For agencies, I would separate initial onboarding from post-launch operations. The painful part is usually not collecting a logo, login, or process doc once. The painful part is that nobody has a clean operating model after the workflow is live.
The post-deployment issues I would rank highest are:
- Credential and API drift: tokens expire, scopes change, fields move, or a third-party tool changes behavior.
- Silent failures: the workflow finishes green but produces empty, stale, duplicate, or malformed output.
- Unclear support ownership: the client does not know whether something is a bug, change request, or normal support.
- Missing issue history: the same failure comes back but nobody can see what was fixed last time.
- Weak client reporting: the agency cannot easily prove what ran, what failed, what was resolved, and what needs attention.
So for onboarding, I would automate the basics, but I would also capture the maintenance contract: who owns each workflow, what counts as a healthy run, how credentials are reconnected, who gets alerts, and what the client sees in the monthly report. That operating layer is usually where the real time savings are.