When I joined Trustpilot in 2016, onboarding was a bottleneck. The process was one-size-fits-all, technical, and dragged on for six weeks before customers even started collecting reviews. For a company selling speed and simplicity, that was unacceptable.
The mission was clear: get customers seeing value faster.
I stripped out the fluff: no long product tours, no unnecessary complexity. We simplified the onboarding goal down to one thing: start collecting reviews automatically as fast as possible.
Manual steps were replaced with automation. The team stopped speaking in technical jargon and started speaking the customer’s language.
The results were dramatic. Onboarding time dropped from six weeks to just two. Calls went from hours to 20 minutes. Our specialists could handle more accounts with less effort, and customers saw results in days instead of months.
At Aircall, I faced a different challenge. Onboarding wasn’t slow because of training. It was slow because nobody owned the number porting process.
That step alone delayed activation by 2–6 weeks. Instead of hiring more onboarding specialists, I built a dedicated porting team out of our Austin office. They documented the process, handled every porting request, and allowed our onboarding team to focus on training and configuration.
By removing the legal and logistical roadblocks, we scaled faster, improved customer satisfaction, and built a talent pipeline where porting specialists could later grow into CS or implementation roles.
Great onboarding isn’t about walking customers through features. It’s about removing friction to value. Simplify, automate, and assign clear ownership for every step.
Robert Statsky 