Levels & Badges onboarding (points, badges and leaderboards)

This template covers the customer onboarding work needed to launch Levels & Badges with the right org structure, visibility rules, and leaderboard scope. It focuses on the data and decisions that make boards usable, not on generic product setup. You use it to confirm who is included, how they are grouped, and what managers can see before go-live.

It should be shared between the vendor CS team and the customer. The vendor typically drives the kickoff, configuration guidance, and validation, while the customer owns directory data, org structure, and local decisions about participation and visibility. Joint ownership is important because the plan fails if either side treats it as a one-way setup.

The template is designed for onboarding, but the outputs should be reviewed on a recurring cadence after go-live. Most teams revisit participation, grouping, and leaderboard scope when org structure changes, new sites open, or job families are reorganized. If you do not assign a named owner for that review, the setup drifts quickly.

The customer should already have a usable employee directory, site assignments, and a clear view of how job titles roll up into families or other reporting groups. If those shapes are missing, the boards may technically launch but will not reflect the company correctly. This template starts with those prerequisites because rollout failures usually happen before kickoff, not at go-live.

Yes, that is the point of the template. It helps confirm whether the company has the parent location level, job-family grouping, and employee assignment needed to power each leaderboard view. If one of those structures is absent, the relevant board should be excluded rather than launched empty.

The biggest mistakes are scheduling kickoff before prerequisite data exists, letting the vendor do all the configuration without customer activation, and ending the project at go-live with no measurement or hand-off. This template also prevents the common issue of launching leaderboards that do not match how the business is actually organized. Those failures are usually visible only after adoption stalls.

You customize it by changing the grouping logic and visibility scope to match the customer’s operating model. A multi-site retail chain may need site and district boards, while a services company may care more about job family or region. The template is meant to be adapted to the org chart the customer actually uses, not forced into a single reporting model.

The onboarding plan can include data validation against HRIS or directory sources if those systems feed employee, site, or title data. The important part is not the integration itself but whether the imported data supports the board structure you want to launch. If the source system does not carry the right hierarchy, the leaderboard scope will be incomplete.

Yes, because ad-hoc setups often skip the prerequisite checks that determine whether boards will actually work. This template gives you a repeatable sequence for confirming data shapes, assigning owners, and validating visibility before launch. That makes it easier to hand off and easier to repeat when the org changes.