Onboarding should be smooth and welcoming. But when information is missing, it slows everything down. Teams get stuck waiting for answers. Customers feel confused or forgotten. And what should have been an exciting start turns into a stressful experience.
Sometimes the gap comes from the customer. Maybe they didn’t explain their goals clearly. Maybe they weren’t sure what to expect. Other times, the problem is inside your team. A rep might not have the latest product info. Or one team forgets to tell another about a key change.
However, you can’t help a customer if you’re not looped in. When everyone, from customers to your internal teams, is working with the same complete information, onboarding goes faster and feels more seamless.
When important information is missing, onboarding slows down. Teams can't do their jobs well without clear details. Customers also get confused when they don’t know what’s expected.
For example, if a rep doesn’t know what the customer wants to achieve, they can’t set things up the right way. If the product team makes a change but doesn’t tell onboarding or support, customers might hear different answers from different people.
These gaps cause delays and make the process feel messy. The result is frustration on both sides. Customers feel unsure, and teams waste time chasing missing info.
Even small gaps in communication can slow down the entire onboarding process. Some of these problems come from the customer side, while others come from inside your own team.
The good news is that once you know where things break down, you can put systems in place to fix them.
Let’s start with the first big challenge.
Customers often skip important details when filling out onboarding forms or during kickoff calls. Maybe they don’t fully understand what you're asking, or they haven’t thought through their own goals yet. When this happens, your team is left to guess what success should look like for them.
Without clear input, you might set things up in a way that doesn’t match their expectations. This can cause confusion, delays, or even rework later on. It's also harder to measure progress if you don’t know what the customer really wants to achieve.
This matters more than many teams realize. 63% of customers consider the onboarding period when deciding to subscribe to a service or purchase a product. If the process feels unclear or disorganized, you might lose them early.
To get the right information from the start, focus on how you ask. Most customers want to give helpful answers, but they need clear prompts and an easy process.
Start by reviewing your onboarding form or kickoff call template. Are your questions too broad or technical? Try using plain language and short examples. If you're asking about goals or success metrics, explain why those questions matter.
Also, plan for follow-ups. If the customer skips a section or gives a vague answer, use automation to remind them or offer a quick way to clarify.
Here are some ways to collect better input:
With better input, your team can create a more personalized and effective onboarding experience from the start.
Even when customers share what they need, onboarding can still stall if your team doesn’t have up-to-date product or service knowledge.
Maybe a feature was just updated. Maybe pricing or policies changed, but not everyone heard about it. These gaps make it harder to give clear answers and can cause reps to waste time double-checking or correcting mistakes.
This leads to confusion not just for customers, but also for your team. When information changes often and there’s no clear place to find updates, people rely on old habits or secondhand info. That slows things down and creates an inconsistent experience.
The best way to keep everyone aligned is to create one place where product, marketing, and onboarding teams can share updates. You can create an internal wiki, a shared Notion page, or even a weekly internal newsletter.
What matters most is consistency. Everyone should know where to go to find the latest details. And the updates should be written in a way that onboarding reps can use right away: simple, clear, and practical.
Here are some tools and habits that can help:
This helps reduce confusion and creates a more consistent onboarding experience. As one statistic shows, 87% of customers agree that companies should put more effort into delivering a consistent experience. Keeping your team informed is the first step.
Even when individual reps are doing their best, onboarding can still fall apart if teams aren’t working together. Product, marketing, sales, onboarding, and support all play a part, but if they aren’t sharing information, it leads to mixed messages and missed steps.
For example, sales might promise a feature that isn’t ready yet. Or marketing might launch a new campaign without looping in support. The onboarding team is often stuck in the middle, trying to connect the dots while keeping the customer happy.
When each team holds its own information, it slows down onboarding and increases the chance of mistakes.
To avoid confusion, set up a system that makes handoffs between teams easy and consistent. Everyone should know what information to pass on and where to put it.
You don’t need fancy software to start. Even a shared doc or checklist can help if it’s used every time. What matters is creating a repeatable flow.
Try adding these steps:
When teams communicate clearly and follow the same process, onboarding becomes faster and more reliable for everyone involved.
Even with a good handoff, things can still go wrong if your onboarding reps don’t stay up to date. Products evolve. Policies change. New tools get added. If your team doesn’t hear about it, they can’t explain it to customers.
This leads to outdated instructions, wrong setup steps, and slower support. It also puts pressure on reps to figure things out on their own. Over time, this wears down trust between teams and lowers the quality of the onboarding experience.
Your reps need two things to stay ready: a steady flow of updates, and a way to give feedback when things are unclear.
Set up simple ways to share new info:
You should also create a way for reps to report gaps or confusion. Maybe something in the knowledge base is outdated. Maybe customers are asking questions that the current materials don’t answer. Give your reps a voice in improving the system.
And don’t do it alone. Involve product marketers, technical writers, or customer success team members to help translate changes into useful, customer-friendly language.
This keeps your onboarding experience fresh, accurate, and easy to follow.
Even if your team is prepared, customers can still get confused during onboarding. Maybe they missed an email. Maybe they forgot to send a file or skipped a setup step. Without clear next steps, they may pause or give up completely.
This happens more often than you think. 55% of customers say that they will stop using a product or service that they don't understand. When customers aren’t sure what to do, they lose confidence, and that can lead to churn before they’ve even finished onboarding.
Help customers stay engaged by guiding them step by step. Start by setting clear expectations. Let them know what you’ll need from them and when. Then use tools and reminders to keep things moving.
Here are some ways to do that:
The easier it is to stay on track, the more likely they are to finish onboarding and see real value from your service.
Customer onboarding works best when everyone has the right information at the right time. But when details get missed, whether by the customer or your team, things slow down and trust starts to slip.
The good news is that most of these gaps can be fixed. Better questions, clearer handoffs, shared tools, and consistent updates can all make a big difference. When your team works together and your customers feel supported, onboarding becomes smoother, faster, and more successful.
Take a moment to review your own onboarding process. Where does information fall through the cracks? Start there and build a system that keeps everyone in the loop.
Need help improving your onboarding systems? Origin 63 helps teams use HubSpot in smarter and more strategic ways. From setting up internal handoffs to building customer-friendly workflows, we’ll help you close the gaps and make onboarding easier for everyone.