How to Automate Customer Onboarding with an Agentic Workflow

Customer onboarding is your first, best chance to make a lasting impression. A smooth, personalized experience can turn a new user into a lifelong advocate. But a clunky, manual, or slow process can lead to frustration and early churn. The challenge is that a truly great onboarding experience involves multiple steps: verifying data, personalizing content, sending communications, and updating internal systems.

Traditionally, automating this required stitching together a fragile web of webhooks, serverless functions, and third-party tools. It was brittle and hard to manage. Today, there's a more powerful approach: the agentic workflow, executed by an autonomous digital worker.

This guide will show you how to build a fully automated customer onboarding process using Ivy.do, an autonomous AI agent that executes complex business workflows as code. Let's deploy your first digital teammate and delight new users from day one.

What is an Agentic Workflow?

Before we dive in, let's clarify what we mean by an "agentic workflow." Unlike traditional automation that follows a rigid, linear set of "if-this-then-that" rules, an agentic workflow is managed by an autonomous agent.

• Traditional Automation: A new user signs up -> Trigger a webhook -> A serverless function runs -> Send a generic email. If one step fails, the whole chain often breaks.
• Agentic Workflow: A new user signs up -> Assign a high-level goal to an AI agent (e.g., "Onboard this user") -> The agent uses a set of tools (APIs) to complete the multi-step objective, handling complexity and potential failures along the way.

This is where Ivy comes in. Ivy is a digital worker, an autonomous agent you can configure and deploy to perform specific business functions. You don't just give it a script; you give it a role, a goal, and the tools it needs to succeed.

The Anatomy of a Modern Onboarding Workflow

A robust onboarding process is more than just a welcome email. Here are the key steps we'll automate with our Ivy agent:

1. Trigger: A new user signs up for your service.
2. Data Validation & Enrichment: Verify the user's email address and enrich their profile with publicly available data to enable personalization.
3. Personalized Content Generation: Create a unique welcome document or getting-started guide based on the user's role or company.
4. Targeted Communication: Send a personalized welcome email that links to their new resources.
5. Internal System Updates: Create a record in your CRM and notify the appropriate team members (e.g., a customer success manager).

Now, let's build this with Ivy.

Step-by-Step: Building the Workflow with Ivy.do

Using the Ivy.do SDK, you can define and assign these complex tasks in just a few lines of code.

Step 1: Create Your Digital Worker

First, you need to create an instance of Ivy and give it a persona. This helps define its purpose and capabilities. For this task, we'll configure our agent as an "Onboarding Specialist."

import { ivy } from '@do/sdk';

// Create a new instance of your digital worker
// This is your dedicated onboarding agent.
const onboardingAgent = ivy.create('ivy-onboarding-01', {
  persona: 'Onboarding Specialist'
});

This code deploys a digital worker named ivy-onboarding-01. You can think of this as hiring a new digital teammate and giving them their job title. The .do platform handles all the underlying infrastructure to keep your agent running reliably.

Step 2: Assign the Onboarding Task

Next, whenever a new user signs up in your application, you assign the onboarding task to your agent. You provide a high-level objective and a list of instructions that serve as the agent's playbook.

// This function would be called after a new user signs up
async function startOnboarding(user) {

  // Assign a complex, long-running task to your agent
  const job = await onboardingAgent.assign({
    task: `Process the new user signup for ${user.email}.`,
    instructions: [
      'Validate email address and enrich user data using clearbit.do',
      'Using the enriched data, create a personalized welcome document with content.do',
      'Send a welcome email with a link to the document via courier.do',
      'Create a new contact record in the CRM via salesforce.do'
    ],
    context: {
        userId: user.id,
        email: user.email,
        name: user.name
    }
  });

  console.log(`Job ${job.id} started. Ivy is on it.`);
}

Let's break down what's happening here:

• task: We give Ivy a clear, natural language objective. This is the "what."
• instructions: This array provides the "how." Each instruction tells the agent which tool (API) to use to accomplish a sub-task. Ivy executes these steps sequentially, passing context from one step to the next.
• context: We provide the initial data the agent needs to get started, like the new user's ID and email.

Ivy will now begin executing this long-running job in the background. It will call the clearbit.do service, use the results to call content.do, and so on, until the entire workflow is complete.

Why Ivy is More Than Just a Chatbot or a Script

It's important to understand that Ivy is not another chatbot or a simple automation script.

• Ivy is a Worker, Not a Conversationalist: While a chatbot reacts to user input, Ivy proactively executes complex business processes in the background. It's designed to perform jobs, not just have conversations.
• Autonomous & Resilient: Ivy manages the entire workflow. If an API call fails temporarily, it can retry. It understands how to chain tools together to achieve the final goal. You don't manage the state; the agent does.
• Built for Asynchronous Operations: Onboarding isn't always instant. It can involve waiting for external services or human-in-the-loop approvals. Ivy is built to handle these long-running processes without tying up your application's resources.

Ready to Automate?

By replacing fragile, custom-coded scripts with a robust, autonomous digital worker, you can deliver a world-class onboarding experience that scales effortlessly. You save valuable engineering time, reduce manual errors, and ensure every new user gets a consistent and personalized welcome.

This same agentic workflow pattern can be applied to countless other business processes: lead qualification, report generation, support ticket triage, and more.

Ready to deploy your first digital teammate? Get started with Ivy.do today and transform your business process automation.