How VMware built a new-hire-centric Customer Success Onboarding Experience
Starting a new job can be daunting. There are so many unknowns: a new manager, new processes, new products, and new colleagues. And now, with the rise of remote work, we're onboarding without ever stepping foot in an office. The grueling interview process you just went through doesn't seem so bad anymore, does it?
In this blog post, I'll show you how one empathetic leader, Akshata Mehta, revamped VMware End User Computing’s (EUC) customer success onboarding process to make it more remote-friendly along with her team. Specifically, Akshata shares how they redesigned the onboarding experience so that CSMs could organically build a support system for themselves and find safe spaces to ask questions without judgment.
Akshata has been on the customer success team at VMware for over 4.5 years. During that time, she's seen the customer success team's culture and needs shift due to the pandemic. As a passion project, Akshata set out to make the customer success onboarding experience better for new hires who were going through it remotely.
There were two key pain points that the customer success team faced when onboarding new hires remotely:
Bridging different skill set gaps with the same onboarding process. For example, VMware hired CSMs who were either very technical or highly seasoned in customer success. The challenge was: how does the CS team customize a remote onboarding experience that enables both technical skills and soft skills? How would the program bridge both gaps simultaneously?
The "emotional stress" aspect of remote onboarding. Akshata noticed that the culture was shifting as new hires were not in the same place as their team members. "You can't quickly tap someone on the shoulder and privately ask a question that you think might be basic," said Akshata. By onboarding remotely, new hires were unable to find their "buddies," who they could develop comfort with asking their basic questions. She wanted to provide new hires with organic avenues to create their community, especially before the flood gates open, when these new hires are given their accounts and buried in work.
With these challenges in mind, Akshata and her team planned an on-demand training program, which is a combination of both CSM job related soft skills and technical bootcamp required to get level 100 understanding of the product. The team divided onboarding into four phases:
Onboarding Bootcamp
Scheduled Shadowing
Mentorship Program
Bridges Program
Phase 1: Onboarding Bootcamp
This phase includes the basic, run-of-the-mill aspects of onboarding. It's a three-part series that's role and organization-specific. During this phase, new CSMs learn about VMware's values, what the customer success organization looks like globally, and what their day-to-day life would look like. This phase was focused on teaching the basics of resource orchestration - which teams to engage, how, and when. This phase also includes education on tracking tools, success planning, and a list of Slack channels, etc. Akshata emphasizes the importance of laying a good foundation of the basics before moving onto the next phase.
Phase 2: Shadowing
In this second phase, new hires sign up for a four-hour slot every day for two weeks, dedicated to shadowing. During this phase, new hires shadow 10 senior members of the customer success team on customer-facing calls. Akshata describes that the key during this phase was having the onboarding team pre-select the CSMs to be shadowed and schedule the calls on behalf of the new hires. In the past, new hires were responsible for scheduling shadowing calls and pinging their peers, which can be a daunting task that doesn't always lead to shadowing.
During this phase, new hires are asked to do two specific tasks:
Observe the different styles of each CSM and build a list of takeaways. The ability to compare 10 different people in how they approach challenges and achieve outcomes allows new hires to envision themselves with a particular style so they can adopt it.
Opportunity to build relationships: Akshata hoped that exposing new hires to 10 CSMs would allow them to meet with different CSM’s outside of their direct team and ice breaker conversations with them. This would help build a relationship with them, where they would be comfortable enough to ping them for help. "If you like the way this CSM you're shadowing builds success plans, or responds to customers, you're naturally inclined to make an effort to build a relationship with that CSM so they can help you in the future. The goal here is to inspire and motivate new hires to build relationships with senior members of the team that aligns with their specific working style," said Akshata.
Phase 3: Mentorship Program
At VMware, there are multiple customer success teams that align with different products. When everyone was in the office, it was easy for new hires to meet CSMs from different teams, run into them, or grab coffee with them. She wanted to find a way to rekindle that organic networking experience.
So, during this phase, the new hires venture outside their customer success team, to a sister customer success team. “The goal is to bolster the new hire experience and provide an alternative perspective outside the new hire’s direct team”, says Akshata. This program is designed to be 6 months long, but can extend beyond this period, and the time commitment is 2 hours a month.
The hope from this program is it would enable the new hire’s professional growth and allow them to grow their network, while also tackling new experiences in the workplace. This is a second avenue for new hires to build trusted relationships and be a part of the VMware customer success community. Akshata perceived the mentorship program as yet again, another opportunity to network that hopefully allows the new hire to not feel disconnected during the onboarding process.
Akshata found a unique way of matching CSMs, kind of like a dating app. “We match them based on common traits such as being a recent grad, industry experience, time zones or even based off the same city”.
Phase 4: Bridges program: This program runs in parallel to the mentorship program. Once new hires are assigned accounts, this program helps bridge the gap between onboarding and account management. The bridges program provides the new hires with yet another avenue to interact with the recent hires (before them) via a Slack channel, join a bi-weekly call where the veterans would either have a SME talk, a forum discussion or even just a happy hour for mingling. specific slack channel that includes 2 veteran CSMs, and the rest are new and recent hires. “These 2 veterans & recent hires in the slack channel answer all new hire questions. The goal is to create a safe space for the CSMs to ask whatever they want, ask the same question multiple times, or whatever they need”.
Continuous improvement: Akshata wanted to ensure that this is an iterative, evolving program that continues to serve new hires better. To do this, the team has a feedback form specifically designed for mid-term and end of mentoring period. Based on the feedback on timeline, cadence, and how to enhance the program, Akshata and team continuously evolved the mentor program.
IMPACT: The ultimate goal of any onboarding is to make the new hire ‘feel at home’ with their new company, team and role.
By giving new hires multiple avenues to connect with their team members, having a manager and a mentor as a go-to and a safe environment to harness the knowledge from the recent new hires & veterans aims to do exactly that.
The hope is that this plays a good role in making the new hires a part of the community and not feel isolated in this remote world, hence improving the happiness quotient and retention.
I hope this blog inspired you to identify gaps in your onboarding journey and suggest some of these changes. I also hope this blog provides perspective on what a good onboarding experience looks like, so you can ask for these things the next time you’re at a new company.