particularly for their customers who are not always technical in nature. “OnRamp was the most digestible for the non-tech-savvy folks,” she said. This simplicity was critical because, as Thome added, “Customers shouldn’t be met with friction immediately after they start learning the product.”
The OnRamp-powered workflows were designed to be discreet and actionable, breaking down complex tasks into manageable steps. This allowed customers to make progress at their own pace. Colleen noted a key insight from a customer: “I don’t even know what OnRamp is.” That is a good sign, because it means they are focused on doing their onboarding tasks. The “behind-the-scenes” nature of OnRamp allowed Qualia to scale quickly while providing a bespoke, Qualia-branded customer journey.
Another major benefit of the software was the ability to invite customers into onboarding almost immediately after they signed up. Thome explained that previously, customers would have to wait up to two weeks for their kickoff call. Now, with OnRamp they can get started right away without additional guidance. “They don’t want to wait two weeks before they get to start exploring what is possible with the Qualia platform,” Thome said, emphasizing the need to ride the excitement of a new sale. This shift has also transformed onboarding calls from a "show and tell" to a higher-value coaching and problem-solving session.
The company is also getting valuable data that was previously unavailable. Qualia onboarding specialists have better visibility into customer progress and can intervene quickly if a project gets off track. Qualia will ask their customers a key question: "How confident are you that your team is using the product well?" This feedback allows customer success managers (CSMs) to prioritize follow-up calls with customers who may need more help, while the more confident customers can be given more space to continue autonomously. The OnRamp platform's Slack integration enables real-time notifications for comments and survey feedback, allowing the team to respond to customer questions and issues immediately.
The Impact
Increased Efficiency and High Customer Satisfaction
By implementing OnRamp, Qualia achieved significant gains in both efficiency and customer satisfaction. The company has already more than doubled its onboarding volume this year, with an expectation to be close to a 3X increase by the end of the year. They managed this growth without having to add additional headcount, thanks to the automation and scale provided by OnRamp.
Thome shared some of the initial results: for the customers using OnRamp, the time from gaining access to Qualia to going live was reduced by 53%.
The customer satisfaction results were also impressive. Qualia uses an OnRamp workflow to send a survey at the end of onboarding, leading to comprehensive feedback on completed projects – and the results show – customers love Qualia’s onboarding experience.
“This is my third account opened with Qualia...this onboarding is so much better than yesteryear! Congrats to you.”
“Having both video and written materials to reference was helpful. Those materials answered most of our questions, but it was reassuring to have the live check-in meetings to make sure we were on track and tasks had been properly completed.”
Beyond the positive qualitative feedback received from customers, Thome shared key satisfaction metrics:
- Onboarding “graduation” rates increased from 92% to 99%
- <3% of customers have expressed dissatisfaction with Qualia onboarding
- 14 customers have offered to provide onboarding testimonials to Qualia sales prospects
These numbers are especially notable given the inherent complexity of switching to a new title production system. As Thome pointed out, even a neutral rating is a positive sign for such a complex product implementation.
By using OnRamp, Qualia has successfully transformed its onboarding from a manual, one-to-one process into a scalable, high-quality, and data-driven engine for growth. The platform has allowed them to deliver superior customer experiences that are efficient and self-serve, empowering customers to move at their own speed while still receiving expert guidance when needed.
