TABLE OF CONTENTS

Credits

Foreword

Introduction

The low-hanging fruit of user onboarding

Killer onboarding starts with a story

One size onboarding doesnt fit all

Your onboarding has a shelf life

Showing customers the value of free

Strategies for onboarding new users

Onboarding groups, not just individuals

How your organizational structure impacts onboarding

Onboarding never stops

Conclusion
 Intercom on Onboarding

Onboarding is one of the few things every single one of your customers will
experience. Intercom on Onboarding lets you do it right.

If youd like to read more, we regularly share our thoughts on onboarding, customer
support, product management, and startups on our blog, Inside Intercom.

Thanks to John Collins, Adam Risman, Sara Yin, and Stewart Scott-Curran for their help
creating the book.

Cover and chapter illustrations: Justin Pervorse

2016 Intercom Inc.

ISBN 978-0-9861392-4-6

Long paragraphs of impenetrable legal warnings arent really our style so well keep it
simple. Please dont share this book, rip off any content or imagery, or otherwise try to
use it for your own gain. If you do share or write about it somewhere (which we
actively encourage) please be sure to give Intercom appropriate credit and a link.
Foreword

Trying out a new software product can feel awesome, like taking on a new

superpower. Suddenly, you have a capability you didnt have before, like
having a face-to-face conversation with someone on the other side of the
planet, or knowing exactly which song is playing in the restaurant youre
eating in.

The real magic comes when we can seamlessly acquire these

superpowers. It sets the product/customer relationship up for long-
lasting success right from the beginning. When this occurs, its great not
only for the customer, but for the business too. Converting signups into
long-lasting, churn-resistant users is a tide that lifts all departmental
ships: marketing, product, customer support, and beyond.

Unfortunately, most transitions from struggling-to-superpowered are

anything but seamless. Signup, activation, first use, and re-engagement
workflows are often tacked on at the last minute. Rarely are they
designed as part of the core product to begin with. This is ironic not

only does onboarding provide that crucial first impression, its also the
only part of the product that, by definition, every single user will

experience.

When a products onboarding is underserved, the loss of users can be

staggering. Every signup has the potential to be a valuable user of your

product. And every signup has come to you thanks to the elbow grease of
your marketing and product teams, who created a value proposition

appealing enough to investigate.

Is that time investment for both your company and its new signups

being rewarded with a robust, bulletproof activation process? Or is it

being squandered with an experience that neglects the needs of first-time

users, letting the majority of them slip through your fingers like sand?

Intercom has not only provided an immensely helpful product for

engaging customers, theyve also consistently delivered phenomenal

recommendations and insights via their blog, and now this book.

From advice on activating new signups, to customizing their ensuing

journey, to ensuring as many users as possible become successful ones,

the writing that follows outlines time-tested thinking that will help your
company thrive by helping its users do the same.

I truly hope you absorb and apply the advice this book provides. The
world, and your business, could always use more superpowered people.

Samuel Hulick, UserOnboard

Samuel Hulick is the authority on user onboarding. Whether its through

his detailed and witty onboarding teardowns of some of the worlds biggest

products at useronboard.com, or his book The Elements of User

Onboarding, hes been central in bringing user onboarding front and center

for modern software products.

Introduction

When we started Intercom, our mission was to make business personal.

So we took it upon ourselves to email every new customer, to ask how
easy setup was, and to see if there was anything confusing them.

It was a manual process, but repeatedly talking to people who are trying
to set up your product is a surefire way to help you learn you need to fix
your onboarding.

Even though onboarding wasnt as well documented as it is today, one

thing was apparent: onboarding was and is the one truly universal
problem every piece of software has. Its the only one thing literally all
your customers are going to do, and youre guaranteed thousands of your
users will run into some kind of difficulty with it.

It doesnt matter if youve tried every marketing technique in the book, if

youre not onboarding users successfully it counts for nothing. Why

would you invest so much in trying to attract users, but not go the extra
step and try to keep them?

One of the obvious traps startups fall into is seeing onboarding as just

three screens after signup. They fall for the snake oil of optimization and
think a blue button instead of a red will magically deliver engaged users.

In reality, onboarding is much more than tooltips pointing out buttons

and menus that should be self-explanatory in the first place.
Onboarding is actually the phase a customer goes through in between

making the decision they want to use a product, and being a fully setup
user who can extract the most value from the product. In short, its about

helping your customers be successful.

What follows is a collection of lessons weve learned from onboarding

customers at Intercom. Theyre free of hacks and gimmicks and cover

everything weve learned over the past five years from redesigning your

onboarding to adapt to new contexts, to getting new users beyond the

free trial.

While a lot of these lessons come from direct experience, theyre bound

by a universal truth any startup can take away. Good onboarding comes
from focusing less on your own business, and more on your users.
Onboarding isnt a metric, its an outcome successful users. Once you

learn that, everything follows from there.

Des Traynor, Co-Founder, Intercom

CHAPTER 1

The low-hanging fruit of

user onboarding
DES TRAYNOR
Onboarding has traditionally been of two kinds. Either Lets point out our
interface or Lets decide where we want our user to end up, and push
them that way.

Both miss the mark they dont understand the difference between

correlation and causation. Just because a user has reached 100% on a

progress bar, or a tooltip tells them how to add a teammate, doesnt mean
theyll make the progress you needed to solve their problem.

The best onboarding is the kind that pays less attention to getting users to
complete steps the business cares about and more about getting them to
those successful moments.

These successful moments usually have nothing to do with optimizing

button colors or calls to action and everything to do with better

understanding who your user is, what it is they are trying to achieve and
where they currently are in your workflow.

Finding these successful moments is more difficult than adding a progress

bar. It involves actually talking to customers while theyre signing up and

after theyve signed up, and learning as much as you can. But nobody said
acquiring and retaining customers was easy.

Startups are knee-deep in customer acquisition metrics; click-through

rates, cost per click, cost per lead, conversion rate, cost per acquisition

and more.

They wade through the data looking for easy tweaks, hoping that
changing a red button green, or adding words like Free and Now to

landing page headlines will add another 0.01% to their funnel. At best

this Fisher-Price psychology gets them a few quick wins. At worst they
spin their wheels for weeks pushing complexity around from one screen

to another, all in the hope of growing signups.

What happens to the users who sign up? you ask. Well thats the funny
thing: most of them disappear, but that gets less attention in this game of

Whack-a-Metric. Its worth remembering that recovering a lost signup is

worth just as much as capturing a new one. Of the hundreds of Intercom

customers Ive spoken with, they all have a variation of this problem:

people sign up, click around, and disappear. Thats where user
onboarding comes in turning new signups into loyal and engaged

customers.

With each successive generation of onboarding the focus has shifted

slightly from what the business wants to what the customer needs. Early

onboarding was outside of the product where help manuals, and later

websites, were offered to users externally and out of context in the

hopes they would use them instead of contacting support. Since then,

onboarding has slowly moved inside the product.

Signs on signs on signs: onboarding 1.0

The first onboarding attempts focused heavily on the user interface, as if

to say, Hey! Look at what we built. Go click this please. This style of

onboarding begins with the product and tries to reverse engineer user
desires from each piece of the interface. For most interfaces this amounts

to tooltips pointing out buttons and menus that should actually be self-

explanatory if the designers did their job right. If you cant read the words

on this button, why dont you read the words in this dialog instead?

