Discuss Onboarding tracking

## Summary ### Onboarding Process and Timeline Expectations The meeting focused heavily on reviewing and standardizing the customer onboarding process, with particular attention on timelines and required documentation. A key goal is to establish a clear and consistent **90-day rule for invoices**, ensuring that no invoice processed during onboarding is older than this threshold. The discussion revealed that while the current average onboarding time ranges from three to five months, there is an aspirational goal to reduce this to a **90-day average**. This duration includes customer dependencies like scheduling kickoff calls and gathering documentation, which can cause significant delays. - **Invoice Age Limitation:** A strict policy is being implemented where any invoice received that is over 90 days old cannot be processed. This necessitates close collaboration with the sales team to set correct expectations from the contract stage. - **Onboarding Timeline Analysis:** The team will create a detailed timetable to analyze how long it takes to onboard every 500 accounts. Historical data suggests past timelines were four to six months, partly due to prioritization of other projects. - **Tracking Customer-Caused Delays:** A significant pain point identified is the inability to easily track and attribute timeline extensions to client-side delays (e.g., rescheduling, slow responses). The team discussed leveraging HubSpot or existing CSM pipelines to log these reasons systematically, creating a defensible audit trail. ### Invoice Data Management and Cleanup A major operational challenge discussed is the management and cleanup of account and invoice data across platforms (UBM and Data Services). Discrepancies and duplicate accounts are causing inaccuracies in critical reports like the missing bills report. - **Simplifying the Missing Bills Report:** The plan is to create a simplified, actionable report that lists accounts, their last actual bill date, and excludes mock bills, moving away from overly complex calculations that have caused issues. - **Systematic Account Cleanup:** A weekly review process is required to clean up duplicate and erroneous accounts. This is not a one-time fix but an ongoing operational necessity. - **Preventing Future Data Issues:** For new bills processed through DSS, there will be an effort to tag entries created by the system. This will allow for periodic bulk cleanup of any erroneous lines it generates, acting as a stopgap until more robust validation guardrails are built into the system. ### Credential Management and Platform Integration The team is working towards a "single source of truth" for customer credentials, which are currently stored in multiple disparate systems. This is part of a broader effort to standardize and link data across platforms. - **Centralizing Credentials:** A primary action item is to chart all current locations where credentials are stored and work towards consolidating them into one authoritative system. - **Standardizing Account Linking:** The process for linking billing accounts and locations between Data Services and UBM is being reviewed to ensure consistency and accuracy. - **Automation on the Horizon:** Future automation efforts are planned to extract invoice data via scanning technology, reducing manual entry and speeding up the onboarding process. ### HubSpot Implementation for Ticket Management The rollout of HubSpot as a centralized issue-tracking system is imminent, marking a shift away from managing requests and problems via email. - **Internal Rollout First:** The system will be launched internally for the team for a testing period of two weeks to a month before being made available to customers. - **Structured Workflow:** The goal is to have all internal and eventually customer-issued tickets flow through HubSpot, improving visibility, tracking, and ensuring no request is lost. Customer Support Managers (CSMs) will be the primary point of contact for tickets. - **Training and Materials:** Training is being organized, and the creation of instructional videos is in progress to facilitate adoption across the team. ### Standardizing Customer Communication and Requests The team identified a need to clean up and standardize communication channels, particularly email distribution lists, and to enforce consistent processes for customer requests like adding new locations. - **Distribution List Cleanup:** Multiple overlapping distribution lists (e.g., for CS, operations) have become cluttered. An action is in place to audit all lists, remove inactive members, and define clear purposes for each to prevent emails from being ignored. - **Process for New Locations/Accounts:** A standardized procedure was reiterated: customers must work with their CSM to add new locations to a central tracking document (e.g., a SmartSheet), the CSM must then add it to UBM, and finally tag the data services team to enroll it. This ensures billing, credential setup, and platform updates happen in sync. - **Reinforcing Official Channels:** The team plans to reinforce with clients the mandatory use of official distribution lists or the future HubSpot ticket system for all requests, especially urgent matters like disconnections, to ensure they are seen and acted upon promptly. ### SmartSheet Usage and Process Standardization A significant portion of the meeting debated the role and format of SmartSheets used in customer onboarding and account management. The current inconsistent use is creating operational inefficiencies. - **Inconsistent Implementation:** Currently, SmartSheets are used differently by each CSM and customer. Some clients actively use them, while others refuse, and the sheet format often gets customized per client request, breaking standardization. - **Desire for Integration and Enforcement:** There is a strong desire to lock down a standard SmartSheet format and, ideally, integrate it directly within the UBM platform. This would make it the single, live source of truth for billing account lists and attributes, visible to all stakeholders without manual cross-referencing. - **Shifting the Paradigm:** The discussion highlighted a need to move from a flexible, service-oriented model to a more productized one. The team recognized the inefficiency of constantly adapting to unique client requests and the need to establish and enforce standard operating procedures for data exchange.