Customer Onboarding Specialist Career Path

Starting a career as a customer onboarding specialist requires understanding the key steps, skills, and experiences needed for success.

In this article, we will outline the typical journey for a customer onboarding specialist, covering educational requirements, entry-level positions, potential advancements, and long-term opportunities.

Without further ado, let’s get into it!

Overview of a customer onboarding specialist career path

A customer onboarding specialist helps onboard customers by conducting product tours, answering their questions, and helping them achieve their goals with the product.
The onboarding process includes conducting product tours, explaining product features to the customer, answering their questions, and ensuring the customer can achieve the goal for which they bought the product.
According to Glassdoor, the estimated total pay for a customer onboarding specialist in the United States is $71,285 per year, with an average salary of $55,673 per year. However, an individual’s salary may vary due to several factors such as years of experience, geographical location, and industry.
Here is what a typical career path for a customer onboarding specialist looks like:
1. Customer Service Representative: The customer service representative role is an entry-level role in the career path. In this role, you interface with customers, listen to customer complaints, and help resolve them.
2. Customer Onboarding Specialist: As a customer onboarding specialist, you are more involved with your customers. Here, you are assigned to specific customer accounts and ensure the success of that customer with your product. Your function ranges from welcoming and onboarding them to facilitating product adoption.
3. Senior Customer Onboarding Specialist: This is a more senior role in customer onboarding. In this role, you have more level of experience and are assigned to bigger customer accounts.
4. Customer Onboarding Manager: In this role, you will manage a team of customer onboarding specialists and ensure the overall success of customers.
5. Director of Customer Onboarding: The director of customer onboarding manages the onboarding department, develops customer onboarding strategies, and facilitates customer retention.
Best tools for a customer onboarding specialist include:
- Userpilot (Best tool for Personalized and Smooth Customer Onboarding): Userpilot is a tool every customer onboarding specialist should have in their arsenal. With Userpilot, you can set up personalized and smooth onboarding processes for your customers.
- Custify (Best tool for Customer Success): Custify is a customer success tool that helps you oversee customer usage, product adoption, and customer metrics.
- ChurnZero (Best tool for Customer Retention): ChurnZero also helps with monitoring product adoption and customer insights. With Churnzero, you can see customer data throughout the customer lifecycle.
- Trello (Best Tool for Project Management): With Trello, you can keep all your projects and tasks organized in one place, giving room for more efficiency.
- Zendesk (Best Tool for Customer Support): Zendesk is a customer support tool that allows you to personalize customer experiences. Features include messaging and live chats, workforce engagement, AI and automation, etc.
Looking into tools for customer onboarding specialists? Userpilot is an all-in-one product platform with engagement features and powerful analytics capabilities. Book a demo to see it in action!

What is a customer onboarding specialist?

A customer onboarding specialist helps onboard customers by conducting product tours, answering their questions, and helping them achieve their goals with the product.

The customer onboarding specialist role is vital in a SaaS company because it plays a huge part in customer retention. They train customers on how to use the product, answer questions, resolve issues, and help with user activation.

What does a customer onboarding specialist do?

Immediately after a customer signs up for a product, the customer onboarding specialist steps in to onboard them. The onboarding process includes conducting product tours, explaining product features to the customer, answering their questions, and ensuring the customer can achieve the goal for which they bought the product.

Customer onboarding specialist’s main responsibilities

The customer onboarding specialist role is a role that interfaces with customers and is important in ensuring customer success. They relate with customers, listen to them, and help them accomplish their goals. Some of the main responsibilities and duties of a customer onboarding specialist are:

Learning and becoming an expert on the product.
Welcoming the customer via onboarding emails and calls.
Acting as the primary contact for the customer and providing support for any issues related to the product.
Training the customer on how to make use of the tool, especially SaaS tools that require a bit of technical knowledge.
Answering the customer’s questions and addressing any problems that arise.
Checking in on the customer regularly, even after a successful onboarding process.
Sharing customer feedback and insights with the other teams such as marketing and sales.
Ensuring continuous customer satisfaction.

Customer onboarding specialist salary

According to Glassdoor, the estimated total pay for a customer onboarding specialist in the United States is $71,285 per year, with an average salary of $55,673 per year. However, an individual’s salary may vary due to several factors such as years of experience, geographical location, and industry.

Your years of experience are a major determinant of your salary as a customer onboarding specialist. If you are just starting in an entry-level role, you do not expect to receive the same amount as someone will over 10 years of experience in the role. Here is a breakdown of a customer onboarding specialist’s salary based on the level of experience:

0-1 year: $55K – $82K/year
1-3 years: $58K – $90K/year
4- 6 years: $60K – $96K/year
7-9 years: $62K – $102K/year
10-14 years: $64K – $111K/year
15+ years: $69K – $125K/year

Another crucial determinant of your salary is your industry. According to Glassdoor, the top 2 paying sectors for customer onboarding specialists and their median salaries are:

Education: $67,561/year
Information technology: $60,774/year

Your geographical location is another factor that affects your salary. Here is a breakdown of the customer onboarding specialist salary in some of the biggest cities in the United States.