Completeness meters: onboarding 2.0

The next era of onboarding was made famous by LinkedIn. Gamified

progress bars shepherd users through a series of hoops, not too dissimilar
to how trainers get their poodles to win top prize at a dog show. This
approach consists of identifying a set of tasks you want every new user to

do, arbitrarily giving them a percentage score for each task and then
bugging the shit out of users until they hit 100%. Gamification: the multi-

billion-dollar industry that never happened.

Progress bars are quite effective, but are still internally focused. They

ensure the user does what the business wants, but not necessarily that
users achieve what they want.

For simple, well-defined products, theres little difference between a

users immediate desire and the metrics the business uses to record

progress. But for anything more complex (e.g. B2B SaaS products) this
can result in force-feeding configuration options to a user who simply
wanted to manage some tasks, or requiring a user to invite their team

before theyve finished assessing the product. For example, many

products ask users to invite additional friends who arent on the service

before they show a users onboarding as complete. Does this benefit the
business or their customers?

Understand the customers definition of success:

onboarding 3.0
Rather than relying solely on emergent metrics and then forcing users to
hit some business targets, modern onboarding focuses on the user and

what they want to achieve. This begins with continually asking newly
signed up customers what they are hoping to achieve with your product.
You will learn:

their functional goals (e.g. organize my teams tasks)

their personal goals (e.g. let me feel in control)

and social goals (e.g.impress my boss)

You also need to ensure each new signup believes they are on a path to
achieving their goals. This is what successful onboarding does. Slack does

this well their Slackbot guides new users through setting up their
account by asking them a series of questions. Not only does the user set

up their account, but they are learning to use Slack at the same time.

Other effective implementations of onboarding 3.0 include CoSchedule,

an editorial calendar for WordPress, which gets new users to create and
schedule an article during the onboarding flow. Duolingo, a language
learning site, has new users translating a sentence into their chosen

language before it even asks for an email address.

Onboarding your customers for success

The purpose of a trial is to convince a potential user your product will

deliver what they need at a price they can afford. Its about getting users
to those successful moments. Its important to remember this is their
success, not yours, and has nothing to do with filling in database fields to
complete their profile. Onboarding is the key here. So heres five steps to

improve your onboarding:

1. Understand the different jobs your product is

hired for

You might regard yourself as being in the project management

category, but people who sign up might actually be trying to improve

productivity or get better at remote working. Yes, your product solves

these problems through the lens of project management, but its

important to know what use cases, examples and copy will motivate your

customers versus what will fall on deaf ears.

2. Understand what success looks like for each of

these jobs

People arent using your analytics tool for the sake of it, theyre using it to

get promoted, or to prove their worth, or to rally a team behind a

common problem. A very simple step here is to ask new signups what
theyre trying to achieve with your product. Once you know that, youll

be amazed at how many onboarding changes youll want to make

instantly.

3. Design paths guiding them through the features

that help them achieve this
Once you know the end goal(s) of your target users, you can design a flow
to guide them to it. If there are end goals that are mutually exclusive (e.g.

I want to share my design work vs. I want to get more design gigs) its

best to let new signups declare their desire up front so youll never be
tone-deaf.

4. Communicate with users to help them get there

Sadly, most product communications during trials are badly targeted,

usually using time since signup as the key. In reality, just because its

been seven days, it doesnt mean Ive done anything useful. Similarly, I
could have signed up yesterday, spent all day in your product, and be

fully up to speed. Activity matters, usage matters. Understand where I

am, where Im going, and send me messages that help me get there.

5. Have an early warning system for new users

Most products wait until a customer cancels, or fails to convert, and then
the apologetic pleading messages begin. Its when youll see How can we

get you back? emails to a customer who has already checked out. Thats

like waiting until you see divorce papers before checking how your
spouse is doing. Instead, know what failure looks like and start the

conversation before its too late.

Collectively, these steps wont solve everything, and its a fair criticism of

the new discipline of onboarding that a lot of this advice maps back to

Good Product Design. But as we discussed at the outset, you can go back
to tweaking button colors, or you can try something new: help your

customers be successful. Do that and youll find theres low-hanging

fruit, and lots of it.

CHAPTER 2

Killer onboarding starts

with a story
SAMUEL HULICK
Signing up for a new product is an expression of hope. When you invest
your time in trying out something new, youre opening yourself up to the
possibility that the way youve been doing things hasnt been so hot. That
the way the new product affords will help you do it better.

Whether that hope is made real or not ultimately comes down to successful
onboarding the product can either deliver you from a not-so-great
situation into a much better one, or you can revert back to the way youve
previously been doing things.

Failing to make that hope real is a bummer for both parties the business
has lost a potential user (and with each churned signup, their overall cost
per acquisition has gone up), and the potential user has wasted time they
could have spent doing something useful. So how can you best stack the
deck in favor of a good outcome all around?

The answer isnt easy, but its relatively simple at the same time get a
crystal-clear picture of what the good situation you can deliver people to
is, but at the same time genuinely understand the psychological

motivations driving someone away from their pre-existing not-so-good

situation to begin with.

Once youre able to fully take on your users perspectives on why theyre

feeling restless before signing up and what theyre hoping to find on the
other side, you can much, much more reliably design a welcoming

workflow that will usher them into the rad new life theyre looking for.
If you want more people to adopt your product, you have to make sure
you know what progress looks like in your users life, not just on their

screen.

Having a stellar user adoption rate is a beautiful thing. Converting users

at a higher rate drives down the cost of user acquisition, which in turn
stretches your marketing resources even further. It also means people

stick around longer, driving up average lifetime value, and letting you
invest your product resources more strategically.

The secret to getting there? First, identify the must-have experience that

keeps people coming back, and make sure new users experience it.

Ensuring new users have that experience is a responsibility put on

onboarding, even though onboarding itself is rarely designed to deliver it.

Rather than relentlessly focusing on progressing the user to success,

onboarding workflows seem content to simply introduce the interface

and call it a day.

Its a real shame, because for onboarding to answer its higher calling, it

has to go beyond moving people through a product tour. The story you

build your onboarding experience on shouldnt be about your user

interface, it should be about your user. And in order to build on solid

ground, that story the one beginning and ending with the user needs

to be thoroughly understood.
Setting the stage for successful onboarding

When you boil it down, onboarding is really about changing peoples

behavior. Your signups are frustrated with the way theyre currently

doing something and are hoping your way of doing things is better (or
else they wouldnt be signing up). Onboarding strives to make that

behavioral switcheroo a successful one for as many people as possible.

Onboarding, when working well, is less an instruction manual for weight

benches and more like a personal trainer: they dont stop once theyve

shown you how the equipment is used; they make sure you attain your

fitness goals. The same goes for user onboarding: in order for it to be

successful, it must ultimately engender success in others.

So, long before you begin to weigh your interface options (Should I go

with an intro video or a series of tooltips?), lets make sure youre clear

on what your users are trying to get away from and where they want you
to take them.

Why are people hiring your product?

Lets begin where your users begin: the situation they dont want to be in
anymore. To take the personal trainer metaphor, this is the last time

the person unhappily stares in the mirror, before finally deciding to do

something about it. Its the specific, burning motivation driving them to

adopt a new way of doing things.

Clay Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of The

Innovators Dilemma, calls this motivating situation the Job-to-be-

Done. The concept is that products are acquired in the same way a

company opens up a new position in their organization: they recognize

theres a need to grow or adapt, and they need to make a hire to fix it.

For example, someone may encounter an I need to unwind situation

after a long day at work, and hire Netflix to help relieve some stress. Or
a startup may find themselves in a we need to be better at talking to our

users situation with their product and hire Intercom to get the lines of
communication flowing freely.

