EPISODE 81 OF WHAT WOULD THEY DO? THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PODCAST FOR SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS
NOTE: Some of the tools and resources mentioned in these shownotes could be affiliate links. That means when you click the link to create an account, start a free trial or make a purchase, it won’t cost you any more but I may receive a commission for introducing you. One thing I want to stress is that I would never recommend anything or anyone I haven’t successfully worked with myself or trust unconditionally.
What if you could automate almost your entire customer onboarding experience… without making it feel automated?
In this episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of a recent Done For You client project where I mapped out a 12-month onboarding experience for an evergreen group program.
My client had transitioned from cohort-based launches, where everyone started together, to an evergreen model where students could enrol whenever they were ready.
The problem?
She was still offering plenty of live support, community access and opportunities to get help, but engagement tended to drop a few months after someone joined.
And she couldn’t spend her days manually keeping track of where every student was, what they’d completed and who might quietly be falling behind.
So we designed a system that could.
I’m walking you through the three layers we used to create an onboarding experience that tracks the signals students are sending, delivers timely automated nudges, and deliberately brings my client back into the experience when a human touch actually matters.
The result is an onboarding journey that’s 95% automated, with the remaining 5% intentionally unscalable.
Because scaling your customer experience doesn’t have to mean removing yourself from it.
What we cover:
Why evergreen programs require a different approach to onboarding
How I mapped a 12-month customer onboarding journey
Why we started with customer research rather than automations
How to identify the milestones that predict customer success
What you can track to understand whether customers are engaging
Why automation should support your live customer experience rather than replace it
How to identify the moments where a personal check-in matters most
3 questions to help you start mapping your own automated onboarding experience
Soundbites:
“There are three questions you need to ask yourself: Reflect on what you can measure in your membership, course, or program, what is quantifiable, and how those things you measure directly relate to your clients, students, members reaching their goals, the goals that they signed up for in the first place.”
“Automations are taking care of the heavy lifting for my client throughout the 12 months. That didn’t happen by accident. We identified where people should be at which point in the program to have the best chance at seeing the results that they signed up for in the first place.”
😍 Love the show?
Submit your question so I can answer it in an upcoming episode (or invite the perfect guest expert!).
Post a screenshot with your key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @candocontent and #WWTDpod so I can repost your content.
Your next steps:
Grab your FREE access to the 2026 State of the Customer Report right here.
Generate 10 tailored-to-you survey questions FREE right here.
Join the Retention Lab 🧪, the membership for savvy online business owners determined to grow their revenue, referrals and repeat business without more marketing. Join here!
Find out how you can get my strategic customer experience brain on your brand here.
Grab the FREE State of the Customer online business industry report with first-hand findings, gaps & opportunities PLUS proven strategies to boost your customer experience. Download FREE here!
Check out my favourite CX tools and resources here.
Episode Transcript:
Nadine (00:00)
Hello, hello, and welcome back to the podcast. This week I am taking you behind the scenes of a recent Done For You Client project that allowed me to automate and semi automate, I’ll get to that later, the onboarding experience for a 12 months group program. which probably
If you are in the online business space, if you have a course, a group program, a membership is a far too common problem because we all usually start off running programs live, launching them live with cohorts. and ultimately there is that transition from live support or live cohort and intake where everyone starts at the same time.
To having people trickle in. Memberships often are, always open, so people can join at all times. Courses that are self-guided also usually have intake times whenever it suits students. while sometimes live launches bring in bulk numbers, but When you move to Evergreen, that’s when things usually start to get a bit tricky.
so this episode, as I mentioned, is how I approach this dilemma and how I map out this onboarding experience for my clients. so it supports their mental space, their time capacity, but also very importantly, so it feels human and really picks up.
Hints and clues and actions that people are taking or not taking along the way.
And at the end of this episode, you will have really good practical ideas to help you automate something that looks very similar inside your course, your group program, your membership, something that is very human, very supported without you having to constantly keep an eye on where your students are.
