Let’s start by defining customer onboarding to set the right expectations. Simply put, customer onboarding is the process of helping you learn how to use a product or service effectively. It begins the moment you sign up and ends when you’ve successfully started achieving your goals with your purchase.

That doesn’t mean onboarding will turn you into an expert overnight. Instead, it’ll equip you with the foundational knowledge to use a product or service confidently and see immediate value. For example, you’ll understand essential features and how to incorporate them into your workflow, helping you feel like your purchase was worthwhile.

A great onboarding process is about more than just “getting started.” It delivers long-term benefits that ensure you’re set up for success. In fact, here are the top advantages you can expect when a company has an effective customer onboarding experience:

• Helpful Support: From the moment you sign up, you’ll have access to a team that’s ready to answer questions, provide resources, and guide you in personalizing a product or service to your needs.
• Faster Time-to-Value: A good onboarding process minimizes the time it takes for you to experience benefits. By tailoring the process to your goals, you’ll start seeing results and value quickly.
• Training and Knowledge: Onboarding ensures you have everything you need to seamlessly integrate a product or service into your workflow. Tutorials, videos, articles, and virtual calls and demos are all designed to equip you with practical knowledge to make your experience as smooth as possible. 
• Customer Satisfaction: Effective customer onboarding increases your confidence in your purchase, reducing the likelihood of frustration or buyer’s remorse. Instead, you’ll feel empowered to make the most of your new product or service.
• Connection with the Company: Great onboarding introduces you to the people behind a product or service, fostering a more personal connection. You’ll build relationships with team members who are invested in your success, making your experience more collaborative and less transactional.

Ultimately, customer onboarding isn’t just a “welcome aboard” handshake—it’s a foundation for long-term success. A well-executed process will ensure you’re equipped with helpful support, personalized guidance, and practical resources. That way, you spend less time wondering, “Where do I even start?” and more time seeing value from your purchase.

At Golden Software, we take your onboarding experience seriously, and that’s why we’ve designed a five-step process to help you hit the ground running with Surfer and Grapher in just a few weeks. For insight on what it entails, here’s a step-by-step look into our onboarding process.

The first step is straightforward but essential. After purchasing Surfer or Grapher, ensure the right team members at your organization install and activate the software. If your team relies on IT for installations, your IT department will handle the setup and activation process, regardless of whether you’ve purchased single-user licenses or a concurrent-use license. 

If you’re working without a dedicated IT team, you likely purchased single-user licenses, as they are the best option without IT support. In this case, start your onboarding experience by assigning unique product keys to each team member who will use Surfer or Grapher. Then, forward the product-related emails you received after purchase to those team members. These emails include detailed instructions for downloading and activating the software.

Once the software is installed, it’s time to dive in. Surfer and Grapher each include a one-hour tutorial accessible via the Help section in the program ribbon. These tutorials are concise but practical, focusing on essential features you’ll use regularly.

Also, a great thing about the tutorials is that you’ll learn by doing. With each one, you’ll walk away with a finished visualization that you created using sample files. By the end of Surfer’s tutorial, for example, you’ll have created a clear, compelling, and accurate map using sample data. The same is true for Grapher’s tutorial. You’ll have crafted a graph that makes complex insights understandable, all while using sample data. Ultimately, by going through the tutorials, you will not only learn critical features but also understand data visualization best practices to build both efficient and effective workflows in Surfer and Grapher. 

After completing the tutorials, the next step is to connect with one of our customer success engineers. You can schedule a call at a time that works best for you, or if a customer success engineer has already reached out via email, you can coordinate with them directly to set up a call. And rest assured: this personalized phase of our onboarding process won’t take much time. We know you’re busy, so we keep the call to a focused 30 minutes. 

During the meeting, you’ll share your specific challenges and goals for using the software so we better understand your needs. The customer success engineer will then take what they learn and provide curated resources—like relevant webinars and articles from our knowledge base—to help meet your objectives for using the software. If necessary, they’ll also craft custom workflows after the call tailored to your goals and needs, ensuring you get the maximum value out of your purchase.

This is the stage where the customer success engineer you spoke with walks through the custom workflows they designed to address your specific objectives. During this meeting, you will receive step-by-step instructions on how to navigate your custom workflows, ensuring you understand how to implement them. This hands-on guidance is invaluable for tackling complex projects and is especially helpful for integrating Surfer and Grapher effectively into your data visualization process.

The last step in our onboarding experience is refreshingly straightforward: stay connected and ask questions. Even after completing the tutorial and getting personalized guidance, you might encounter challenges as you dive deeper into Surfer and Grapher, especially when handling difficult projects. That’s why we’re here—not just during onboarding but well beyond it.

We know your journey with our software doesn’t end soon after purchase. As your projects evolve and your goals shift, you might explore advanced features or need to refine your workflows. That’s where our team steps in to provide ongoing support. Whether you’re trying out a new tool or troubleshooting a challenge, we’re here to guide you.

We want to ensure you’re confident using Surfer and Grapher, leveraging their full potential to create the impactful, visually stunning maps and graphs your stakeholders need. So don’t hesitate—keep the conversation going. Reach out whenever you need assistance, whether it’s during onboarding or long after, and let us help you bring your data visualizations to life.