Frustrating situations open up new employment opportunities, and

intimately familiarizing yourself with them makes sure your user

onboarding nails the interview. However, you cant discover them

through demographic research or behavioral data. To fully understand
what drives your users, you have to go straight to the source with

interviews.

Who should be interviewed, and when?

Whenever possible, interview people who have just crossed the finish

line to becoming highly-engaged users. Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta,

Jobs-to-be-Done practitioners and co-founders of The ReWired Group,

refer to this as the switching moment. If you charge for your product,
its the moment people start paying. If you dont, youll need to come up
with your own engagement indicator and use that as the point of

introduction.

Why is the timing important? If youre approaching users before theyve

made the switch, you run the risk of interviewing people who wont
actually stick with your product. Approaching them too long afterward,

though, means theyre likely to have already forgotten what drove them
to change things up to begin with. People who have recently switched are
proven customers, but still have the emotional memory of the whole
process available for recall, which is exactly what youre looking for.

Where does their story actually begin?

When conducting your interviews, try to keep participants focused on

their actual actions and feelings when they made the switch. People are
notoriously unreliable at predicting their future behavior and attitudes,

so framing everything around what really happened (not what usually

happens, or could have happened) during their onboarding keeps your
emerging story tethered to reality.

Asking for specifics also helps transport people back into the actual
moment, which brings up valuable additional details. Rather than asking

them if they had an easy time with setup or not, get to specifics by asking
which part was the trickiest, and deeply explore that moment. For

example, while someone might not have a lot to add to are you a safe
driver?, asking them to specifically recall the last time they were pulled
over by the police would immediately thrust them into a story rich with

emotional details.

Be sure to track every storys breadcrumb trail as far back as you can get

your interviewee to remember. The narratives that lead up to decisions

can be surprisingly long much longer than the surface would show. A

journey to a car dealership may at first seem to begin with seeing a

newspaper ad. But after even a little bit of digging it could turn out to
have really started with a funny noise in the engine two months before.

Onboarding always begins with the motivation to change, which always

takes place before the user lands on your site.
If your user onboarding story was a movie, your product itself wouldnt
appear until long after the action was already underway (and remember,

the user is the star of this show, not you). Retracing their steps
especially the ones before your product comes into the picture provides

you with the context you need to correctly kick the transition off.

What has to happen for adoption to succeed?

Now the starting place is well-explored, have your interviewee recount

their steps forward all the way to the moment they became fully up and

running with your product. Its very unlikely to have been a direct path,

so encourage them to meander or head off on seemingly-unrelated

tangents. These often provide the richest insights of the entire

conversation.

For example, if your products setup process needs the user to import a

bunch of data for everything to be fully up and running, urge them to take

the scenic route in describing every little detail of how they accomplished
it. Did the numbers come from a spreadsheet? If so, was it in Excel or

Google Docs? How many sheets did it have? Did they import the data by

uploading the file or by pasting it in by hand? How did the numbers even

get into the spreadsheet to begin with and how long did it take to be
populated?

Cataloging the external tedium involved in getting set up with your

product doesnt just provide you with plenty of low-hanging fruit for

making the transition much easier for your new users. It also gives you a
clearer picture of all the pressures theyre dealing with that surround the
time they actually spend inside your product.

In fact, theres one kind of pressure that stands heads above the others,
and goes criminally overlooked in most product strategies: people

pressure.

Who else has to be successful for adoption to

succeed?

While its crucial to understand what makes your onboardee tick,

theres no need to stop there. People are social animals, and

understanding an individuals motivations often requires understanding

the motivations of those around them.

Nowhere is this truer than in the land of business software. Budgets need
to be approved, technology needs to be reviewed, processes need to be

changed, and colleagues need to be trained. Understanding what

motivates the budget-holders and technology-reviewers in your users

life can help you ensure things get past all those surrounding parties as

quickly and easily as possible.

If it comes up in an interview that their managers wanted an explanation

of why a product was worth the investment, arming future users with a

professional and credible PDF outlining the ROI of your product will beat

leaving them to come up with reasons on their own. If you frequently

hear the IT department nearly scrubbed the deal with their technical

review, you can save untold others from the chopping block with a well-
timed offer for a guided tour under the hood.

Ask as many questions as possible about who applied pressure to the

process, and what pressures those people were dealing with themselves.
Teeing your user up for success doesnt and shouldnt have to exist

solely within the confines of your products interface.

Go forth and listen

The insights that create an exceptional onboarding experience are out

there, but wont fall into your lap from a Google Analytics chart or an
open text box tacked onto an NPS survey. To uncover the real story the

powerful, driving, emotional one you have to access the person behind

the user.

In fact, I want you to do this so much Im sharing a time-tested email of

mine so you can get started right away. Send this to people the day after
they become customers (or cross the engagement proxy).
Not everyone will reply, but I guarantee some will, and the hardest part of

interviewing getting people to talk with you will be covered. 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 theyre 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!

Interviewing isnt easy, but its a heck of a lot more enjoyable than
pouring tons of late nights and hard-earned dollars into a product thats

sucking wind. Heres to your onboarding (and your users) success.

CHAPTER 3

One size onboarding

doesnt fit all
NATE MUNGER
When contemplating a career switch from education to software a few
years back as nervous as I was to make the leap I was confident my
teaching skillset would serve me well.

Looking back, I think I underestimated the relevance of my experience. The

parallels between teaching and working in a startup are pretty striking

after all: long-term planning and project management? Check. Inter-
personal skills and written communication? Check. On-the-fly adaptability
and resilience working under deadline in a stressful environment? Well,
you get the picture.

What I didnt expect was how the deeper professional knowledge and
educational theory I had accumulated over 12 years could be directly
applied to onboarding. Educational theory might not be the first place
youll look when to trying to build software. But a few key concepts will

help your users get the information they need, when they need it.

When it comes to guiding customers to success, a one-size-fits-all

approach just wont work. Instead, try differentiating your onboarding so

all types of customers can master your product. I spent 12 years as an

educator, designing curriculums and making sure every student truly

learned the subject matter.

One of the fundamental challenges of teaching is that not every student

learns in the same way or at the same pace. Some learn best by reading.

Others prefer listening to a lecture or watching a demonstration. The

kinesthetic do-ers want to dive in and learn by doing it themselves.

Others prefer to watch from the sidelines. And regardless of style, it takes
a little one-on-one tutoring to fully grasp a concept.

The basic idea is that the primary educational objectives making sure all
students master essential knowledge, concepts, and skills remain the

same for every student. But teachers use different instructional methods
to help students meet those expectations. This is a concept known as

differentiation.

You should differentiate your user onboarding as well. Not only can you
have different types of companies using your product (startups, SMBs,

enterprises) that move at different speeds, but you can also have

differences in the individual users learning styles.

As in the classroom, your goal for onboarding is the same for every user:

help them extract value from your product so they become satisfied,
paying customers. Thats why you should build differentiated support

structures so onboarding can happen at different speeds and in different

ways.

In a classroom setting, teachers provide students with scaffolds, or

temporary support structures, to help them access challenging content

and complete tasks they couldnt otherwise. In software, scaffolding

looks like great written documentation, how-to videos and best practice

blog posts. These resources support multiple learning styles.

Spending a little extra time thinking about the organizational structure of

your documents will pay off. Matching them to the logic of your product

will make them more user friendly. Its the same reason scaffolding
follows the contours of a building. For example, at Intercom weve

organized our documentation by the different jobs customers use

Intercom for.

