Product Decision #10: Intercom’s Onboarding Change That Increased Conversion By 40%

This is #10 in a collection of posts highlighting decisions made in tech to build and grow products.

Product Decision

In a recent talk on successful user onboarding, Intercom co-founder Des Traynor gave an example of how in the company’s first few years, they focused their efforts on making sure new users could “install the Javascript correctly” to start using the product. After getting many feature requests for an “import from CSV” function, they realized they had to make a mindset shift: the team had to think about onboarding in terms of “Get their users into Intercom” rather than “install the Javascript correctly”. Adding the new import feature and updating the onboarding experience resulted in a conversion rate increase of 40%.

Details

More from Des:

When most people think about onboarding, they think it’s the bit where we try to get the email. There’s actually a lot going on with onboarding. Is it the idea of trying it out? Is it buying and paying? Is it being set up for success, or is it progressively expanding over time and learning about new changes? There is a lot to it. […]

We built this tool to upload users from a database or from a CSV. The product had changed, so the onboarding should change. We went from the saying onboarding is about getting people installing JavaScript to, “how do we get people getting their users into Intercom,” which brought us here.

Read the full article here.

Have you tried something similar at your company? If so, share your results in the comments.