Onboarding at scale can be challenging for any company. Busy seasons like back to school may never be totally painless, but here are a few tips from our experience that can help you get schools onboarded quickly and efficiently:
Start earlier than you think
Everyone involved gets busy during back to school - your team, your IT admins, and Edlink ourselves. Any planning or onboarding that can be done at the end of the previous school year or earlier in the summer will help you avoid the rush and get problems sorted out before teachers and students return. If you're onboarding during June or July, you can expect a higher level of support from our team, simply due to the reduced volume of support requests we receive at that time.
Put together a training plan
Make sure your team is ready to help schools through the onboarding process. This could include training on the Edlink dashboard, the onboarding flow, and common issues that schools may encounter. Your Edlink client success manager is happy to help in the training process - we train our clients' teams all the time.
Divide up work by data provider, not region
It's common for companies to want to divide up onboarding work by region (as that is often how clients are managed by support teams). However, it's more efficient to divide up work by data provider. This way, individuals on your team can become experts in the onboarding process for a specific data provider and can help schools more efficiently.
Let Edlink supplement your team
Our client success team is here to help you and your schools through the onboarding process. We can assist with onboarding calls, troubleshooting, and migration. If you have a dedicated Edlink client success manager, you are welcome to include them on school onboarding calls to help guide your customers through the integration process.
Technical tools that Edlink provides to help scale onboardings
Edlink offers a variety of technical tools to help streamline the onboarding process and integrate onboarding more deeply into your existing workflows.
- Create Unique Onboarding Links: Keeping track of which schools have onboarded and which have not can be tricky at scale. Using the onboardings tab in the dashboard, you can generate unique links for each school. This way, you can see which schools have started or completed the onboarding process and which have not.
- Embed the Onboarding Flow: If you have an existing administrator onboarding process, you can simply add the integration steps into that flow by embedding the Edlink onboarding flow into your application.
- Manage Integrations via API: After a school gets connected via Edlink, you can detect the new integration and set it to "active" via API, eliminating an otherwise manual process for your team.
- Set Sharing Rules via API: Sharing rules can also be configured via API if you prefer to build these into your product as well. We don't recommend building out all of the capabilities that Edlink's Sharing Rules offer (as this is a huge engineering effort), but if your customers typically follow simple patterns (e.g. share classes by teacher email), these can be integrated into your application.