How to Improve Your Onboarding Program Though TaskRay’s Template Performance

By Sunny Harmon, TaskRay Director of Customer Success

Are you considering using the new Template Performance feature in the June 2019 release?

Reviewing performance is one of the most important aspects of a successful onboarding program. How do you drive customers to value quickly without understanding where in the process customers are successful, where they get blocked or delayed?

While you can get this information through a combination of Salesforce reports and your TaskRay implementation, it has gotten much easier with the new Template Performance View released this June. This new view is a quick and easy way to understand performance right within TaskRay—without the need for multiple Salesforce reports.

The TaskRay Onboarding team will be incorporating the new Template Performance feature into our internal process and we wanted to share a behind the scenes look at how we’ll do this.

Step 1: Our “why” — we want better insights on template performance.

Let’s start with the “why?”. Why should the TaskRay Onboarding Team move to Template Performance View to analyze our process? What do we hope to accomplish by using this feature?

Internally, we offer several onboarding programs and need to understand performance across all onboarding templates and task groups in use. We also want to make informed decisions based on real data to improve these programs. And finally, we want to understand commonly overdue tasks, blocked tasks, and tasks completed ahead of schedule (in order to achieve the above goals).

Step 2: Defining requirements and designing our own solution.

In order to justify a change in our process, we wanted a solution that tracked performance across all templates and time. It also needed include new, existing, and completed/archived projects, and as such, show performance for in-flight and completed projects. It was also important to us that we could select timeframes for reviewing performance, like specific date ranges.

There were several solutions that could have been used to meet our requirements. Below are our definitions of what we needed, a high-level summary and the solutions we implemented.

We first needed to define what it means for a project to be “Complete”. This definition is important because it determines when a project is set to “Complete” in TaskRay and each project must have the recently-added “Completed” checkbox to be reflected in Template Performance View. We determined that our definition of “Complete” is when a project reaches 100% Progress in TaskRay.

Once we defined what “Complete” meant to us, we had to determine how we would mark projects as “Complete” moving forward. We had three options to choose from:

1. Manually check the “Complete” box on a project upon its completion (Note: the“Complete” field must be added to the TaskRay Project Layout pages for this box to appear). This is the easiest option.
2. Import the Customer Onboarding Completion Flow – bonus you can implement the Onboarding Score to increase the reporting capabilities (We chose this one). 
3. Create an automation based on our own definition of “Complete”. This is a more complex option.

And finally, we had to decide how we would update all the existing projects that are completed. Similar to how we defined what “Complete” meant to our team, this step also requires deciding whether you want to see metrics for previously completed projects and if so, how you will access that information. Again, we had three options to choose from:

1. Do nothing and exclude all previous projects from Template Performance View. This did not meet our requirements, but is the easiest option.
2. Use the TaskRay utility which updates all projects with 100% progress with: (We chose this one). The utility marks the “Completed” checkbox as “True”  and sets the “Actual Completed Date” to the “Estimated End Date” (this was originally known as the Project End Date).
3. Use a data loading tool to update the above fields based on your definition of “Completed”. This is the most complex option.

Step 3: Train the team.

Even though the update to our process involves just a few minor adjustments so that projects are marked complete, training is always recommended to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Once we’ve completed training on the appropriate aspects, the final step is creating a plan to review the metrics and determine how we’ll use them. This will be done in two ways:

1. Monthly reviews of all in-flight projects will help us uncover where customers might be blocked or delayed or where they are advancing quickly. Having these tactical discussions with the onboarding team will help us move customers forward and remove blockers.
2. Quarterly reviews of all completed projects to discuss how we can holistically improve our onboarding program. This will help us find quick wins like template modifications to account for more accurate ordering of tasks or identify areas ripe for additional training resources.

Additionally, we can use this information to work on strategic initiatives and determine where we might create additional offerings in order to better support specific products or customer types, and review performance data.

There are many options when implementing new June release features into your existing TaskRay workflows and I hope it was helpful to hear how we internally transitioned to use the new feature.  If you have questions on using a new feature, our support team is a great resource.