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YuJa Onboarding Project
YuJa Onboarding Project

What is YuJa?

YuJa is an enterprise video platform that focuses on compatibilities with educational technologies. I joined the Customer Success team at YuJa as a Customer Success Manager(CSM) and during my time at YuJa I had identified a problem that all of my team members experienced.

Problem Statement

The Customer Success team at YuJa doesn’t have an organized process for onboarding new team members. This results customer success team members having a slower training schedule and inconsistent knowledge at the end of the training process.

Project Background

When I first joined YuJa, there wasn’t a formal training session or documentation that I could study for training purposes. My manager was the one who oversaw the entire onboarding process on their own. Of course, they had other commitments at the time as well so they squeezed in time to train me in between their packed meeting schedule. This left a lot of time hanging in between the different areas that I was being trained where I wasn’t particularly actively learning anything new.

As I spoke with the rest of my team, it turns out that everyone had a similar experience. All people on the Customer Success team from other CSMs to the Support staff had a confusing and disorganized experience being trained. Since all the members of our team came from a different background in terms of past professional experience and skillset, this unorganized training created large gaps of knowledge between each team member.

Identifying the Root Cause

YuJa is a rapidly growing company because the demand for a video platform for educational institutions has only grown since the onset of COVID-19. This rapid growth has left very little time for processes to be established and documented since so much work with new clients needs to be done. That also means that knowledge isn’t easily disseminated to existing teammates, let alone to any people that are new to joining the team.

The Business Need

Since all of the current in-depth knowledge of the platform is centralized in a single person, scaling the dissemination of information is crucial for the future. Democratizing information and documentation that can give background and debrief anyone joining YuJa on the product will increase opportunities for company success in the future, especially as the company headcount grows.

Optimization of the onboarding process is extremely important because as it is, all responsibility and feedback for training are done through a single person, and if they are busy then training comes to a halt. Delegating different areas of training to other team members not only helps the new members get put on an accelerated track of training, but also allows for newer hires to get familiar with the team and establish a support network. Getting members up to speed as fast as possible would help with keeping the Freshdesk ticket queue low and also free up schedules for all team members to work on additional projects.

Getting Buy-in

At the time that the pieces were fully in motion to ramp up on this project, I had been working at YuJa for a few months and I saw a few new members added to the team. Since I had been sitting on the idea of creating the onboarding program for a while because of what I experienced, I decided to speak with these newer members as well as with the existing members of the team to gauge how useful doing so might be for the future. It was unanimous with all team members that it would be extremely useful for any new members coming on to the team to have a team onboarding plan available to them.

After getting full approval with the team members, I spoke with my manager in a 1:1 meeting and proposed the idea of the plan with them to get feedback. They were happy to work with the team as we create the onboarding plan and have input on the areas where they still wanted to be hands-on with the new hires.

Project Requirements

Since all the team members were on board with the project, we now needed to brainstorm on the requirements for all different aspects of the project. Initially we started with a Google Jamboard that we could collectively collaborate on. To start us off, I asked the team to put questions that they believe should be addressed by the completion of the project. Of course, as we developed the training plan more questions would come up down the line but this initial set of questions was a great kicking off point to developing the training framework.

Developing the Framework

For this section, I’ll break down the questions that were posed as well as our answer for the question.

What are the responsibilities of people on the Customer Success team?

This is probably the most critical question to answer for any new members of the Customer Success team so they understand exactly what they might be getting trained on. To best answer the question, we’ll enumerate the main responsibilities of a CSM since it encompasses a great deal of what even the Support staff do.

CSMs are first and foremost responsible for relationships with new and existing client accounts. This is anything from keeping clients up to speed with newest product feature releases to developing workflows for any particular class assignment. CSMs will collaborate with Account Executives(AEs) to work on any inbound trial accounts to bring them fully onboard with a full enterprise agreement. For existing accounts, CSMs and AEs will work to bring them to renewal of their contracts.

CSMs are in charge of training sessions. This is often times done in a webinar manner while giving time for questions between sections of training. Training entails teaching clients base functionality of the YuJa platform as well as how YuJa integrates with their existing educational technologies.

