Onboarding: helping new clients to use Conta Azul’s platform
Article also available in Portuguese/disponível em português: Acessar/Access
The first steps through Conta Azul’s platform are an important moment for the business owners to comprehend how our features works and understand the value our product delivers.
With the Customer Success Team support, we offer free training by phone for the new subscribers, as well as providing materials (digital books, videos, among others). However, as we grow as a company, this process can’t scalate.
With this thought in mind, in order to deliver autonomy to our clients, we studied an automated onboarding process through our platform. This article describes our hits and misses in this process.
Shall we?
The starting point
We began our research seeking to understand the perceptions our users got when arriving at Conta Azul’s platform.
To this purpose, we conducted interview sessions with business owners and accountants, studied churn indicators in a period up to 60 days post-purchase, and clients call numbers to our customer service — also considering the variable of clients who bought the product in the past 60 days and possibly, would have more questions.
Besides, we mapped the user journey since the purchase final step, the first contacts customers had with product until the conclusion of the task that motivated users to purchase the platform.
We also investigated how Customer Success team organize their schedule to get in touch with new clients, in order to understand how this dynamic influences — or not — the arriving of new clients and also their success when using the product.
Several stakeholders, both internal and external, contributed or were a source for the compiled evidence. More than 15 business owners, 10 accountants, customer success coordinators and agents, project managers among other professionals helped throughout discovery stage.
Design Sprint as a facilitator process
Once the challenge and the research focus where defined, we began to compile the first data found in our exploratory research and interviews.
Right after, we invited a multidisciplinary team for a Design Sprint week, a process that unites designers and others stakeholders in five days to:
- Understand and define the problem;
- Produce hypotheses;
- Prototype;
- Test;
- Define how to measure the project success.
The other factor which supported the needs for a Design Sprint was the calendar, as we were closed to Black Friday, as also the opportunity to deliver a solution that would serve the increase of new clients.
Framing the problem
To reach consensus on the projects’ problem-question, in the Design Sprint first two days we shared the exploratory research results with the group and, reached the following pains points:
- Onboarding timing needs to adjusted: It’s hard to match Customer Success call schedules with client schedules, not to mention the length needed for the phone calls.
- The product adaptation has to be easier: We received feedback from our users who assessed their first steps into the product as a complex task. It’s important to provide paths to solve this feeling.
- Onboarding service process must be scalable: Although we have a considerable number of Customer Success Agents dedicated just to onboarding new users, calling and training each and every new user has become an inefficient process.
Hypothesizing solutions
As the pain points were gathered from the team feedback, we began to hypothesize solutions for each problem founded.
Then we listed and created prototypes aiming to solve the pain points defined by the team. Our goal was to right after evaluating the prototypes with our clients (where we could get feedback about the hypotheses certainty) we could estimate development costs and the value delivered to the users by the future solution.
The solutions were:
- Allow users to onboard autonomously on the product;
- Create a quick flow, which will guide users to complete the task that motivated his purchase;
- Humanize the new onboarding process, using textual and visual elements;
Validating and defining the project success metrics
In order to test the solutions proposed, we recruited users to participate on a usability test session, giving them specific tasks, where we followed in real time the hypotheses performance. Were invited to the test clients who already were frequent users of the product, but also clients who didn’t onboard until the Design Sprint week.
Besides, the Design Sprint test day allows, if necessary, correct the solutions and change its course within a low cost, as there were no big development efforts yet or any negative impacts in a possible feature release.
As for the metrics, we used Google’s HEART framework. By using it, it was possible to define our goals and also to check evidences of achievement on every and single one of our goals. Considering criteria such as client happiness, engagement, adoption, retention and task success.
Next Steps
With Conta Azul’s new onboarding process, our expectations are that new clients can reach their goals on the product, through a experience that guides them and provide all the necessary resources, already in the initial steps. You never get a second chance to make a good first impression!
We are currently A/B testing the new onboarding, measuring its performance and close following the project with Product Analytics team support.
Have you faced a similar challenge? Do you want to talk about our new onboarding? Email me at bruno.cruz@contaazul.com and I will be glad to answer!
Don't forget to clap 👏
