Samdock
The One Where We Personalized Onboarding
Introduction
First, we wanted to improve the sign-up experience, providing the sales and marketing team with insights to help with things like segmentation. Second, we wanted self-service onboarding so users could discover the tool in a way that allows them to see the value of the tool even if they don’t speak to Sales or Customer Success.
Goal
How might we improve the sign-up and onboarding experience in a way that is personalized so users can quickly see the value of the product even on their own?
Company
Samdock is an easy-to-use CRM tool made for busy salespeople that need a way to manage their deals, tasks, and contacts.
Role
End-to-End Product Design
Illustration
Motion Design
Illustration
Motion Design
Team
Head of Product
Front & Back-end Engineers
Head of Customer Success
Head of Marketing
Front & Back-end Engineers
Head of Customer Success
Head of Marketing
This was a cross-functional project, so I needed to gather requirements from each team.
This project touched essentially every team. In order to do their job well, they all had certain insight requirements. For example:
Sales & Customer Success
I need to know what type of user I am speaking to and where to best contact them. Are they experienced with CRMs? Are they a “One-man-show” or are they a team? Why are they looking for a CRM?
Product
I need to know their intention, experience, and industry so I can personalize their Samdock experience in a way that provides the most value.
Marketing
I need to know their name and email so I can send them relevant information throughout their time with us. The more I know about them, the more I can customize the type of content I send them.
What did we do with this information?
This translated into the questions that we would ask the user in the sign-up flow, which fell into 3 buckets:
Step 1
About You
Step 2
Your Goals
Step 3
How You Work
First, it was important to get a pulse on what our current customer journey looked like.
We hadn’t previously done this, so it was important to look into questions like:
The answers to these questions helped me get to know who our customers were, what their pain points are, and why they come to us. We condensed our users needs down into 3 categories:
Category # 1
Improve the structure and efficiency of my sales process
Category # 2
Manage my contacts and relevant data in one system
Category # 3
Better organization and collaboration with my team
Now I wanted to look into onboarding experiences on competitors & adjacent tools.
It helped that I worked in the CRM space so I knew what some of the competitors looked like. I looked at tools like:
Here is a sample of some of the take-aways I extracted:
Flexibility
We didn’t want to force the user to complete the onboarding, but we needed to make it easy-to-find, but not hard to dismiss.
Keep it Simple
We didn’t want to overwhelm users with too many steps. So we condensed account creation questions to the minimum.
Be transparent
We wanted to have a progress-tracker to show the user exactly how many steps there are in the account creation.
Show the app ASAP
A lot of the better sign-up experiences at least give a peek of the dashboard.
With all this information on hand, it was time to think about the user flow.
I wanted to illustrate what the ideal user journey would look like from the moment they enter the website up until they completed their onboarding.
Next, it was time to start thinking Hi-Fidelity.
In general, we wanted to move towards a more playful and engaging visual style, but not straying too far from the design system.
Subtle animation in the sign-up page
From early on, there was a desire to make this page feel more “fun” to push our brand in that direction.
Sprinkling in moments of delight
We really wanted to make an otherwise boring process into something engaging, but not overly distracting.
Injecting humor where it made sense
I made a mascot out of one of the cat illustrations created by the agency that designed the initial branding. We named him Sam, and made him into a playful little companion.
Check out the full experience here
How did we measure success?
Some questions we asked in order to understand the impact of this project include:
Discovery
What percentage of users are completing the onboarding steps? How many self-onboarded users still email us about basic functionality?
Engagement
Is there an increase in engagement with core features? Are any core features still not being used?
Conversion
Is there an increase in conversion after the trial period? Was there a difference between users who self-onboarded and those who were onboarded by CS?