So let me give you a bit of background before we get stuck in how this particular Done For You client project unfolded. So my long-term client, Krista Miller of Summit in a Box, approached me to take her Accelerator students behind the scenes of
my Retention Lab onboarding experience, which is 12 months long. Yes, you heard right. So 12 months fully mapped out for my members inside my community. And it is super strategic, super intentional. It leans into extrinsic motivation at the beginning. So motivation that comes from the outside before people have seen first wins and that intrinsic motivation takes over, which is internally motivated.
and it is 95% totally automated on the back end via clever tools that talk to each other and keep track of the actions that people are taking or not taking. And then the remaining five percent are unscalable. That’s where I get involved and I take over because I know it is super important at that particular point of their onboarding experience. And
During this workshop, I had one of the attendees tell me just how much this process and this experience resonated with her. And sure thing, shortly after the workshop, she touched down in my inbox and said that she absolutely loves what I’ve created, and she wanted to do something very similar for the students inside her 12-months group program, which she had just
Turned from a cohort-based live launch situation into an evergreen program that still has live support, but that allows people to enrol whenever they’re ready. And so we locked in a CX Catalyst and it all involved me diving deep into all the things that were remotely relevant to her course. So I looked through
her sales sequence, the sales page copy. So I really understood why people signed up, what that transformation is. I also looked through her testimonials, voice of customer data, and insights to really make sure we deeply understood why people signed up, what they were looking for, what that transformation was that we needed to make sure popped up at the end of this onboarding experience and their 12 months inside the program.
The thing is, I’m so passionate about working with people who truly want the best for their customers and want their customers to succeed. So when this particular lady approached me, I was totally on board because her problem was that she knew people were investing a fair amount of money in her program, in her support, but for whatever reason the engagement dropped.
A few months after people joined, while there was a whole lot of live opportunities every month, there was the community. she wanted to have peace of mind that she was doing whatever was in her power to lead people to that result they came for. and a quick disclaimer here: while you can do
Everything in your power to design an onboarding experience that sends the right nudges and the right cues at the right time, it is still ultimately up to your students, your members, to take action. ultimately, as membership site owners, as online business owners, we need to let go of.
Us being in charge of the results that our students are getting, particularly if we’ve set the right parameters, if we are doing everything on our end to make getting those results easy. So let’s dive into the project. As I said, we kicked off with research where I spent a week going deep inside her business.
And we then caught up for a strategy session where I talked her through everything that I had in mind, the milestones and the key markers and the key success factors that I had picked up that we needed to make sure her customers, her students were hitting. and I took her through how I saw that unfolding over the 12 month period that her students were with her and were getting her live support.
And with that strategy and that action plan came three layers to make sure we had everything we needed when it comes to insights but also then that we were giving people the support they needed on an automated basis, but also then, as I touched on before, on an unscalable basis. So layer one came down to the right system. So we used
Airtable to keep track of actions people were taking or not taking. And we implemented a super strategic tagging structure in her email platform, which is kit. So then my client could see down the track on Autopilot whenever she needed insights where every student sat in the program cycle and which actions they had taken or had not.
Taken. in my client’s case, we needed to track module completions as well as live attendance
as much as modules are important, the live events are just as important, and coming to live events also has to come with working through the modules and the material that support the success in the live section.
and we also needed to track how long someone had been in the program at any point in time so she could organically present.
Existing students who are currently active in this 12-month support window with the next opportunity or another opportunity that comes up organically. So tagging, very important, and tracking completions and live attendance in a way that is quantifiable. Then we have layer two, which is automating everything and email automations inside kit, but also inside Airtable.
are taking care of the heavy lifting for my client now throughout the 12 months. So as soon as someone signs up and as soon as someone starts submitting their module completion and logging their event attendance, those automated emails are taking over without my client having to lift a finger. And that just didn’t happen by accident. As I mentioned, we identified where people should be at which
Point in the program to have the best chance at seeing the results that they signed up for in the first place. We also identified which program components were most important to help them reach their goals at every stage of their enrollment cycle. So what’s important at three months in the program, what’s important in those next three months.
Which type of events do we want people to be reminded of if they can only make it to one this month, for example? So again, very strategic. Every email, every gentle nudge throughout those 12 months are linked directly to the easiest and most likely path to success. And then we have layer three.
