Customer Onboarding Specialist Job Description: Templates and Examples
Since there are multiple, distinct steps in the customer journey, some companies choose to separate these steps and have them managed by separate roles:
The sales team handles pre-sales.
A customer onboarding specialist manages onboarding.
A customer success specialist owns lifecycle management.
If your company is splitting responsibilities in a similar way, this post will teach you how to write a customer onboarding specialist job description that attracts the most qualified candidates and gets them excited to apply.
Section 1: About the job
As you introduce the concept of the role, include information about the company itself. Be sure to mention any specific values or traits that differentiate this role from the candidate's other potential opportunities.
Having a bigger picture of the company will help the person reading your job description better understand what the role might be like in reality, rather than just on paper.
Similarly, because customer onboarding is a specific section of the role traditionally associated with customer success management, clarify that this is specifically for the onboarding segment of the customer journey and explain what that segment encompasses. Here's an example:
Company ABC is a rapidly growing, profitable technology company that still embodies a small start-up culture. Our mission is to make video easier to share and easier to watch.
Our primary customers are higher education, enterprise, and government customers — so captioning, transcription, audio description, and translation solutions are our bread and butter.
We are hiring a Customer Onboarding Specialist to help set up these high-value customers for immediate success through a clearly defined implementation process.
As a Customer Onboarding Specialist, you will educate new customers, help solve technical problems, and ensure the smooth adoption of our products. Throughout our customer lifecycles, we prioritize delivering a fantastic customer experience, and onboarding is the first step of that process.
Because this is a new team, you will have a critical hand in shaping its function within Company ABC. We hope you will be invigorated by the idea of stepping into the unknown, wearing many hats, and dealing with some ambiguity in your day to day.
In exchange, you’ll be rewarded with a challenging, fun, and stimulating work environment and excellent customers to work with every day.
While the example above doesn't discuss the company's values or specific views, the reader comes away with a sense of the culture. It is a high-performance, potentially high-stress role, but it can be very rewarding. You want your readers to understand what your company is about and be eager to learn more about the role.
Section 2: Key responsibilities
The key responsibilities section is your opportunity to dive deeper into the role itself. This is where you engage candidates and help them see how they would feel in the role.
Be as clear and concise as you can with these responsibilities without leaving out essential details. Keep it easy to read and quickly skimmable.
Here's an example of what this might look like in practice:
Own and manage customer relationships from the point of sale through successful implementation.
Develop measurements to help understand the impact of successful implementation.
Create initiatives that help to drive successful product implementation.
Help the customer define their needs and manage their timeline toward seeing value.
Work with sales, product, and support teams to ensure that each piece of the journey meets customer expectations.
Respond to customer emails, chats, and calls regarding implementation.
Complete video and phone calls to ensure that customers are supported during the onboarding process.
Build evergreen content and resources for customers (and other organizations) to use for education and to drive rapid product adoption.
Be a Company ABC expert and discuss or educate on any nuance of the product internally and externally.
Quickly pick up and disseminate any updates to the product, both to your customers and to your internal teams as needed.
Create repeatable processes, resources, and frameworks to use when onboarding customers.
Successfully transfer your customer relationships to a customer success manager after onboarding.
This list is relatively short and sweet, but it gives an in-depth picture of the position's key responsibilities.
Section 3: Skills and qualifications
You should first list the requirements you consider essential, not to set a low bar, but to ensure you don’t exclude great candidates who may not meet all of your nice-to-have items. For example, if you would accept in-role experience as equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree, you could leave the degree off your list.
You can always follow your requirements with a "nice-to-have" section to help your ideal candidates self-select into the application process.
Here's an example:
Pleasant and straightforward phone and video manner.
Excellent written communication.
Technical knowledge of video encoding frameworks and transcription software.
Organizational skills — you'll be working with many customers, and you'll need to have expertise in place to keep all of their needs organized.
An understanding of market needs and current use cases of businesses using video.
Strategically minded — you'll be helping customers come up with their overall strategy with our product!
Highly self-motivated and driven — you don't need someone hovering over your shoulder telling you what to do all day.
The ability to shift priorities quickly when necessary.
Nice-to-haves:
Bachelor's degree.
Experience project managing in a professional context.
Teaching or educational experience.
6 great examples of real customer onboarding specialist job descriptions
Though customer onboarding often forms part of a broader customer success role, we have found several examples of stand-alone customer onboarding job descriptions.
1. Customer Onboarding Specialist, Conga
Conga paints a picture of the company’s success and provides useful context on how the role fits into the larger team.
2. Implementation Specialist, Interfolio
Interfolio writes a clear, concise customer onboarding specialist job description. The 30/60/90-day view of what the applicant can expect in the role is a valuable addition.
3. Customer Onboarding Specialist, Gusto
Gusto makes it incredibly easy for potential applicants to understand the context of the role and the responsibilities of the position. After it covers all the necessary details, the description outlines benefits, values, and other important cultural aspects.
4. Onboarding Specialist, Mercury
This is a beautifully short and sweet example. One thing that stands out about this description is Mercury's more casual language: Instead of "Responsibilities" and "Skills & Qualifications," Mercury uses "Things You'll Do On the Job" and "You Should." This phrasing sets the tone for a “small and scrappy company” right from the start.
5. Customer Success Onboarding Specialist, Invoca
Invoca’s example spends a lot of time on the company's purpose and goals. The “We are here to” section lets candidates understand the “why” of the business, and it will attract people who want to take part in that journey.
6. Customer Champion, Onboarding, Zapier
Zapier front-loads their job description with multiple links out to external resources. They emphasize a focus on quality of life for their employees, how they handle diversity and inclusion, and the benefits and expectations of those working remotely.
Potential applicants have a great view into the company even before they dive into the role itself.
Set up onboarding in a league of its own
Though some companies choose to include onboarding as part of customer success, creating a dedicated role for onboarding can be beneficial for your customers.
Excellent job descriptions are essential when it comes to building a strong implementation team, and it’s important to include information about what differentiates the role from a more traditional customer success role and any information that may excite or invigorate the best candidates.
Your onboarding team may be the first representatives from your company that customers come in contact with, so make sure you set up both groups for success by starting with an extraordinary job description.
More job description templates and examples:
Mercer Smith
Mercer is the VP of CX Insights & Community at PartnerHero, a yoga fanatic, and strives to make the world a little bit happier one customer at a time. You can find her at mercenator.com and on Twitter.