How Quilt Software Took Back Control of Onboarding and Gave Its Team Hours Back

Two Business Units, Two Tools, and Too Much Manual Work

Quilt's onboarding process grew up in pieces. About four and a half years ago, the Experiential unit signed up with an onboarding platform. The Essentials unit ran onboarding through tiered Salesforce cases, which lacked customer-facing features, automatic triggers, and a portal. About two and a half years ago, Quilt moved the Essentials unit onto the same platform, GuideCX, to align both teams on a single system of record.

Alignment turned out to be harder than expected.

• Two units used one tool in very different ways. The first unit had built in so much technical debt that cleaning it up wasn't possible. It was a start-over. Aligning processes and reporting across the two units was difficult, and the team at Quilt had to do manual work in Salesforce and Tableau to pull out data it couldn't get from GuideCX.
• The Salesforce connection was a black box. The GuideCX connection to Salesforce would break, push in bad data, or go down. Two of Quilt's directors were spending dozens of hours a month manually updating records. Any change meant asking the Salesforce team to modify the managed package and hoping it worked.
• Service fell short. Outages and slow response times were common, with very little account management or follow-up.
• The "upgrade" was a start-over. When GuideCX announced a new version, it turned out to be a net-new system with no migration path. Quilt would have had to start over, with its renewal approaching in September.
• Playbooks were bloated. Without an onboarding experience of its own, the Experiential business unit ended up with about 40 templates to manage 10 different things, intertwined and difficult to maintain.

A Platform Built for Small-Business Onboarding

Replacing GuideCX was a strategic goal for 2026. Quilt started shopping in February and spent about three months vetting competitors. OnRamp was the second or third product it looked at, and the fit was clear quickly. Many onboarding tools are built for large enterprise projects that run six months with a dozen project managers on the customer side. Quilt's customers are store owners, and OnRamp matched that workflow.

“Our customers aren't large enterprises. Our customer is the person who runs the store. They're the one learning the software, giving us data to import, and meeting with our implementation specialists. OnRamp was a fit for this end user.” – Will Atkinson, VP of Implementation, Quilt Software

The vetting process also showed how OnRamp works. Quilt spoke with OnRamp customers, who confirmed that product requests really do get built. Then, they saw it firsthand. Features Quilt had asked about weeks earlier went live before the contract was even signed. OnRamp's team also did hands-on sales engineering to prove out the Salesforce integration, the make-or-break requirement for Quilt.

Salesforce Integration That Quilt Controls

For Quilt, everything has to work with Salesforce. The goal was always to let implementation specialists work in a single tool instead of bouncing back to Salesforce to look up customer details. With OnRamp, Quilt's onboarding leaders manage workflows and triggers on the OnRamp side and pull from Salesforce objects. As long as a field exists in Salesforce, the onboarding team can use it without filing a request. OnRamp helped Quilt work through creative approaches to get the data it needed. That was a game changer compared with the black-box integration they had before.

Stackable Playbooks and a Module Library

Quilt now runs roughly 10 to 12 playbooks, down from about 40 templates. A standard playbook covers the baseline process. If a customer signs up for something additional, the team spins up an extra module, rather than maintaining a separate playbook for every combination of software and services. Quilt's onboarding team owns all of it without going back to Salesforce. The module library lets the team pull proven pieces into existing projects instead of rebuilding them each time.

Aero AI: A Daily Essential

OnRamp's agentic AI wasn't live when Quilt signed. Now, the team uses it all day, every day. Supervisors and directors ask it to make changes that would normally mean hours of repetitive work, such as updating one task in a module across every playbook, and it reports back when it's done. Implementation specialists use it to surface what needs attention: accounts that need a look, past-due items, and priorities for the day. Administrators also use it as a thought partner for optimizing workflows.

“Aero is super useful. We use it all day, every day, and it’s a game changer.” – Will Atkinson, VP of Implementation, Quilt Software

Rolled Out Ahead of Schedule

Quilt set a 90-day timeline and beat it. The team started in earnest on June 11 and went live on August 27, two weeks ahead of plan. Most of the work was customizing Salesforce fields and objects on Quilt's side rather than waiting on OnRamp. Throughout onboarding, Quilt met weekly with its CSM and held a separate weekly Salesforce engineering call. Updates often shipped between calls.

Time Saved, Control Regained

Leaders focused on higher-value work. With Aero handling repetitive maintenance, Will and his directors are spending less time maintaining a tool. Supervisors focus on coaching their teams. Directors focus on what supervisors need and how to improve the process, rather than preserving the status quo. For Will, the question has shifted from "let's make sure the house isn't on fire" to "what are we going to do next?"

Visibility across the company. Anyone at Quilt can open the Projects object in Salesforce to see notes, dates, and go-live status for a customer in onboarding, without logging into OnRamp. Quilt built and formatted it to read like a notepad. Reporting in Salesforce and Tableau is also more flexible than before, which should give finance and ops better output. And because the Salesforce and internal ops teams no longer have to handle every small change, they have more time to build new things.

A foundation for faster time to value. Quilt isn't a renewal business. Customers sign up because they have a budget and a pain point right now, so getting them live quickly matters most. OnRamp helps implementation specialists stay organized and in front of customers. It also lets Quilt build a post-live check-in directly into the project, with a template of questions such as a 0–10 software training comfort score five days after go-live. That gives product teams consistent, granular feedback they didn't have before. Quilt expects early time-to-value improvements as its implementation specialists become more organized.

Hours back every week. Will estimates each of Quilt's 40-plus implementation specialists is saving an hour or two a week. Across the team, it adds up quickly. Changes that might have meant assigning two people for three days now take a few hours. Once a week, the team reviews what it has learned since go-live and makes updates.

Service that exceeded expectations. Customer references said the service at OnRamp was great, and Quilt has seen it firsthand with their CSM, support, and the Salesforce integration team.

Bringing the Customer Into the Conversation

Quilt is still early in its OnRamp journey. The next exciting step is setting up the customer portal, which the team hasn't fully used yet. They plan to do some branding work, build out materials, and add texting to stay engaged with customers.

As a result of their confidence in Aero, Quilt also plans to put the customer-facing agent in the portal. Customers can ask it where to find something, and it will remind them when they're past due on sending a data file to their implementation specialist, so they don't need to call and ask.

Will's advice to other teams: check how a platform will work with your CRM, whether that's Salesforce or HubSpot, and plan for the upfront build. A prebuilt managed package can look like a pro on paper, but it's easy until it isn't. With OnRamp, Quilt did the build and now owns the result. Ask who the product is built for, too. For customers who need customization at the individual project level, Will calls OnRamp a game changer. For teams that have outgrown spreadsheets, it's a great time to go straight to OnRamp.