Intercom on Onboarding

It’s a common mistake for companies to launch features in products without any context. Your goal should never be “get it launched”. Your goal is “get it used”. That’s why the right time to promote an improvement is not only when someone is in your product, but when they’re in a position to use it.

When we think about onboarding we usually don’t think beyond signup. In reality, your onboarding is just getting started. You haven't turned users into experts, and they haven't yet given up all the other products they used before yours. If you only focus your onboarding efforts on new signups, you’re leaving a massive opportunity on the table – passionate, engaged customers.

Multi-team onboarding – the right way
So how do you organize your teams to create a seamless onboarding experience? Here are some steps you can take:
Periodically review the entire experience. Each team responsible for a part of the onboarding flow should review the entire experience end-to-end. This is good for context, so there’s an awareness their part of the process needs to work well with the rest of it. It also helps reveal awkward transitions between different areas of ownership so they can be addressed.
Assign one onboarding owner from each team. It’s critical organizational alignment is created where key people share responsibility for the onboarding flow. The more teams and owners that proliferate, the more silos occur. When you hear people deflecting responsibility, “Oh, you gotta talk to the growth team about that”, rather than, “Let’s work with the growth team on this together”, you know you have an issue. Organizational alignment creates a structure that increases the likelihood of success.
Align each team behind a shared goal. If one team’s goal is to educate the customer, and another’s is to get them through signup as quickly as possible, you can see how cracks in an onboarding flow might occur. Make sure each owner agrees with and works towards the same goal i.e. create the most intuitive, efficient and delightful onboarding experience that results in higher customer conversion.
Enforce domain overlap. Most companies like to box off responsibilities for each team so they can focus on their specific problem. Onboarding doesn’t have that luxury – team overlaps need to be woven together. Instead of fighting these overlaps, iron them out so there’s a smooth transition. In our example, the marketing and growth teams might be responsible for the start of the signup flow and growth and product might be responsible for teaching the customer how to use the product once they buy it. By creating a shared responsibility at each transition point, we create a better model for a more fluid onboarding flow end-to-end.

You should presume that not everyone will have the ability or permission to complete every step, and provide ways for users to invite the people they need to help them.
Prompting people to invite coworkers means asking the customer to give up some of their social capital – you’re asking them to ask another person for a favor, to take time to setup an account and learn something new.
That’s why it’s important to provide some context – explain why someone is receiving an invite, and what they’ve been asked to do. And while it might look old-school, providing links can give people more direct control over how they choose to invite others.

While you have a new customer's attention, allow them to accomplish as much as they are capable of or have permission to do, right away.
It’s hard to recapture this attention, to get them to come back to your product, especially to do something boring, like enter a credit card or create an API key. So while you have their attention, provide ways for them to skip to other steps they can accomplish.
Remember, it’s almost always better to let people keep moving and exploring.

Let’s see what happens if you make the mistake of modeling these steps in a linear way.
Sign up for an account
Enter a credit card to start a trial
Authorize Google Apps access to get employees email addresses
Add a legal document or NDA for visitors to sign
Place the iPad in a stand at the front desk
If someone without a company credit card signs up, they’ll be stuck on step 2. At a company of 100 people, that might be 80% of people who could possibly sign up for your product. The same holds for the rest of the steps – the potential for failure is massive. Who has permissions to connect Google Apps? Who knows our lawyer’s email? Who has the stand for the iPad? Who is it I can ask for the credit card again?
Modeled in this way, as a blocking sequence of steps, there’s only one person at the company who could complete every step, unassisted – the CEO. And if the only person at a company who can complete your onboarding is the busiest person, with the least time, you have a problem.

A simple onboarding flow might give you lots of signups, but lots of signups doesn’t always translate to lots of customers. That’s why the best products don’t stop with an intro tour. They focus on the job the customer is hiring your product for, and show customers how to be successful with it.

Another benefit of a feature audit is it shows if your product has become too bloated. You’ll know bloat when you see it – features that aren’t being used by any significant number of your customers. Of course, if you’re in sales or customer success you might say bloat is not your problem, but that’s not the case.
You should think of bloat as non-monetizable features, rather than just being something that’s a problem for your product and engineering teams. Good products start with all the users using nearly all of the features. That grows the business and so you add new features. You’re convinced everyone is going to use the new features just as much as the original ones – because let’s face it no one thinks “let’s add some junk no one wants”.
But the reality of product management is not all your new features will be successful. You will introduce features that won't resonate with your customers – they won't be used, and they will damage users' overall perception of your product.

As your prices increase however, it becomes more challenging to explain the value of your product if potential customers just see a big monthly price tag. Before they sign up it’s the job of marketing to bridge the gulf between the value customers see and the what you’re actually delivering.
You have the same issue once they start a trial. The value someone is getting may fall far short of the price you charge. They may be using your product as a simple task manager but you are charging for a fully featured project management tool. This time your customer support team needs to bridge the gap.

Once you have them on the line, make sure to remember these points:
In order for your onboarding to succeed, it has to make your users successful
People sign up for products because they’re frustrated with their current situation.
The frustrations are the key early motivators, and are uncovered by interviewing people who have recently made the switch.
The interviews should always skew towards real events and feelings, rather than abstract or presumed ones.
Track the initial motivations back as far as possible, then move forward with as many specifics as possible.
Take the scenic route – color and commentary is a very valuable resource.
Catalog and overcome outside stumbling blocks and hurdles, be they software or people.
The story starts at “frustrating situation” and ends at “successful situation” – make sure all the dots connect!