Onboarding gets attention because it is measured, visible and sits next to revenue. The annual review of that same customer usually gets none, and in several of the organisations we have worked with it was quietly the worse experience by every measure that mattered. Nobody had looked, because nobody owned it. The people who built the signup had moved on, and the review had been inherited by an operations team with no mandate to change it.
The pattern repeats almost exactly. A process designed once, under time pressure, for a much smaller book of customers, then run unchanged for six years while the volume quadrupled. Requests go out one at a time. Nobody can see the queue. The customer, who is by this point paying and reasonably loyal, gets a worse experience than a total stranger applying for the first time.
It is also among the cheapest things in the building to fix, because the work has usually been done next door already. The sequencing that shortened onboarding tends to transfer to reviews almost unchanged. We have started asking about it in the first week of every engagement, and we have yet to find an organisation where the answer was reassuring.
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