How to Avoid Creating a "Braze Glass Ceiling" During Your Onboarding

Why Traditional Onboarding Fails Your Best-In-Class Ambitions

Companies do not buy sophisticated customer engagement tools like Braze to simply send generic email blasts. You make the investment because you have a vision to deliver hyper-personalized, 1:1 messaging at scale. You want a single, unified customer journey powered by the latest advancements in AI connecting with customers in real-time.

Yet all too often, we see there’s a massive, unspoken gap between that vision and the operational reality.

The uncomfortable truth is that most teams are stuck using only a fraction of their customer engagement platform's power. For our Braze customers, we call this the "Braze Glass Ceiling." You have access to the most sophisticated engagement engine on the market, but you’re utilizing it like a legacy email service provider!

Marketers can see the potential above them (e.g. automated optimization, AI-driven decisioning, and complex cross-channel flows), yet you can’t break through to reach it. Instead of strategic optimization, your teams are bogged down in manual campaign operations. Your end-customers are not receiving the dynamic tailored experiences you imagined, rather, they’re still getting generic messages.

What makes this especially costly is that the ceiling often forms before the first real campaign ever goes live.

Decisions made during onboarding (about data, process, and operating models) quietly define what’s achievable later. Once set, that ceiling caps ROI: lower LTV due to under-personalization, slows teams down, and creates distrust and frustration in the platform long after it went live.

For those onboarding Braze customers, the question isn’t whether the platform is powerful enough to help you reach your vision.  It’s whether you’ll ever fully unlock it!

Below are six things to really think about before you begin your Braze onboarding journey.  However, if you’re already using Braze, check out this article on how to correct the mistakes made during your onboarding process.

1. The Activation vs. Adoption Fallacy

The primary KPI for most third-party onboarding vendor teams is "activation" - meaning the lights are on and the system is operationally configured. This may include, but is not limited to, SDK integration, the IP warming, and launching your first message. If you talk to any marketer who has done a Martech implementation before, they’ll tell you that activation is not the same as adoption.

This failing approach focuses entirely on technical setup and connecting the pipes, while ignoring the goal of running more meaningful and relevant marketing. You could be activated and technically “live” and also effectively neutered regarding your ability to use the tool’s advanced features. By prioritizing technical setup over strategic enablement, it will leave you with a powerful tool that may be efficient, though not more effective.

2. The Fixed-Duration Cliff

Perhaps the most damaging onboarding methodology is the fixed-duration engagement. Onboarding packages sold as rigid 8, 12, or 16 week sprints seldom work out for the best. We’ve all experienced it, your engineering team gets pulled into a product hotfix, or the data ingestion strategy needs a pivot mid project. Regardless, the clock keeps ticking. This fixed calendar approach creates a cliff where you’re pushed out on your own, not because you’ve achieved your onboarding goals, but simply because the calendar says time is up.

3. The Theory vs. Practice Gap

Modern marketing teams are comprised of builders, doers, and creators who learn by executing tasks. So why is the standard onboarding experience often a deluge of slide decks, user guides, and theory?

You don’t want a lecture on the promise of Canvas Flow, but rather you want to build your specific Welcome Series with an expert looking over your shoulder. You don’t want a generic presentation of Adobe AI best practices, but rather someone to help you configure the Braze AI Item Recommendation for your specific product catalog.

The over-reliance on passive learning materials leads to low retention, high anxiety, and a team that isn't ready to operate the platform.

4. The One-Size-Fits-None Curriculum

There is a massive difference between a digitally native Series C startup outgrowing a modern tool like Iterable, and a heritage Fortune 500 retailer migrating from a legacy Salesforce setup. The startups often request advanced Liquid scripting tricks and complex API trigger logic immediately, while the large enterprises need governance and permissions management first.

Don’t let third party onboarding vendors apply the same set of fixed methodologies to your onboarding. By not tailoring the project to your organization’s technical aptitude and MarTech maturity, the onboarding process bores the experts and drowns the novices. This ensures that neither group utilizes the advanced platform capabilities where the real ROI lives.

5. The Advisory Only Hands-Off Gap

This is the most frequent complaint we hear regarding standard onboarding. Customers often say that their onboarding manager told them what to do, but wouldn't actually log in and help them do it. The standard model is strictly advisory, meaning the onboarding manager is strictly a guide with their hands never on the keyboard.

For an advanced platform such as Braze, this is a fatal flaw. Sometimes, you don’t need advice; you need a partner who will step in and fix the Liquid logic or build the prototype of an action-triggered campaign. The refusal to be hands-on creates a chasm between knowing what needs to be done and actually achieving it, reinforcing the glass ceiling by keeping the more complex features out of reach.

6. The Pricing Disconnect

We’ve heard that a lot of commercial models for onboarding are often misaligned by assuming that company size equals complexity. Pricing is frequently scaled based on the logo size, charging Enterprise giants a premium simply because they are large, while assuming SMBs have "simpler" needs. However, in the world of Braze, size is not linearly proportionate to complexity.

Consider three common scenarios that break the standard pricing model:

• The Enterprise: A massive retailer might purchase Braze, and only use it for a simple, weekly promotion. They are charged a premium for "Enterprise” package despite having a very basic use case.

• The Mid-Market: A growing D2C brand might be technically sophisticated, though resource-constrained. They need a complex data integration with their CDP and loyalty platform, but they’re sold a "standard" package that lacks the technical hours required to support that architecture.

• The SMB/Startup: A small, agile app might have the most complex strategy of all—relying entirely on real-time API triggers and multi-channel orchestration. Because they are small, they are sold a "lite" package that leaves them woefully under-supported for their advanced needs.

When pricing is based on the size of the company, rather than use-case complexity, it creates friction across every segment. Large companies feel overcharged for simple setups, and smaller, agile companies are under-serviced because they didn’t buy the architectural support they needed.

The Path Forward

The true measure of onboarding isn’t whether your first campaign launched. It’s whether your team can confidently build what once felt impossible.

• Can you design dynamic, cross-channel journeys without hesitation?

• Can you deploy AI-driven personalization without relying on outside help?

• Can your marketers move at the speed of strategy - not the speed of tickets and troubleshooting?

Onboarding should not be a temporary configuration phase. It is the moment where operating models are shaped, data structures are defined, and capability is built. When done correctly, it doesn’t just turn the platform “on,” it expands what your team believes is achievable.

At Covalent, we treat onboarding as long-term enablement, not short-term activation. That means flexible timelines aligned to real-world constraints. It means hands-on builders, not just presenters. It means tailoring the curriculum to the maturity of your team and the complexity of your use case.

Our job isn’t done when the SDK is live or the first Canvas launches. It’s done when your team has broken through the ceiling and is operating at the level the platform was meant to deliver! And if you are considering a partner to support your Braze onboarding, please drop us a line.