Likewise, our blog is organized thematically. We regularly publish posts

by members of our team in their areas of expertise. Our customers also

get to tell their own stories of success with Intercom on our customers

page. All of these are great examples of peer-to-peer learning a research-

driven educational technique.

These self-serve resources are great customers can go back to them as

many times and as often as they want. They provide more details to

customers who contact you for help, and act as a resource for customers
who would rather figure it out themselves. Everyone wins.

An old fashioned conversation

Teachers build time into their lessons to take student questions and hold
discussions about high-level concepts. It helps clear up confusion,
contextualize theory, and engage students. These kinds of conversations

stretch students understanding of content and concepts. It also lets

teachers assess how well their students have grasped what theyre trying

to teach them.

In the same way, facilitating this conversation will always be a crucial

part of user onboarding and retaining more customers. A tool like

Intercom lets customers get answers to questions you didnt anticipate in

your docs, or they cant answer independently. If you find the same
questions are being asked over and over again, this is great feedback
about the usability of your docs, your product, or both. Teachers adjust

their lessons based on this type of informal assessment all the time. You
should too.

At Intercom, our customer support team tags every conversation twice.

One identifies the team responsible for that area of the product, and the

other categorizes the type of conversation (confusion, bug, feature

request, etc.). These tags help our product team iterate and plan our
roadmap.

One-on-one and group tutoring

One-to-one teaching is the ultimate form of differentiation. Thats why

teachers doors are open at lunch, or after school for students who

needed extra help. Thats why they build in time during lessons to check
in and make sure students are understanding the material.

Individual demos can help new users get a head start in your product
while also making personal connections. Customers who are not

successfully using your product will eventually quit, taking all that
revenue with them. Identifying these customers and proactively reaching
out to offer a demo will definitely be worth your time. Intercom can even

help you automate this process using the data youre tracking to
proactively trigger demo offers to a targeted user segment.

For example, a project management tool might want to trigger an auto

message, offering a demo to users on their Pro plan who signed up more
than seven days ago, started at least one project, but havent used their
super amazing reporting tool. Why? Because these users are not taking
advantage of a very useful feature. This makes them less likely to see the

value of the tool and more likely to churn.

Product demos are a great way to scale this personal onboarding

approach. They allow one person to give a more personalized experience
to a large number of customers at once. Theyre great for customers who

want to learn by watching a live demonstration and asking questions.

They also support those who prefer to just listen.

Webinars and personal demos offer opportunities for your customers to

connect with someone on your team or interact with other users of your

product. Relationships like these build loyalty, while helping customers

get the answers they need to achieve success in your product.

Use data to customize your message schedule

Not every user needs every onboarding message. If you are talking to
every user the same way, youre likely over messaging many and
annoying some, or at least training them to ignore you. At the same time

other users are left struggling to find answers, or dont discover valuable
features. By tracking user events and attributes you can automate a

message schedule tailored to each user.

If youre not differentiating your messaging based on customer behavior,

you probably find yourself having a lot of reactive conversations. Youre

fielding support questions from people who are already struggling and
frustrated.

A proactive, data-driven onboarding message schedule means you are

talking to your customers based on how theyre actually using your app.
Sometimes youre helping customers before they even realize they need
it, and reducing your support load in the long run.

This just enough, just in time approach means you will send fewer

messages to more of your users. The ones who do get a specific message
are the ones whose behavior indicates they need it.

A little theory can go a long way

Educators know differentiation is hard, but worth it. That does not mean
all 150 students a teacher sees every day get an individually tailored

lesson. Rather, the best teachers plan variety into their lessons so there

are multiple points of access to the content throughout a unit and the
curriculum.

In the world of software at scale, it doesnt mean hand-holding every new

user through the onboarding process. Differentiated onboarding means

strategically building a few structures to help your users get the

information they need, when they need it, in the way they understand it.
CHAPTER 4

Your onboarding has a

shelf life
SEAN MCBRIDE AND STEPHEN OBRIEN
For several years, user onboarding at Intercom centered on one action:
installing a snippet of JavaScript on their website or app. For our technical
user base of developers and small startups, it was the clearest and simplest
way to get up and running.

What was less clear was that while our onboarding process remained
consistent, our user base was broadening. Marketers, customer support
teams and product managers were signing up for Intercom, and installing
JavaScript wasnt as easy for them.

What we discovered was that as integral as UIs and snippets of code are to
the onboarding experience, the context informing them audience,
environment, product, packaging and price is just as crucial, and
constantly evolving. In Intercoms case, our context has changed many
times over the past few years. And our onboarding has had to follow.

Onboarding encompasses a lot of things: how you get set up with a

product, how you learn about it, and how you purchase it too.

When we think about onboarding, most of us think in terms of software.

But all products, in all industries, have an onboarding experience. Take

the automobile industry, for example.

Car dealerships provide the onboarding experience for cars. Theyre the
place where you come to browse, try out, and purchase the different

options available. This onboarding experience hasnt really changed

since the 1950s. Its a big, glass box full of cars where you can talk to

salespeople.

If we look at the broader context that informs the car onboarding

experience, not much has changed here either. There have only been
incremental shifts in the product theyre selling, the environment in

which they sell them, the audience they sell to, the packaging, and the
price they charge. In fact, Tesla is the first car company thats tried to

shift this formula.

When contexts change, so does onboarding

Compare this to an industry thats changed its onboarding over time

fast food. Back in the 1920s, the most popular restaurant chain in the US

was Horn & Hardart, and American cities were very different than they
are today. The population density of a place like the Lower East Side of

Manhattan was four times what it is today. The onboarding challenge was

to efficiently and effectively serve a huge number of customers in a

relatively small space.

So Horn & Hardart created the Automat, an automated restaurant. Youd

walk in, go to a wall with an array of windows containing different foods,

choose the one you want, put a dime in, take the food out and go back to
your seat. All of this happened without any staff involvement. The

restaurant was amazingly effective. The biggest one in New York was able

to serve 10,000 people per day.

Fast-forward 50 years to the 1970s and fast food has changed

dramatically. Its something similar to what we have today restuarants

you drive to, or even drive through, largely outside of city centers. It was

caused by a monumental shift in where people eat and live suburbia. It

meant car culture started to dominate, changing Americas landscape

forever. And as the environment changed, as the contexts changed, the

onboarding changed too.

In software, contexts change fast

If we look at onboarding for software, the same contexts apply the

products we sell, the environment, the audience, the packaging, and the

price. And in software, these contexts change fast.

With so much change, youd expect onboarding experiences to keep

pace. Thats not really the case. Traditionally software onboarding

experiences dont change much. Perhaps the biggest reason is companies

default to optimizing their onboarding even when redesigning might be a

better decision.

If we look across these two axes performance and context we can see

the different situations where it might make sense to optimize, and when
it might make sense to redesign.

When to optimize and when to redesign

The first axis covers change in context. Have your audience,

environment, etc. changed a lot over time?

The second axis covers the performance of your onboarding experience.

Is it meeting the expectations and goals youve set?

As we can see, when your onboarding is already performing well, and

youve only recently launched it, you should optimize. It means you have
strong foundations to build upon, and youll continue to get incremental

improvements in performance.

On the other hand, if a large period of time has passed, contexts have

changed, and your onboarding isnt performing well, you should think
about redesigning. You should take a step back and consider the

constraints and opportunities of onboarding in a new way in order to

come up with a new solution.