So we have the automations that take care of the bulk of the gentle nudges and the touch points that are happening in the background throughout those 12 months, apart from my clients supporting them during live calls and in the community. so the human touch really is also semi-automated and happens via Bonjoro
Where in that 12 months onboarding sequence, there are clever little things happening in the background in kit that check whether her members, her students have hit that milestone and that success marker that we identified at the beginning. If they haven’t hit it, that’s where my client is going to step in and is receiving an automated task in Bonjoro for her to send a quick video. Check in, make sure there’s nothing they’re missing.
and she’s giving students a little reminder, personal message to try and get them back on track and make sure they’re not falling behind. And the way these three layers are designed means that the automations don’t replace personal touches. As I said, there are live events happening every month. She’s in the community, but these automated touches.
send the right signals, the right important reminders at the right time without eating into my clients capacity. So she can pour all her energy into the live components, the live events, the community support. And she doesn’t have to constantly keep track of people, make sure she checks in with people, you know, where they are when it comes to modules. All that is taken care of on the back end and automated.
And I didn’t just leave her with this long list of automations and things to implement. everything I designed came with a detailed video walkthrough and a handover manual. So whoever she outsources the implementation and the build to knows exactly what’s happening
why it’s happening, where things are in kit. So everything is linked up and easily identifiable. So even if her current VA is no longer in her business, she has something to hand over to the next person. And that is the whole point of automation, right? There’s no point me implementing it, me building it, and everything living in my head. The whole point here is that my client understands
The thought process and what’s happening in the background enough to get someone to implement it. And that handover video and document makes it super simple long term in her business. So I, as per usual, have a little to do list for you off the back of this episode. If you feel that automating your course program or membership experience is something.
You would love to do simply because you are already stretched too thin, you potentially have no idea how your students or members are tracking, and it is eating away at your confidence that people are investing in your program, and only a fraction of them are actually showing up for the things and getting results.
there are three questions you need to ask yourself. Reflect on what you can measure in your membership course or program, what is quantifiable, and how those things you measure directly relate to your client students’ members reaching their goals, the goals that they signed up for in the first place. Next up, absolutely reflect on
your model students or members? So people who are seeing results, who are doing really well, who are on track, who are achieving amazing things inside your course membership or program. what actions do they take on a regular basis? How do they show up? How do they engage in the community? What is that bare minimum they all have in common that you want your other members
to achieve as well. So you can then map those minimum to-dos against the time in your program, you know, what is happening every month. And then very important, decide on the things that you can totally automate that don’t need you to be on top of them. And then also identify those key moments in your program membership or course that require you to step in where you are
afraid that if you don’t act now, people might cancel, people might fall behind, not get the results they came for. be super, super conscious and reflect on all of those things before you start automating anything.
I invite you to tune in next week because I am exploring the three questions that I ask myself or my clients before automating anything in my business or my clients’ businesses to make sure I’m on the right track and I am automating the right things for the right reasons. So you don’t have to choose between scale and personal touch points. I think that’s the key message from this.
episode, you simply need to know where each one sits in your onboarding experience and how that translates to the touch points that you implement.
and if you now go, Nadine, I am super curious, but I’m really scared to go there myself. I can implement an onboarding experience for your program, course, or membership as I did for my CX catalyst client in a done for you capacity. But if you love to DIY or if you don’t have the budget to outsource it all to me, you can also join me inside Retention Lab where I have just
dropped an interactive tool to help you map out a 12 months onboarding experience for your course program or membership as well. So you get a full breakdown of my membership experience and then strategic prompts to help you map out what that could look like for your onboarding experience
You can map it out and then bring what you have created to our next live strategy session to talk it through and make sure it’s all on track before you take action. That’s it for this episode. As I said, if you want to go deeper before automating, make sure you tune in next week for the three questions I ask myself before automating anything. If you have a question that you would like me to explore in a future episode, make sure you submit.
via the link in the show notes. And yeah, if you haven’t followed and subscribed to the show yet, make sure you do so so you don’t miss any future episodes. Thanks so much for tuning in and I will see you next week.