CSMs along with Support staff work on inbound support via the Freshdesk ticketing system. Many requests come through the Freshdesk ticketing system from normal troubleshooting problems to workflow and project questions.

CSMs and Support staff will escalate any new feature requests and bugs appropriately to the product team.

CSMs and Support staff update and create new guides for the Zendesk support database. This will involve creating assets and getting screenshots to use to update existing support guides in order to reflect on the most recent UI/UX experience of the product. New guides will need to be created and document any new features that have been released.

CSMs are in charge of data migration for clients that are coming from other platforms and moving to YuJa. This is a very involved process where the CSM needs to work with the client to determine the scope of the project to see how much data will be migrated, whether or not existing links for the data should be replaced with new links generated after data has been migrated to the YuJa cloud, and any number of additional services.

While this doesn’t touch on all of the complexities of working as a CSM, these are in broad strokes the responsibilities and activities one can expect as a CSM.

How does the Customer Success team integrate into overall business operations?

Firstly, business development representatives acquire customers and try to get them to agree to a meeting where they will get a brief demo of what the product is and how it works. Account Executives give this demo and start talking about what level of agreement that the client might want to start with from trial to pilot or even straight to full enterprise agreement. Once the agreement is settled upon, the AE lets the assigned CSM know about the new client and gives background of their need and use. The CSM then starts working on creating the use environment for their client’s institute and coordinating to do training. As the CSM learns about any gaps or features that the client wants, the CSM will forward the feature requests and work with the product team to come to a resolution for the client. This then starts to create a feedback loop between the product team and the CSM/AE for any given client.

What is the base level of knowledge we expect someone to have after a week of training? Two weeks?

After a week of training, we want the CSM or Support staff to understand how to use the platform as a standalone item as well as how to use YuJa with different learning management systems (LMS).

After two weeks of training, CSMs and Support staff both should be getting a handle of the Freshdesk tickets. CSMs at this time will do additional practice and training to be able to present. CSMs will also be starting to sit in on meetings with clients.

How can we individualize the experience while still maintaining a standard of outcomes?

Since we have our expectations of what CSMs and Support staff should know, we can set those as baseline skills that Customer Success team members should have under their belt by the end of onboarding. Personalization of the onboarding process would come in the form of giving more or less time to any given area of the training based on the demonstrated level of proficiency of the particular skill might be. For example, if a new hire can grasp and learn the platform very quickly it may be more prudent to give them additional time to practice with their presentation.

An opportunity also exists to leverage the existing knowledge that the CSMs have of the platform and training. We can collaboratively work on a schedule for this training and create the documentation for the onboarding plan to be easy to follow for those conducting the training. Additionally there are a set of tools and documents that Customer Success needs to access on a daily basis but no central documentation for what these platforms and documents are. Customer Success can add these tools onto the documentation to make sure that prior to the start of onboarding the new member has full access to everything that they need.

What should the timeline of the onboarding be?

Given the previous answer, we would hope for any Support staff to be able to operate independently by week 2 and CSMs to be ready by week 4 to start handling clients. As of now the average has been 3-6 weeks for either of the roles to be fully ready.

How can we integrate the new members into the team socially?

Since one of the bottlenecks for the onboarding process was the fact that the entire process was handled by a single person, we figure it would be best for different areas of the onboarding be delegated to different members of the team. This gives an opportunity for all members of the team to meet the new hire and establishes a support network for the new hires to ask anyone on the team for help should they run into any issues that they may not be able to solve initially.

What determines whether or not someone is ready to take on clients and do trainings and presentations?

Throughout the onboarding the new CSM will be continually practicing their presentation and doing live practice runs with other CSMs watching. The other team members will try to ask questions and throw curveballs to simulate what a training with real clients might be like. The manager will be checking in periodically on on the presentation practice and will also act as the final checkpoint to say when the CSM is ready to present in front of clients.

Determining KPIs

Based on an amalgamation of the answers to the many questions that were answered in the previous section, we can determine a few KPIs that we will look out for:

Speed of training - measured in time it takes until the new member is fully autonomous. We set soft measures for Support to be ready in 2 weeks while CSMs should be ready by week 4. Any faster time than that can be considered a resounding success and a great result.