Its the other two quadrants that are less straightforward. In the top right,

it could look like your onboarding is performing well. Its tempting to

continue to optimize, and try to get incremental improvements out of
that experience.

But the large shifts in context might actually be masking new

opportunities that could unlock serious potential in your onboarding

experience. In other words, what used to be good performance might not

be all that good any more.

In the bottom left, the temptation is to try optimizing incrementally from

bad performance to good. In fact, a redesign may get you to good

performance more quickly than an incremental approach. Lets

investigate these axes using a concrete example from our experience at
Intercom.

When your audience changes, so does your

onboarding

For many years, the heart of Intercom installation has been a snippet of
JavaScript. Add the snippet to a webpage or app, and tell us some
information about the currently logged in user.

So early on, our onboarding challenge was simply, Help as many

customers as possible to correctly install this JavaScript snippet. It was

directly tied to our context appealing to tech savvy people at small

startups.

Over the following years, the JavaScript snippet remained. But by 2014,

we had optimized it to death. For non-technical people, you could email

your engineer for help. Or you could join a chat room so we could coach

you through it. Or you could watch a 30-second install video. We did
you through it. Or you could watch a 30-second install video. We did
everything possible to get you to install this JavaScript. In the meantime,

wed also received requests from existing customers about importing CSV

data into Intercom.

So we built a CSV importer that existing customers could use to get extra

user data into Intercom after sign up. The breakthrough came when we

realized this importer could be useful for new customers who are signing
up for Intercom.

We realized our context had changed significantly. Wed moved to a

broader audience who found it much harder to install the JavaScript. It

was no longer about how to get customers to install JavaScript. It was

about how to get users into Intercom.

Once we stopped optimizing, and started redesigning, the impact was

massive.

The three months before we launched the CSV importer, our conversion

rate from emails to signed-up apps hovered around 30%. In the three

months following, our conversion rate rose to 45%.

Even more incredibly, we hadnt actually cannibalized the standard

JavaScript installer traditional JavaScript installs grew too.

Its important to remember redesigns have a shelf life too. The contexts

that inspire a redesign will continue to shift over time. Even if your
onboarding has a solid foundation and a proven thesis, its important to

continually assess when to optimize and when to redesign your

onboarding. Its only then youll be able to capitalize on new

opportunities presented by shifts in context.
CHAPTER 5

Showing
customers the
value of free
DES TRAYNOR
The only reason you should be giving customers a free trial is because you
believe that after experiencing its value theyll decide your product is the
right one. The common approach to 30-day free trials obsesses over days
28, 29, and 30 where the customer is seemingly making their decision. In
practice if a customer has made it this far theyre almost certainly going to

convert; the real will we or wont we decisions are made much, much
earlier.

Remember, people are happy to pay for great products. Every customer
who signs up for your product and starts a trial wants to become a
customer. What you need to do during their trial is convince them your
product is the right one. The way to do that isnt automated mails one day
before the trial ends, its to ensure they experience your solution early and
often.

The way technology is sold to businesses has changed fundamentally in

the last decade. As a result, so has the role of customer support teams in
helping to close sales.

In the old world, potential customers rang a vendor to arrange a trial, a

demo at their offices would be scheduled with a sales rep, and assuming
that went well, negotiations about the price would get started. SaaS has

turned all that on its head. Potential customers want to sign up for free
trials, explore product documentation and talk to existing customers

preferably without having even talked to anyone at the vendor company.

While the self-service model has revolutionised the software industry,
its not without its challenges. Its dangerous to assume everyone can

work everything out for themselves, to assume they want to work it out
for themselves, or even that they will be able to do it themselves.

The typical SaaS way

Let me explain what I mean by looking at the typical signup flow for a

SaaS product. Sales are usually responsible for everything until the
customer starts a trial, at which point responsibility passes to customer

support.

Most of the focus is on what happens when the trial ends did they
become a paying customer, or was the trial a failure? We capture that kind
of data in profit and loss centers, and its no secret whats normally seen

as a profit and whats considered a cost.

So much for the outcome of the trial. What can be done during the trial to

try and positively influence that outcome? Because if questions arise

when someone is in the middle of a trial for a $449 per month plan, you

dont want to leave the response to chance. Who owns those questions?

Sales? Support? Success?

What happens on a trial

When a trial ends youll hear phrases like: Its too expensive, We dont

have that kind of budget, or I havent gotten around to trying it yet.

All that translates into one very simple reality they havent seen the

value of your software during the trial period. These people knew how
much you charge when they signed up, so this is not just a question of
your price even if they say its too expensive.

No, when they say it is too expensive, they are not necessarily talking

about the price.

In startups we like to think our products are getting better over time, that

they deliver more value to customers every month as we make

improvements and add features. So keeping a fixed cost over time is

ridiculous.
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 its the job of marketing to bridge the gulf
between the value customers see and the what youre 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.

A good place to start is by doing a feature audit of your product. If you

know what features are being used in your product you can build up a
picture of what happy customers typically do. Intercom helps you to do

this with a few clicks.

Armed with this data you can decide what features of your product you

should be exposing your trial customers to. What are the things most
likely to help them see the value of your product? Another benefit of a
feature audit is it shows if your product has become too bloated. Youll

know bloat when you see it features that arent being used by any
significant number of your customers. Of course, if youre in sales or

customer success you might say bloat is not your problem, but thats not
the case.

You should think of bloat as non-monetizable features, rather than just

being something thats 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. Youre
convinced everyone is going to use the new features just as much as the

original ones because lets face it no one thinks lets 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 wont resonate with your

customers they wont be used, and they will damage users overall
perception of your product. That can even lead to reduced usage of your
formerly successful features, and of course this is all happening against

this backdrop:
So what can you do during the trial period to prevent this from
happening? It might sound a little glib but the job of customer support is

to focus on what the customer needs for success. If that job is being done
properly your customers will always value what they are getting from

your product and you should see a chart like this:

What are your customers expectations?

If you are unsure what success might look like for a particular customer,

just ask them. Take Intercom for example.

When viewed this way it becomes clear different customers have

different definitions of success. Dumping them all into the same

customer success flow doesnt make any sense if you want to maximize

your chances of converting them from trial users to paying customers.

How to see failure coming

It is possible to learn how to predict, and to preempt, failed trials. Youll

need to be able to track a users activity over time. Luckily, Intercom is

pretty good for that. The graph for a regular user will be pretty flat by

definition they use your product about the same amount of time on a
pretty regular basis.

Successful free trials are pretty easy to spot the graph is going up and to
the right, while failed trials start somewhere in the middle and head

downwards in a pretty predictable fashion. Once they realize youve

billed them, theyll cancel, and thats the wrong time to try and get them

interested in your product.

In an ideal world, wed get an alert every time a customer was in the

danger zone their usage is starting to decline but there is still an

opportunity to influence them. But real life is harder than that, and its

not easy to generate graphs like the one above for every single customer.

So what can you do?

Start by looking at people, rather than abstract graphs that measure

things like pixels and pages. If 13 people start a trial of your product on a

given day they are not all going to have the same definition of success.
Four of them might want to improve support, another five might be

looking to boost conversions, while the last five might just want to send

newsletters.
For each of these definitions of success you should have a corresponding
action in your product you expect successful trialists to complete by day

three. For those interested in support its receiving queries, for those

looking to boost conversations its messaging users, and for those

interested in newsletters its creating a template.

