Prototyping a Data Driven Onboarding Experience
Project Overview
A poor or mediocre onboarding experience is the leading contributor to early churn for subscription-based software companies. Executives seek deeper insights into their customers' onboarding journey. Key questions arise: At which stages are users disengaging? How can a dashboard effectively assist an internal product champion in streamlining the team's onboarding process? Addressing these inquiries, this prototype represents a step towards an intuitive and insightful onboarding dashboard. It stands as a critical instrument for stakeholders to evaluate the success of onboarding strategies and to lay the groundwork for robust customer relationships.
Executive Feedback: Positive feedback from executives has affirmed the impact of these dashboards on the company's operations. Commendations from leadership on the dashboard's ability to encapsulate the company's ultra-premium consumer experience into tangible data points have been particularly gratifying. This executive endorsement speaks volumes about the dashboard’s success in meeting its core objectives.
Context and Challenge
To positively influence customer retention and product adoption, stakeholders (particularly those managing large subscriber bases) face a unique set of challenges:
- Ensuring Successful Onboarding: Internal product champions require effective tools to ensure the success of onboarding. Once they introduce the product, their job is to ensure high adoption rates among their teams.
- Demand for Empowering Tools: New customers have expressed a need for tools to enhance their onboarding success. This feedback highlighted a gap in the current offerings, underscoring the necessity for a solution.
- Insight-Driven Customer Success: Customer Success teams, tasked with overseeing the customer onboarding journey, sought deeper insights also. Their goal was to understand better and address the points where customers might struggle or disengage.
- A Dual-Purpose Dashboard: The request was clear: develop a dashboard that not only provides comprehensive insights for Customer Success teams but also equips internal product champions with actionable data to foster successful onboarding experiences.
Understanding the Onboarding Flow
Initial Consultation with Executives: Over the course of three weeks, I met with executive leadership to distill their insights into a clear understanding of the onboarding process and the key metrics of success.
Project Journey
Stakeholder Engagement and Gathering Requirements: I engaged with executives to extract both explicit requirements and tribal knowledge, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the onboarding process.
Prototyping and Development: Utilizing Lucid Chart, I rapidly iterated prototypes, integrating feedback to refine the dashboard's functionality and design.
Success Criteria and Scorecard Development: I established success metrics aligned with strategic onboarding goals, crafting a scorecard that measures and drives success.
Final Implementation: The project culminated in a MongoDB-developed dashboard, offering real-time onboarding insights and a pathway to excellence.
Outcomes and Impact
Quantitative Results: The dashboards I’ve developed have proven their worth, contributing to significant upticks in onboarding completion rates and a marked reduction in the time users take to reach proficiency. These metrics are a testament to the efficacy of the dashboards and the strategic alignment of the scorecard development process.
Conceptualization
Drawing on a decade in subscription revenue models, my experience across various customer-facing roles informed the dashboard's design:
- Onboarding Team Management: Experience with onboarding teams highlighted challenges in data and information extraction, as well as time management during onboarding.
- Customer Success and Service: Handling customer transitions and addressing service feedback gave me a comprehensive view of the onboarding process and its pain points.
- Business Development Insights: Having built an SDR team, I've ensured that sales teams set realistic expectations consistently. This experience helped in designing a dashboard that serves multiple purposes. It not only supports onboarding and customer success teams but also aids sales leadership. The dashboard helps in aligning promises with actual deliverables, maintaining trust throughout onboarding.
This combination of roles allowed me to create a dashboard that streamlines onboarding and upholds the expectations set at the customer's journey outset.