Low visibility and poor customer experience top the worries of customer onboarding teams

New Rocketlane survey reveals current challenges, future trends and 2022 goals for customer onboarding teams

SAN JOSE, Dec. 7, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Rocketlane, the collaborative customer onboarding company, today released “The State of Customer Onboarding,” a report revealing challenges, future trends and goals based on a survey of customer onboarding professionals from companies, including Microsoft, Intuit and Pendo. The report shows the top reasons for customer escalations during onboarding and implementation, challenges in the onboarding process, such as the reliance on multiple tools, and difficulties with creating optimal customer experience. The report also highlights the reasons behind the various challenges and offers best practices to make onboarding seamless.

“Customer onboarding is the first major engagement after a sale is closed. The experience delivered during the onboarding journey influences future engagements, upsells and cross-sells, and key SaaS metrics, including NRR and churn. But today it is marred with inefficiency and inconsistency. The survey brings these issues to the surface and highlights where SaaS customer onboarding needs improvement,” said Rocketlane CEO Srikrishnan Ganesan.

Key takeaways from the report include: 56% of onboarding and implementation professionals feel there’s inadequate visibility into the work of each project, 54% rate the customer experience they provide as average, and around 60% use at least four different tools for their customer-facing projects.

“The report uncovers the daily struggles of customer onboarding and implementation teams. A lot can be attributed to generic project management tools, which by nature aren’t built for customer-facing projects. Leaders now have strong data points to prioritize process optimization and formulate strategies to create a 5-star experience for customers and their teams,” adds Srikrishnan.

Other significant findings:

  • Customer onboarding seems to be riddled with inefficient processes. The usage of multiple tools, manually soliciting feedback from customers, and dependence on the project manager for status updates are some of the inefficiencies that are apparent from the survey.
  • Holding customers accountable for the parts of the onboarding process that are dependent on them is a challenge for onboarding and implementation teams.
  • Considerable time (5-10 hours a week) is spent by onboarding teams manually sending follow-ups and reminders to their customers. Their top distraction is tracking work across tools.
  • 56.1% of the respondents stated that improving customer experience during onboarding was their top goal for 2022. This indicates that companies are recognizing the importance of delivering an impressive and professional experience early on in the customer journey.

About Rocketlane

Rocketlane, with its purpose-built customer onboarding platform, enables businesses to accelerate the time-to-value of their products, achieve faster go-lives, increase renewals and boost customer satisfaction. Rocketlane brings the focus back to the customer in customer onboarding through a fully collaborative experience. The platform replaces general project management, communication and document collaboration tools with a unique, unified workspace that improves communication, collaboration, and project visibility for teams and their customers. With insights from trends and benchmarks across projects, teams can develop and optimize playbooks and best practices with continuous improvement. For more information, visit www.rocketlane.com.

Press Contact:
Kira Wojack
[email protected]
(415) 419-4062

Author Information

As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.

Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.

Latest Insights:
How Genesys and AWS Are Redefining AI-Driven Customer Engagement
July 24, 2026
Article
Article

How Genesys and AWS Are Redefining AI-Driven Customer Engagement

Keith Kirkpatrick, Vice President & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Di at Futurum, Genesys Cloud's expanded AWS partnership leverages agentic AI to transform enterprise customer engagement and enable autonomous interactions at scale....
So This Is How AIs Attack- Observations From the OpenAI & Hugging Face Incident
July 24, 2026
Article
Article

So This Is How AIs Attack: Observations From the OpenAI & Hugging Face Incident

Fernando Montenegro and Mitch Ashley, VPs at Futurum, read the OpenAI and Hugging Face agentic incident as a live test of enterprise readiness to detect and contain AI agents that go off-goal...
Nokia Q2 FY 2026 Optical Strength Positions Nokia for the AI Buildout
July 24, 2026
Article
Article

Nokia Q2 FY 2026: Optical Strength Positions Nokia for the AI Buildout

Futurum Research analyzes Nokia’s Q2 FY 2026 earnings, focusing on AI and cloud order strength, optical and IP demand, AI-RAN timing, and supply constraints....
Texas Instruments Q2 FY 2026 Earnings Climb on Broad-based Analog Growth
July 24, 2026
Article
Article

Texas Instruments Q2 FY 2026 Earnings Climb on Broad-based Analog Growth

Brendan Burke, Research Director at Futurum, reviews Texas Instruments' Q2 FY 2026 earnings, the broad industrial recovery, doubling data center revenue, and automotive re-acceleration....
Latest Research:
Redefining Creative Workflows in the AI Era
July 21, 2026

Redefining Creative Workflows in the AI Era

In Redefining Creative Workflows in the AI Era, completed in partnership with Adobe, Futurum Research examines how organizations are moving beyond isolated AI productivity gains toward unified creative platforms that...
The Governance Gap Why Scaling AI Requires More Than Monitoring
July 15, 2026

The Governance Gap: Why Scaling AI Requires More Than Monitoring

In our latest market brieft, The Governance Gap: Why Scaling AI Requires More Than Monitoring, completed in partnership with IBM, Futurum Research examines why AI governance must evolve from periodic...
The Rise of the Super Agent: How Agentic AI Is Reshaping the Enterprise
July 13, 2026
Research
Research

The Rise of the Super Agent: How Agentic AI Is Reshaping the Enterprise

In our latest Market Brief, The Rise of the Super Agent: How Agentic AI Is Reshaping the Enterprise, completed in partnership with Lenovo, Futurum Research examines how autonomous AI systems...

Book a Demo

Welcome

The vision behind everything in Futurum’s Custom Research practice is this: research should show you what is happening, what comes next, and what to do about it. It should be personal to each audience, easy for people to grasp, and structured so LLMs can reason over it accurately. And it should be fast and turnkey; you want answers now, not another project to carry for quarters.

Whether you are defining business, channel, or go-to-market strategy; evaluating vendors or justifying ROI; or commissioning research to fill an emerging market need, we have your back, with a program that answers your questions with the objectivity and credibility to drive real decisions.

To do it, we bring unmatched data to bear: Futurum research, surveys, and market projections; validated market feeds; ETR’s 15 years of insight from 10,000 technology decision-makers; G2’s buyer and user data; and what our analysts hear every day. Add leading primary collection, from AI-moderated voice interviews to surveys and analyst-led interviews, all turnkey, and every project comes out credible, nuanced, and actionable.

And we don’t just drop the results in your lap. For internal work, we provide analyst-led sessions, interactive dashboards, and a range of formats. For market-facing work, Futurum delivers turnkey activation and amplification that actually gets seen, by people and by LLMs, through our media and share of voice. This is research that moves decisions and markets.

We will meet you wherever you are, from a fast-turn brief to a multi-year program, and shape the work to your goals, timeline, and budget. The right program for your moment.

If any of this is useful, I would love to talk.

Benjamin Brown, VP Custom Research, Futurum Research

Benjamin Brown

VP, Custom Research · The Futurum Group

Newsletter Sign-up Form

Get important insights straight to your inbox, receive first looks at eBooks, exclusive event invitations, custom content, and more. We promise not to spam you or sell your name to anyone. You can always unsubscribe at any time.

All fields are required






Thank you, we received your request, a member of our team will be in contact with you.