Using rules such as hasnt messaged a user but signed up < three days
ago, you can reach out to the people getting stuck. For people trying out

your most valuable plans thats probably some form of 1:1

communication, but an automated email for common issues or customers

trying your lowest plans.
Youll manage to nudge some of these people to the first milestone but

some you wont. Thats just business. Now you need to think about, what

success looks like after seven days? For the support cohort, maybe its
forwarding support emails, having conversations is key for your second

segment, and mailing more than five users will show the newsletter

trialists are on track. This can be tough, but Intercom allows you to create
the logic and automate the messages. And the results are more than

worth the effort.

The sound of success

The first step to successful free trials is knowing what success looks

like for your customers. Once youve asked them that, you have to ensure
you have targeted support, docs, tutorials and case studies to help them
succeed. Finally you need a picture of what failure looks like, and once

you see the tell-tale signs you need to step in to prevent it.

Implementing all of this correctly isnt easy. But get it right and when it

comes to decision time, instead of hearing phrases like Its too

expensive, We dont have that kind of budget, you should be hearing

Did exactly what I need, Cheap at half the price and How did I do

this before. And thats the sound of success.

CHAPTER 6

Strategies for onboarding

new users
NATE MUNGER
When youre building your own onboarding, its helpful to familiarize
yourself with some particular design patterns: how other companies are
teaching users about the interface, how theyre demonstrating progress to
the user, etc.

However, onboarding patterns should never be treated as best practice.

Everything depends on the type of product you have. Some patterns work
fantastically well for consumer apps, but just wont make sense in a B2B
product. Thats why weve put together a walkthrough of some of the most
successful patterns to explore what patterns work and when, to get you
thinking about the right patterns for your product.

What happens right after signup makes or breaks any software product.
Some new users expect you to welcome them and show them around.
Others prefer you to get out of their way as soon as possible and let them
figure things out for themselves.

The problem is that to have a product with tens or even hundreds of

millions of active users, youre going to have to successfully onboard

customers from across this spectrum.

On top of that, users dont necessarily want to do the things you need

them to do to become successful. You need to balance the user

experience of onboarding with the friction of necessary steps such as

account creation, user education, and data gathering. Its no small

challenge.

Heres a few ways you can effectively onboard customers.

1. Social login

Social login offers users one-click sign up just create an account with
pre-existing social profiles like Facebook, Twitter, Google, or LinkedIn.

Social login combats one of the biggest issues facing users when they sign

up account fatigue. Social login provider Janrain found 92% of people

have left a website instead of resetting or recovering login information. If

your goal is any form of virality, social login is a must. Put simply, it

increases the rate at which Monthly Unique Users (MUU) are becoming
Monthly Authenticated Users (MAU) that means a higher percentage of

monthly visitors are actually signing up and logging in.

Social login also lets you access and connect to a users contacts. Instead

of asking users to manually input their contacts and build a profile from

scratch, leverage the existing networks infrastructure. With some simple

API and export features, users can get off to an easy start.

One-click social login works. But which social login options are right for
your app? Much depends on the your product. For example, Facebook is

the most popular option across consumer brands, retail, music and media

services.

For B2B applications, Google is the most popular. So make sure you

choose the social login model that best matches your customer base.
2. Contextual tutorial

All successful consumer products have created habit-forming

experiences, or so called desire engines. The more often a user
completes these experiences, the more likely they are to self-trigger.

You can add these desire engines to your onboarding so users form habits
that will keep them coming back to your application.

Take Pinterest. Their desire engine is getting users to pin items they find
interesting. It would have been easy for Pinterest to force users to click

through a step-by-step onboarding tutorial. But Pinterest doesnt place

users into the tutorial immediately. They let you explore at your own

pace and wait until the user clicks an image in their content feed. This
triggers the tutorial.

These types of contextual tutorials give users their first taste of success
and kickstart the desire engine so they keep on pinning. Its also
important to note Pinterest introduce the concept of pinning and boards.

Even when users have successfully pinned an image, theyre probably at

greater risk of not returning if they dont understand these larger

concepts.

If your application relies on a new concept without established patterns

of behavior, be sure new users dont leave until they understand it.

3. Clear path to completion

Whether its numbered steps, a task-style checklist, or a progress bar,

giving users a sense of how far they have to go to complete the

onboarding process helps reduce abandonment. If new users know how
many steps they must complete, theyre more likely to complete the

process.

Spotify, Quora, LinkedIn and Facebook all provide numbered steps to

preview and track new users progress through the entire onboarding
process.

4. Early value for the user

A simple onboarding flow might give you lots of signups, but lots of

signups doesnt always translate to lots of customers. Thats why the best
products dont 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.

Twitter is a great example of this. Whether or not a user follows other

people on Twitter is an important indicator for user retention. So Twitter

encourages you to follow at least 20 other users with a single click to

make sure you get the most out of the product.

New users are first shown a checklist of topics to choose from, with

popular accounts already selected. New users that follow people and
topics of interest are more likely to continue using Twitter, so they make
it easy right from the start.

5. Progressive profiling

One of the best ways of reducing friction in account creation is allowing

users to progressively build their profiles. You do this by requesting only

the most important and necessary information during registration. Its a

tricky balance to strike. Ask too much of new users and they may not

complete the process. Dont ask enough and users are more likely to
churn. Requiring just enough information increases the odds of retention.

Just enough information means you wont be giving users the complete
experience from your product right away. You can see this tactic in the
way LinkedIn, Facebook and Tumblr give users easy opportunities to
build their profiles over time.

LinkedIn does this by assigning user profiles a strength rating. The rating

is displayed on every user profile, with a call to action to Improve Your

Profile Strength. This gives users the chance to complete elements of the
profile they left incomplete during their initial onboarding. With each

step they complete, users are rewarded with an improved strength rating.

As well examine later though, progress should be based on what the user
wants to do, not what the business wants them to do.

6. Connect teams

The way software is being bought is changing, and the buyer for a

company often starts as an individual user. Collaborative, team-based

SaaS products like Asana, Dropbox and Slack know the sooner they can
connect these individual users to a team the more momentum they build

toward a premium upgrade.

In each of these examples, when signing up with an email domain others

have already used, new users are prompted to connect with teammates

on the same domain. Ask to join and Find your team are common
ways to encourage users from a company, who may not know their

colleagues are considering the same tool, to connect.

Slack builds its teammate invitation right into the onboarding flow prior
to letting you use the product. In this case, teammates make the tool

valuable. With a simple opt in, Slack allows new users to let their

teammates join without additional permissions if theyve created an

account using a verified company email address.

Making these connections between users and their teams can really help a

whole company get onboarded to your product.

The right way to onboard new users

In the end, the right kind of onboarding depends on your business model,

and the answers to a few important questions:

What do you need to know about your users to provide them with a
great experience?

What do they need to do to get value from your application?

What are the costs and benefits of adding friction to your onboarding
process?

How will you motivate users to complete it?

 At what point in your users lifecycle does onboarding need to be

completed?

What actions must your users take regularly to drive growth and

revenue?

Answering these questions takes time and experimentation. But these

examples give you a sense of where you should start.
CHAPTER 7

Onboarding groups, not

just individuals
BRENDAN IRVINE-BROQUE
Onboarding a company to your product is different from onboarding an
individual user it requires many people across departments to get setup
and start seeing the value your product can provide.

If you sell your product to businesses and havent designed your

onboarding to support groups of people, youre likely asking people to

complete tasks theyre not capable of or lack the permissions to do. As your
company grows and starts selling to larger companies, rethinking how your
onboarding helps groups of people work together will have a greater impact
than optimizing an existing step-by-step flow designed for individuals.

