Whether it is a new partner, a new employee or a new customer, the on-boarding is the most important step that you can take.

For an employee, at arrival, there should be a workspace, gear and guidance waiting.

For a customer, on-boarding is the process by which you ensure that the customer not only understands the changes that your services - Hosted PBX, backup, MDM, cloud services - will have on their daily work experience, but has options for learning how to use it - like manuals, videos and more.

I have seen where customers would leave a Hosted PBX vendor due to poor on-boarding - more precisely because the customer didn't get to leverage the service enough to make it worthwhile keeping.

Often channel execs talk about the 80/20 rule when it comes to channel partners. How many have a true on-boarding process for partners though? How many go through value proposition, competitive analysis, benefits versus features and other impactful information with partners? In my experience, not many.

The cost to bring on a new hire, a new partner or even a new customer is high. Why wouldn't on-boarding be a detailed, significant process then?