So you’re thinking about building with Aqfer to help improve your tech stack, but not quite sure how to get started or what to expect for your onboarding? No worries, we’re here to help. Our team is committed to ensuring we deliver with excellence for every client through our white glove onboarding. While other companies may try to use those terms, we want you to understand what that means to us. Let’s dive in.
White Glove Onboarding
We believe that getting clients started off on the right foot is critical for our long term success – and yours too! That’s why we get our client success team involved before you ever agree to become a client of ours (aka go through formalities of contracting). We want to engage your engineering team with ours to ensure that everyone knows what’s coming and what needs to be done to get there. What we call a Mutual Engineering Validation is a critical step in your buying process, and we don’t allow our sales teams to skim over this in the hopes that we’ll figure it all out after getting the contract signed (not that there are teams out there like that….j/k).
Internal Kickoff
Once all of the formalities are in order and it’s time to begin, we kick things off internally to assign and coordinate resources, ensure accurate and complete knowledge transfer between the sales engineers, representatives, and other stakeholders you’ve been working with to our delivery organization. As part of this internal kickoff, we create your initial project plans in our project management software, Monday.com, assign Solutions Architects, Solutions Engineers, and Client Success Managers to your account, review all documentation from your team and our Sales teams, and coordinate with you to schedule your kickoff meeting(s).
Housekeeping
Once all of the formalities are in order and it’s time to begin, we kick things off internally to assign and coordinate resources, ensure accurate and complete knowledge transfer between the sales engineers, representatives, and other stakeholders you’ve been working Of course, there are a few housekeeping items that also need to be taken care of on the technical side too. Our team will get you set up with access to your Aqfer Portal which is where you’ll build and manage your tags and jobs, plus view reports and much more. Don’t worry, we’ll walk you through it when the time is right. We will also get everything set up for you in your cloud account or sub-account. We often use AWS if other clouds are not required, so we’ll ensure you’ve got an S3 bucket available to house all data that will soon be coming in. And of course, we grant access to you and your team for this too. Typically, these processes take 5-7 days to complete.
Kickoff Meeting
When the big day finally arrives, it’s time to celebrate the start of something new, but also to start getting our hands dirty and putting in the work. For our client success team, it’s their chance to make a great first impression – and we know you never get a second chance at that. They’ll work with you to help educate you on the specifics of your onboarding process and get you and your team prepared for what to expect. Plus, you’ll get to know who you’re teaming up with and who to contact for specific issues that may arise. This is a working session too. We’ll be sure to cover what’s in- or out-of-scope, review key deliverables and discuss the all-important next steps for 30/60/90 day success.
BRDs and Project Plans
Successful journeys never happen without lots of planning, communication, and documentation. That’s why our Solutions and CS teams prepare formal documents like our Business Requirements Documentation (BRD) and Project Plans. These items get into the nitty gritty of all the requirements, define timelines, success factors, key deliverables, and of course your goals and desired outcomes. Not only do we want to understand what success looks like, we also want a measuring stick to know when we’ve hit it.
Transition
After completing your White Glove Onboarding, it’s time for you to shine. By this time, you’ll have training on how to use our portal to create your own tags, configure your own data ingestion and collation jobs, and distribute your data to your downstream applications as needed. Even better, you’ll have clarity on exactly what that last sentence means. Transition is always a bittersweet time because we often won’t be working together quite as closely anymore since you’ll have graduated, but rest assured that we’ll still be here to support you whenever you need.
Ongoing Communication
Just because you’ve transitioned into a maintenance phase doesn’t mean we don’t care anymore. Our Client Success Managers are still here to make sure you’re having a great experience. On a regular basis, we’ll schedule Business Review calls to check in with you, discuss any new features that have been released (hint: there’s a lot of them coming), and see how you’re progressing on your goals. We’ll also discuss any new projects you have coming up that may require additional assistance.