If you build software for business one of your main jobs will be to
onboard groups of people at a company. Your beautiful, linear sequence
of onboarding steps might work well for individual users, but teams
behave unpredictably.

So as larger companies start using your product, instead of just asking

How many people made it from step A to step B?, you might start

asking different questions, such as:

Why would someone in a group be unable to complete this step?

Who in their company might be able to help them?

What is blocking them from asking for help?

Weve asked ourselves these questions as Intercom has grown. Our

customers have become increasingly diverse in size, which has affected

the order in which we previously expected common actions to be done.

Early on the vast majority of our customers were small startups and our

onboarding reflected that it was designed to help one engineer install a

JavaScript snippet. But our customers are no longer small startups

working out of one room. We have to onboard companies where it may

require more than one person to code, authorize integrations and teach
teams how to use our products.

Weve learned great onboarding acknowledges that different groups of

people take very different paths to get started, and gives them multiple
paths for them to progress as a team.

Designing a predictable set of steps for

unpredictable groups

The mistake most companies make is trying to model their onboarding as

an ordered series of steps. They have a very definite idea of what step

should be completed in what order. This one linear sequence of steps

quickly breaks down for groups of people.

Not convinced? Lets say youre building an iPad app for a reception desk

that lets guests sign in and notifies employees when they arrive. In order

to be set up, a new customer might need to:

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

Completing all of these requires participation from:

Someone with access to a company credit card

Someone with administrative access to the Google Apps account

Legal counsel

Office manager(s) or receptionist(s)

At a very small company, this could be just 2-3 people. At a larger

company, it could be dozens.

Lets see what happens if you make the mistake of modeling these steps

in a linear way.

1. Sign up for an account

2. Enter a credit card to start a trial

3. Authorize Google Apps access to get employees email addresses

4. Add a legal document or NDA for visitors to sign

5. Place the iPad in a stand at the front desk

If someone without a company credit card signs up, theyll 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 lawyers 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, theres 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.

We had a similar problem at Intercom as we grew. Previously, in order to

sign up for an account, we made people add a code snippet or import data
from a CSV or third-party service. In some ways, this a good thing we
were able to show customers Intercom working on their own website or

app right away.

But it also meant we blocked anyone who couldnt add a code snippet or
import data from doing anything else. Once we changed this to allow
anyone to create an account right away, and then add a code snippet or

data import afterwards, more people were able to make more progress
through our onboarding.

How to expect unexpected paths

Since its hard to predict who will do each task, or which order tasks will
be completed in, designing onboarding means designing for a moving
target. It requires the humility to know that it will never be perfect. This
is especially true for a growing company, whose customers are
increasingly diverse and often get larger overtime.

That said, weve found three strategies that work for dealing with the
unexpected paths our customers take in the onboarding process.

1. Provide an escape hatch

While you have a new customers attention, allow them to accomplish as

much as they are capable of or have permission to do, right away.

Its 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, its almost always better to let people keep moving and
exploring. The conversion rate lost on one small step is made up by the

customers overall progress and comprehension of what your product has

to offer.
2. Unblock steps with invites

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 youre asking them to ask another person
for a favor, to take time to setup an account and learn something new.

Thats why its important to provide some context explain why

someone is receiving an invite, and what theyve 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.

3. Identify and empower an onboarding leader

Without organization and leadership, groups of people have a natural

entropy people disagree, have different priorities and get less done.
Chances are, trying out your product is the last thing on the roadmap, and

not even something everyone agrees on.

When someone tries your product, its your job to find a leader and
empower them to organize their team around getting setup with your

product.

The solution here doesnt always start with building more software or

writing code. At Intercom, identifying and empowering an onboarding

leader starts with our sales team. Sales teams traditionally try to find the
champion in a company, the person willing to fight through obstacles

to adopt a new product and close the deal.

If youre responsible for your products onboarding, you can learn a lot by

finding out what questions your sales team use to identify champions,

and also the resources they provide to help them convince others on their

team.

When it comes to onboarding, its easy to think everyone will follow the

linear paths youve wireframed. But groups of people rarely follow such

neat paths. Instead, you should assume at each step of your onboarding
that the task at hand may be someone elses job. That way, you can build

a flexible onboarding that adapts to different kinds of people, and

support larger companies too.

CHAPTER 8

How your
organizational
structure impacts
onboarding
MARK ANDREWS
As a company scales, the onboarding experience inevitably increases in
complexity, as the different teams responsible for it alter it to increase the
success of their product or feature. Inevitably, this leads to increased
complexity for the customer.

If youre not careful, you end up with a hodgepodge experience with

disjointed content and context that can confuse. When this occurs, you
have failed to achieve what the business and your customer actually
require getting the customer to an outcome they desire.

You dont have to look for long to find poor onboarding experiences. Many
of the worlds best known consumer technology brands suffer from them.
But dont worry; its possible to structure your teams so theyre aligned to
create the best experience. You can make your entire organization work for
you to create an optimal customer onboarding flow.

Earlier Des explained how focusing on the customer will reveal a lot of
low-hanging fruit in your product that will up your onboarding game.

This low hanging fruit lies not just within the product but within your
organization as well.

When was the last time you asked a teammate to run through your

products onboarding flow and critique the experience? Its unlikely to

have been anytime recently. For most of us onboarding our own product

is something we do once and quickly forget about.

But unless you keep revisiting this flow over and over again, its easy to
lose touch not just with your customers experience, but also with the

teams who create it.

Does your onboarding look like an office directory?

For example, we recently asked a number of teams at Intercom to

reacquaint themselves with the experience of setting up a product. After

all, even for those who have worked at Intercom for a while, it wasnt a

flow they were likely to remember a lot about. Viewing the onboarding
experience with fresh eyes, I noticed how the transitions between certain

parts were jarring, and in some cases, plain wrong.

For one of our products, Acquire, customers were placed in the wrong

part of Intercom once it was fully configured. When a customer installed

a single Intercom product, the onboarding UI still referred to all Intercom

products, even presenting install options that didnt apply. If I could see

these inaccuracies, its likely hundreds of customers had found them too.

What struck me was that most of these mistakes were not down to design
and engineering oversights. Instead, they exposed how different parts of

the onboarding were handed off between our marketing, growth, and

product teams. It was like reading an office directory you could literally

see the organizational structure of Intercom in our onboarding.

 Multi-team onboarding the wrong way

Your product onboarding experience might reflect your own

organizational structure too. Here are some things to look out for:

The navigation for your products marketing website reflects the

separate teams within the company.

The visual style of your marketing site isnt carried through to the
setup and onboarding experience of your product.

Customers are confused when moving from one stage of the flow to

the next because the content and context doesnt reflect where they

just came from.

There are multiple redirects between different parts of the onboarding

flow.
 Customers arrive in your product and dont know what to do.

A customer doesnt care if marketing owns the page before signup and

product owns the page after signup. They only care about one thing
using your product successfully to produce an outcome they desire.

When focus leads to silos

This is easy when youre a startup with 10 people in one room. Everyone
is working towards the same roadmap and theres little product collateral
to maintain. Push it live and get people to use it now is the mantra. But

as a startup grows, specific teams are created to deliver concentrated

value engineering, marketing, sales, product, etc. This allows teams to

focus on specific problems more thoughtfully than an ad-hoc group can.

Focus helps product teams solve more specific problems but it may not

lead to coherent experiences overall. It can also lead to silos where your
onboarding is a collection of disparate pieces that make little sense to
your customers when placed together.

