Optimizing Customer Onboarding
Year: 2020
Duration: 8 months
Role: Sr. Experience Designer
Team: Experience Director, Design Technologist, 3 Front-End Developers, 2 fellow Experience Designers
Tools Used: Pencil & Paper, Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator, Airtable, Miro, Zoom, Google Sheets (Notetaking)
Responsibilities:
Conducting research to improve customer onboarding and provisioning for enterprise messaging campaigns
Facilitating collaborative remote workshops to guide onboarding service design
Summary:
What started as a three-month UI and component library project turned into an 18-sprint partnership, all conducted remotely across timezones.
I conducted research across product operations to optimize the customer onboarding journey, increasing conversions and accelerating time to market.
“Thanks everyone. This project wasn’t just a simple “build a design system and some components to match it.” This project was: learn a new industry, identify the problems that go along with that industry, create solutions for those problems, incorporate them into a design system and cement them in code… all while your client changed courses a few times. It’s a tremendous project you’ve delivered. Your whole team is world class.”
— Mike King, VP Engineering of OpenMarket
Background:
OpenMarket makes mobile marketing easy through user-friendly software for creating and managing SMS campaigns. The company’s robust network of web service APIs allows enterprise clients like SkyNews to coordinate massive global campaigns while optimizing for success in specific markets.
In addition to its API services, OpenMarket’s flagship product, Indigo, provides an intuitive conversation builder allowing non-technical users like marketing managers to create SMS, RCS, and other types of text-based messaging campaigns. Users can track engagement and manage all their campaigns from one dashboard.
Challenges:
Onboarding new customers was a lengthy high-touch process, which didn’t work for OpenMarket’s target customers: medium-sized companies seeking to quickly expand their digital marketing efforts.
Campaign provisioning is highly regulated and individual to local constraints of each country where the campaign is run, meaning customers had to invest resources and wait months just to try the product.
Research
Qualitative Interviews
I conducted a process deep-dive to fully understand the customer onboarding journey and its impact upon customer experience and business needs.
I connected with leadership across OpenMarket’s globally distributed team, conducting qualitative interviews with 15+ stakeholders representing Sales, Account Management, Technical Implementation, Support, Operations, Provisioning, Supplier Relations, Legal, Finance, and Product. I asked each of them to outline the process end-to-end, recording breakdowns, recurring tasks, customer touch points, and compliance needs along the way.
Visualizing the Current Process
Customer Onboarding Journey Map
I synthesized what I’d learned in these in-depth sessions to visualize the existing customer onboarding journey, highlighting sentiment and areas of complexity throughout the process.
Optimizing the Customer Onboarding Experience
Service Design Workshops
I then invited the full leadership team, including my interview participants, to review the process together, facilitating a series of collaborative workshops in Miro.
The workshops offered visibility to each department’s struggles as well as their shared dedication to customer success, and empowered stakeholders across unique areas of expertise to address pain points, explore solutions, and imagine an optimized customer onboarding experience. In the last of these 8 collaborative service design sessions, I guided stakeholders to align on high yield opportunities, roadmap them, and create an actionable backlog to implement the improved customer onboarding and provisioning process.
Customer Onboarding Journey Stages Prototype
Since remote collaboration was relatively new for many participants, it was crucial to support ongoing conversations with visibility and context. A clickable prototype of the customer onboarding journey allowed stakeholders to dig deeper into each stage of the current process. This extra layer of facilitation made workshops more productive and engaging for busy stakeholders who were able to maintain context, collaborate, and prepare for sessions asynchronous.
The Results:
While implementation took place after the end of our engagement, the new process offered OpenMarket significant sales flexibility, accelerating new enterprise customer conversions and driving growth by enabling pre-provisioned free product trials.