Challenge

Incentivizing onboarding without endless customer chasing and signal monitoring

As the first-of-its-kind "Shopify for independent restaurants," Owner has experienced explosive growth since day one, surpassing 10,000 customers in 2025. But the company's CRO, Kyle Norton, doesn't take this momentum for granted. Like any savvy revenue leader, he knows that sustainable growth depends on retaining customers, not just winning them.

Kyle has always encouraged new customers to quickly finish their onboarding milestones and start unlocking value fast. The blocker? Most of the company's busy SMB customers have little time to spend implementing new tech. "There are always a million things happening in restaurants," he explains. "As a result, tasks like photographing menus and updating website storytelling can feel too painstaking for our customers."

Still, Kyle was well aware that churn risk goes up every day that onboarding stalls—and his eight-person team spent four hours per day calling, emailing, and generally following up to ensure customers supplied the required assets. However, as Owner's platform took off, the number of onboarding customers quickly outpaced the team's ability to personally chase down each one.

Kyle had a hunch that customers wouldn't need so much manual nudging if they were given a discount or another onboarding incentive. But determining who needed incentives to hit which milestones presented another obstacle. Since Owner's CRM and product usage data lived in different tools, mapping out all the onboarding possibilities would take data science resources that the company didn't have to spare.

What Kyle truly needed was a third-party platform to optimize post-sales engagement by:

• Providing 360-degree visibility into every untapped onboarding opportunity and its revenue potential
• Automatically targeting new customers with incentivized, multi-step onboarding campaigns

Luckily, he was already familiar with a solution that met these needs: Trig.

Having previously worked with Trig's Co-founder, Mark Ryan, at Shopify, Kyle knew he had to get in on what his former colleague was building.

"Our SMB customers have restaurants to run, so onboarding usually isn’t their highest priority. Trig’s personalized campaigns are just the push they need to start unlocking big wins with our platform."

Solution

Deep behavioral insights and automated onboarding campaigns ramp up adoption

With Trig, Kyle saw "tremendous results" in just two weeks. After a turnkey integration with Owner's CRM and product analytics platform, Kyle worked with the Trig team to launch an incentivized onboarding campaign to a select group of customers. To his surprise, these customers immediately began completing onboarding milestones at a 70% higher clip than the non-incentivized group.

This early win gave Kyle's team the encouragement they needed to extend their use of Trig across Owner's entire customer base.

Today, they deploy Trig's trusty AI agents to continuously monitor all new customers' onboarding progress. The agents show them how many milestones each one has left to complete and what messaging and incentives they need to complete them—no data science lift needed.

With this data, Trig's AI agents then suggest and orchestrate fully automated email campaigns, coaxing each customer to submit every asset, including menu photography and website updates. While campaigns target multiple accounts, each remains tailored to the customer and their onboarding stage. For example, when a customer has completed two out of three major outcomes, an email is triggered offering a one-time monthly discount to finish the third.

"Letting Trig do all the pinging for us is a huge headache reliever," Kyle says. "We're more than happy to give our customers a small financial reward if it's going to get them value faster."

And thanks to Trig's user-friendly dashboards, he can easily track and validate every bet they make on their customers' success. These reports offer a transparent, real-time view of how quickly customers are progressing through this journey (including email open and reply rates, as well as outcomes completed). That way, his team has all the information needed to decide on the next course of action.

For customers who've successfully finished onboarding, that means rewarding them with the incentive and eventually moving them into an expansion campaign to drive upsells. For customers who continue to stall, that means gently but persistently retargeting until they go live.

So far, Trig's ROI predictions have been spot on. Not only is adoption skyrocketing, but now that customers are actively customizing Owner to their branding and workflows, they're experiencing noticeable upticks in their Growth Potential Scores (GPS). And in Kyle's experience, when customers' GPS is strong, retention and LTV always follow.

"Trig puts a precise dollar value on every post-sales opportunity. We can quickly go from hypothesis to incentive to validated answer without any of the usual data science heavy lifting."

Results

Faster onboarding, more successful customers, and 52% reduction in pre-live churn

By partnering with Trig, Owner transformed onboarding into a potent, retention-driving engine. Thanks to the platform's timely nudging and strategic incentives, SLAs are improving, onboarding is faster, and customers are quickly realizing all the value the restaurant software has to offer. Meanwhile, Kyle's team has gained valuable time to focus on other revenue-driving initiatives, such as automating asset collection workflows, aligning communication, and increasing visibility between the sales and onboarding teams.

With their very first AI agent deployment, they reduced pre-live churn by 52 percent, generating over $1.3 million in business value - achieving a 12x return on investment.

• 52% reduction in pre-live churn
• $1.3 million in business value generated from first intervention
• 80% reduction in onboarding asset collection timelines
• 3X increase in full asset collection at launch

Looking ahead, Kyle is eager to continue tapping into Trig and its team of post-sales growth experts. Being an early adopter has given his team a major strategic advantage that will continue to translate into greater NRR growth, especially as Trig's product rapidly evolves.

"Trig's product has already matured so much that we've been expanding our use of it deeper and deeper into the organization. I only work with companies at the top of their category, and I can confidently say that's Trig.