Consider marketing landing pages, account creation, payment, initial

product setup and finally, initial use of the product itself. When a startup
begins to scale, focus dictates that many of these steps be owned by
separate teams. Yet successful onboarding is a direct result of how

effectively each of these teams work together not how each team is able
to optimize their own piece of the flow.

Its easy for teams to think within their own focus area, since they can
more easily deliver a great result within their own domain. Creating the

best experience relies on each of them working together to establish good

continuity throughout the entire flow, particularly at these transition
points.

Setting teams up for successful transitions

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 theres 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. Its 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, Lets 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 teams goal is to educate

the customer, and anothers 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 doesnt have that luxury team overlaps need

to be woven together. Instead of fighting these overlaps, iron them out
so theres 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.
Your customers need the most attention right up until they see the value

of your product. Successful onboarding isnt simply getting your

customers to pay; its proving the value of your product once they start
using it.

This means onboarding is one of the most important and complex

product flows you will ever create. It also falls under the remit of several

teams, increasing its complexity.

We presented three ways team alignment, goal alignment and domain

overlap, to help your organization work for you. Get it right and your

onboarding will be set up so that each team shares responsibility for

creating the best experience possible. Use your organization to master

your onboarding experience and youll not only end up with happy

customers, but with a meaningful impact on your business.

CHAPTER 9

Onboarding never stops

RUAIR GALAVAN
As your product and service offering evolves and changes over time, youll
invest money and time in new features, big product launches and expensive
release cycles. But beware: the vast majority of new features flop because
they never get used.

Fun fact: when Microsoft asked their users what they wanted added to
Office, they found 90% of the requested features were already there. They
had just done a terrible job of onboarding the right users on to the right
features at the right time.

New improvements sit unappreciated, unused, and are eventually cast

aside. You need to fight for usage, by onboarding your current customers to
your new features. But done wrong, you run the risk of annoying more
customers than you delight.

When we think about onboarding we usually dont think beyond signup.

In reality, your onboarding is just getting started. You havent turned

users into experts, and they havent yet given up all the other products

they used before yours. If you only focus your onboarding efforts on new
signups, youre leaving a massive opportunity on the table passionate,

engaged customers.
For example, lets say somebody has been using your product for six

months. Theyre totally engaged and up to speed. But then you release a
brand new feature that can make them even better. Thats an onboarding

opportunity right there. Ultimately, good onboarding retains customers

over time by continually showing them how to get the most out of your
product.

We recently experienced this when we launched our new feature, Smart

Campaigns. We knew it had the potential to improve almost all our

customers definition of success personal customer communication at

scale. This gave us a significant onboarding opportunity we could

deliver more value to our existing customers.

The challenge was that Smart Campaigns was not an easy concept to

understand. If the beta period taught us one thing, it was that a certain

amount of hand-holding was required. The easy path would have been to

ignore this and send a once off feature announcement email to all our
customers. But that meant we risked Smart Campaigns becoming a
feature only a few customers ever looked at.

Thats why we set out to carefully and consciously onboard existing users

to Smart Campaigns. Our approach was to make just enough information

available at every turn, but also stay out of the way. Heres a few ways we

did that.

Onboard in context

Its 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. Thats why the right time to promote an

improvement is not only when someone is in your product, but when

theyre in a position to use it.

For Smart Campaigns, we announced the new feature to customers when

they arrived in the messaging area of Intercom, via an in-app

announcement. That message contained a video with a high-level

overview of the feature and instructions to get started. Like all good

onboarding messaging, its closely modeled on just-in-time information

teach in the moment when specific information is actually useful.

Use educational content to onboard

When explaining new concepts, its important to give users a sense of

what success looks like. Its a familiar technique used in onboarding

giving users educational content as a blank slate. Take Trello, for

example. Users are given a welcome board with pre-made to-do cards,
with each card explaining a different interaction. They use content and

the interface to teach you how to use the product.

Not only is it a great way of providing a warm and human experience of

your product, it encourages action and tees your customers up for success
from the word go. This is a far better approach than saying, Your

campaign is empty and thats all Im going to say. You would never say
that in person to your customer, so why say it in your product?

When a customer encounters a campaign for the first time, there is an

example campaign created when they get there with best practice tips

and links to helpful guides.

Then, when a customer creates a new campaign, and sees a blank

campaign for the first time, we signpost them to a guide for creating
engaging messages. This is easily dismissed, but its helpful content in

the right place at the right time for those who need it.

Anticipate the next questions

In education, the more you hold someones hand, the less their brain will
engage. The same goes for onboarding if you keep spoonfeeding users

solutions, dont be surprised when they cant pick up a knife and fork.
Thats why its better to give information as gradual hints, so new users

can more deeply retain what theyve learned.

One of the best ways to do this is to center information around the intent

of the customer. For example, when a customer creates a new campaign,

by clicking on the create button theyve shown intent. With new users

interested, now is a good time to start sharing more advanced

information like best practice guides. This type of careful consideration
really does drive engagement.

Gradually expose features over time

Onboarding users to a new feature requires the same skill as onboarding
them to a new product. You wouldnt welcome new users to your product

by asking them to do complex tasks only a pro user would be able to do.
So dont overload users when youre onboarding them to a new feature
either.

Think about a game like Super Mario Bros. At any given point, only the

necessary parts of the game are on screen, allowing players to gradually

and naturally understand whats going on around them. As you make
progress, only the next piece of relevant information is exposed. Imagine

you saw the entire level as soon as you started playing? Front loading
your users with information will make sure they never get past the first
few hurdles.

For example, Intercom users dont need to know about our keyboard

shortcuts until theyve been in the inbox for a while and have started to
deal with a heavy load of user conversations. Its certainly not a day one
announcement. Similarly they probably dont care about our bulk data

export feature until theyre tracking a bunch of data.

The best way to tell a customer how to do this stuff is after youve
gathered evidence that theyre a good candidate to hear about it.

Converting todays signups into tomorrows

engaged users

When youre building software, remember there are hundreds of

products competing for the same job. If youre not continuously showing

your customers how to get value out of your product, youre not
encouraging product dependency. Youre leaving the door open for

someone else to come in and persuade them their product is more

valuable than yours.

Thats why you need to continuously onboard existing customers,

bringing people all the way through, and making sure they get as much
value as they can.
Conclusion

The number one mistake every business makes with onboarding is

thinking from the inside out. Instead of starting with the outcomes a
customer wants, they start with a model of a profitable customer and try

to reverse engineer what needs to happen to get them there.

Over the past five years, weve discovered the only proper way to
onboard people is to understand where they are, what capabilities they
have, where they want to get to, and then use a combination of interface,
communication, tooltips, nudges, and messages to ensure theyre never
stuck on the path to achieving their outcome. Thats what successful
onboarding looks like unifying a successful business outcome and a
successful customer one.

I hope these chapters have shown that onboarding is everyones job and
getting users set up is only one piece of the puzzle. If marketing cant
describe the outcome customers are looking for, if product cant build a

signup process people understand, if customer support cant help get to

those successful outcomes, onboarding breaks down. So many forces

feed into onboarding, so dont trick yourself into optimizing one small
sliver of your onboarding and ignoring the others.

When you think about it, it doesnt matter how good your product is,

without onboarding its meaningless. Onboarding is the bridge between

the users stage of desire for value and the value they actually get thats

what makes software successful.

If youve had similar experiences with onboarding at your company, I
would love to hear from you. Im [email protected] drop me a note.

Des Traynor, Co-Founder, Intercom

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