Managerial sign-off - this is a binary measurement, but is important as our indicator of quality of skill. It is fairly all-encompassing but since the manager is the one who gives the final OK, this measure will be a checkmark that all of the prerequisite skills are up to quality standards.

Team integration and cohesion - this is a self-reported measure that we ask the new hires at the end of their onboarding to get feedback from them and an idea of how they feel about how well they are integrating with the team.

Creating Documentation

Our biggest initial consideration was separating documentation based on the topic. This would help delineate between our trainings for CSMs and Support staff. Additionally, having separate documents for each topic helps serve as a more user-friendly reference and starting point for people to more easily find in the document archives. Existing documentation is in a team folder on Google Drive, so all future documents would be added into the team folder.

Topics for Each Document

Since we have previously listed out the many duties and tools involved, we used those individual items for each document that we’d draft. We are building on an existing document base for some of the tools that we use regularly (e.g. PivotalTracker and Freshdesk) but existing documentation is not encompassing of all the aspects of the responsibilities for Customer Success. Therefore we created additional documents that give tips for any client interactions as well as the document that has the full onboarding schedule and agenda. Documents were created as follows:

Customer Success Onboarding Plan & Schedule - The full rundown of the features of the product that all Customer Success team members need to understand. This includes everything from recording video to posting the video onto any given compatible LMS. The schedule chunks the content features by day to give time for new members to take notes and fully absorb the content. Each given chunk will be taught by a different person on the Customer Success team to start building the team network for the new hire. After each chunk, the member will be tested in a Q&A session by other Customer Success team members to make sure they have a solid understanding of the features they learned about on the given day. The new member must answer the questions and demonstrate their knowledge before being moved on to the next chunk of content.

This document also includes days for the new member to learn how to use the other tools and platforms that are used regularly as part of daily operations. Supplemental documentation will be provided for each platform that is being interfaced with to aid in learning.

Also built into the document is allotted time for presentation practice and checkpoints where the new member will demonstrate their accumulated knowledge and presentation ability to the manager. Practice sessions may be collaboratively watched by other members of Customer Success for constructive criticism and tips to be given to the new hire after practice.

Freshdesk Playbook - This worked as a general introduction on how Customer Success uses Freshdesk to assist users with any difficulties that they may run in to. An FAQ section was included to give an idea of some of the most frequently encountered problems that people write in to solve. This also gives an idea on how to respond to inquiries which may take a bit more research and questioning because it’s a somewhat delicate social process on levying expectations and keeping people updated. Outlined is also the idea of how to “smell smoke” to find the root causes of some of the issues that people are experiencing. For example, a user may write in about a technical difficulty that may just require a different workflow than what they were using. The difference maker between a good and a great support response is that the great response would take into consideration why users are not finding the other workflow more intuitive than the first one and suggesting solutions to the product team based on that perspective.

PivotalTracker Ticket Filing Guidelines - PivotalTracker is the internal ticketing system at YuJa for filing feature requests and bugfixes with the engineering team. This document outlines the format that the tickets should be written in and how to best provide information for the engineers to be able to execute on the filing. Often times Customer Success will be filing tickets on behalf of the clients for requested features.

Zendesk Guide Database Guidelines - YuJa’s online guide database is fairly extensive and regularly updated. All of the guide articles are written via Zendesk Guide and integrated to the support site. This document was written as a style and technical guide on how to write/update articles while maintaining a consistent look and feel across different articles. To accomplish this consistency, specific tools for screenshotting and image editing are outlined along with a small guide on how to use these tools to create the guide assets.

Tracking Accounts on ClientSuccess - This is a guide for the CSMs on how to make use of the ClientSuccess CRM platform. There are a couple of templates for client progress (whether they are still in the trial stage or if they have been converted to full enterprise and are now accounts that just need maintenance) and this guide goes over how to best make use of each template. It also covers how to write notes and update the pulse for each client so that anyone that may have to handle a support request that comes in from a given client can look at the logs on ClientSuccess and get a bit more background of the account and what their concerns are.