San Francisco: $72,470/year
New York: $71,040/year
Boston: $69,484/year
Washington DC: $64,215/year
Chicago: $55,947/year

The customer onboarding specialist role is an interesting one you will find enjoyable if you like communicating with people and helping them achieve their goals. You can start with an entry-level role, such as a customer service representative, and from there, move up the career ladder. Here is what a typical career path for a customer onboarding specialist looks like:

Customer Service Representative: The customer service representative role is an entry-level role in the career path. In this role, you interface with customers, listen to customer complaints, and help resolve them.
Customer Onboarding Specialist: As a customer onboarding specialist, you are more involved with your customers. Here, you are assigned to specific customer accounts and ensure the success of that customer with your product. Your function ranges from welcoming and onboarding them to facilitating product adoption.
Senior Customer Onboarding Specialist: This is a more senior role in customer onboarding. In this role, you have more level of experience and are assigned to bigger customer accounts.
Customer Onboarding Manager: In this role, you will manage a team of customer onboarding specialists and ensure the overall success of customers.
Director of Customer Onboarding: The director of customer onboarding manages the onboarding department, develops customer onboarding strategies, and facilitates customer retention.

How to become a customer onboarding specialist

There is no specific degree for customer onboarding. However, a degree in Marketing, Business Administration, Psychology, or Communications is usually required. It is also important to note that this is not strictly followed when you have the skill and experience.

If you are looking to break into the customer onboarding specialist role, start by taking certification courses in customer success, project management, and communications. From there, you can start applying for customer onboarding specialist entry-level roles.

Best resources for customer onboarding specialists

There are several valuable resources on the internet to make you a better customer onboarding specialist. This ranges from books to webinars to blog posts and podcasts. Below is a curated list of resources every customer onboarding specialist should bookmark:

Best books for customer onboarding specialists

Product Rantz by Userpilot: Product Rantz is a book on best practices for a SaaS product, including customer onboarding. Included in the book are the do’s and don’ts of customer onboarding.
Product-led onboarding by Ramli John and Wes Bush: The book is a gem on how to retain customers and turn them into lifelong users starting from the onboarding process.
Better Onboarding by Krystal Higginso: Understanding the importance of onboarding, Krystal used her wealth of experience to write about how to better onboard customers.
Onboarding Matters by Donna Weber: This book explains how to turn new customers into paying product loyalists.
The Seven Pillars of Customer Success: A Proven Framework to Drive Impactful Client Outcomes for Your Company By Wayne McCulloch: In this book, Wayne explained the seven pillars of customer success, of which onboarding is part.

Best webinars for customer onboarding specialists

Customer onboarding specialists play a crucial role in shaping a positive first impression and setting users up for success. This curated list highlights webinar sources that help elevate your onboarding strategies:

Userpilot Events Our webinars delve into user onboarding best practices, product adoption strategies, feature walkthroughs, and user sentiment analysis. Bonus: You can look for webinars specifically focused on Userpilot features and how they can be leveraged to create exceptional onboarding experiences.
Gainsight PX offers webinars on customer onboarding strategies and product success management. Learn how to design effective onboarding workflows, measure onboarding effectiveness, and identify at-risk users for early intervention.
Services like Product School and Mind the Product offer premium subscriptions with access to exclusive webinars on customer onboarding and product growth topics.
Churn Zero Webinar: ChurnZero organizes a webinar series that talks about customer success and onboarding.
Custify Webinars: Custify is a customer success company that organizes webinar series on all things customer success, including onboarding. The series is usually an interview series with top leaders in the customer success community.
Valuize Webinars: The Valuize Webinars is another holistic webinar on customer success that every customer onboarding specialist should keep tabs on.
Finovate Webinar on Successful Client Onboarding: The Finovate webinar is a webinar where operations leaders talk about metrics to put in place for successful client onboarding.

Best blogs for customer onboarding specialists

Userpilot Blog: Userpilot has an entire section of the blog dedicated to in-depth and valuable insights on customer onboarding. A customer onboarding specialist looking to gain valuable insights should visit the blog regularly.
ClientSuccess Blog: The ClientSuccess Blog is a resourceful blog on customer success. It covers topics around customer success, such as customer onboarding, customer engagement, and customer success metrics.
CogniSaaS Blog: The CogniSaaS blog is another blog with insightful content around customer onboarding to check out.
Nicereply Blog: The Nicereply blog is a holistic customer success blog that discusses customer onboarding and customer retention.
Hubspot Service Blog: The Hubspot Service Blog contains a blog about customer onboarding, customer service, and customer success as a whole.

Best podcasts for customer onboarding specialists

Custify Podcast: Custify also produces a series of podcasts on customer success that talk about trendy matters in customer retention.
Grow and Tell Podcast by Dock: The podcast discusses a range of topics around customer onboarding and retention. If you are willing to learn broadly about the customer onboarding specialist role, this podcast is one you should subscribe to.
Gain, Grow and Retain by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan: Hosted by senior customer specialists, the podcast is one every member of the customer team should listen to for its valuable insights.
Churn FM By Andrew Michael, CEO of Avrio: Hosted by Andrew Michael, the CEO of Avrio, the podcast shares valuable insights into the role of the customer success team in retaining customers.
Women in Customer Success Podcast: The podcast presents a lot of thoughtful topics around having a career in customer success and how to navigate through successfully.

Best tools for customer onboarding specialists

Userpilot (Best tool for Personalized and Smooth Customer Onboarding): Userpilot is a tool every customer onboarding specialist should have in their arsenal. With Userpilot, you can set up personalized and smooth onboarding processes for your customers.
Custify (Best tool for Customer Success): Custify is a customer success tool that helps you oversee customer usage, product adoption, and customer metrics.
ChurnZero (Best tool for Customer Retention): ChurnZero also helps with monitoring product adoption and customer insights. With Churnzero, you can see customer data throughout the customer lifecycle.
Trello (Best Tool for Project Management): With Trello, you can keep all your projects and tasks organized in one place, giving room for more efficiency.
Zendesk (Best Tool for Customer Support): Zendesk is a customer support tool that allows you to personalize customer experiences. Features include messaging and live chats, workforce engagement, AI and automation, etc.

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