Results & KPIs

I was able to witness 3 new Customer Success members getting trained using the newly founded onboarding process and documentation. The makeup of these new hires were two CSMs and one Support member with 2 of them being remote and one attending in-person at the office. The findings for the onboarding of these three new members was as follows:

CSM 1 (in-person) - This person had a strong proclivity for picking up new technologies, so that part of the training was finished within a week. That left a lot of room in the schedule to work purely on presentation skills and preparation. Within 2 and a half weeks, they were able to do trainings and take on new clients. They were able to handle helpdesk tickets autonomously after 3 weeks. An area of feedback that I was able to get from conversations with them was that they felt they were well-connected with the team and were happy that they had such a strong support system for any questions or tips that they might ask fellow team members for.

CSM 2 (remote) - This person was the first CSM that would be joining the Customer Success team remotely, so training them was a bit of an experiment in both whether or not the team would be successful in training someone remotely as well as whether or not the onboarding structure we created would be helpful in making the process smooth. Contrasting the other CSM, this person wasn’t as technically proficient in picking up the platform but had great person skills. The training went about as long as expected for the technical portion of learning the YuJa platform as well as the other tools that are used to help customers, but less training was needed to ease them along for presenting and client interactions. Overall they were ready within 3 weeks to start taking on clients, and was fully independent and able to work on support tickets after 4 weeks.

Making sure that this person felt like they had a strong network was a bit more of a challenge due to them being remote, but along the training process we emphasized openness of all team members to help them along the way if they have any questions or needed any guidance. In the end they were thankful that we were so open and said they felt like they were very included in the team.

Support Staff (remote) - Support staff training slightly differs in that the emphasis that was placed on presentation is shifted over to emphasis on how to interact with people over text via the Freshdesk ticketing system. Platform and technical training was smooth with this hire, but since English was their second language we had to work with them a bit more to touch up on their ticket responses. It took roughly 2 weeks to get them fully up to speed and we continued to support them as they got more familiar with responding to tickets in order to help capture some of the nuances that a non-native English speaker may miss when reading messages over text. This hire appreciated the continual support that we gave them and felt that they were able to come to any of the team members if they ever wanted additional eyes on a message that they were drafting or to get pointers on how to troubleshoot an issue.

KPIs

For each of the three hires, all KPIs were met and their training was quite a bit more accelerated than previous hires who have taken anywhere between 4-6 weeks to be fully ready for their duties. The fact that the same training process could be done in such an accelerated manner while maintaining the high level of quality that is expected of them is an extremely successful result. It also felt great to meet the goal of having new hires really feel like they’re integrated and part of the team. Making sure that everyone on the team feels that they have a strong support network that they can go back to any time they have questions is an important part of making a strong team and I’m happy that the project was able to accomplish this.

Next Steps

There’s an opportunity for the Customer Success team to establish a central repository of expertise about the entire YuJa platform that can be distributed to more other areas of the business. Of course the engineering and product team are familiar with the functionality of the product, but being able to understand firsthand the workflows that many faculty are going through could prove to be an additional insight on how to design for any of the pain points that they experience. Another area of the business that could benefit from knowing more intricate information about the product is Business Development. The Business Development Representatives(BDRs) are having conversations every day with educational administrators, educational technologists, project managers, and IT specialists. Many of these people that they regularly interface with have their own unique products that they already own and need a reason to pick up YuJa on top of their repertoire of other digital platforms. If the BDRs were more armed with knowledge of the product, they might be able to secure more demos with the people that they are calling since they’d be more able to understand how YuJa might suit their needs.

All of this information could be spread via video tutorials that are recorded for internal reference. Making people access it this way would further their familiarity with YuJa and would give the employees more opportunity to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the product. Recorded videos could be separated via feature and can even be granular down to the different workflows people may go through to utilize the feature. Keeping the videos separated by feature and topic can help for any future updates that will inevitably be made to existing features or for new features that are added on to the product. BDRs would be able to sell the new features to prospective buyers, the Customer Success team would be able to more deeply understand the feature, and the product team would be able to see what the real-world use of the feature looks like. Democratizing the expertise that each area of the business has will serve to better actualize business goals in the future.