Samdock

Samdock is a user-friendly CRM system that helps small and medium-sized businesses streamline their sales and marketing efforts by managing contacts, leads, and sales pipelines.

My Role

I was the lead designer on this project, and led design end-to-end from research to hand-off.

Stakeholders

CEO
Head of Product
Head of Marketing
Head of Customer Success
Front-End Engineers
Back-End Engineers

The Problem

Trial users were not converting

Samdock users that had to self-onboard were not finding the value of Samdock during their trial period. Because of our small team, our Customer Success team had limited availability to demo and onboard all users manually.

We had a very rudimentary onboarding process which was a simple walkthrough video that appeared when you entered the tool for the first time. To improve conversion and help users find their AHA! moment faster without the CS team, we needed to rethink the existing onboarding experience.

The Challenge

We needed data & insights

We knew that CS-onboarded users converted better, but we needed to understand how the CS team onboarded users so we can emulate this in a self-service format.
We did not have the time or resources to speak directly with users, so I needed to gather insights from other sources.
We knew we had users with different needs, which meant that the value they got from Samdock relied on different features. However, we didn’t have the existing framework to collect data in order to customize the onboarding experience.

What is the current journey like?

Customer Experience is a shared responsibility. Each team from Marketing to Support own a piece of this puzzle. Onboarding is a crucial series of touchpoints, and we needed to make sure that all stakeholders shared their expertise in this process. What did I ask them and why?

Customer Success

Why Customer Success is important in this process

They are the first contact with all our customers. Nobody knows them like Sales & CS does.

What information I needed from them

What is your cadence for following up with users?
What are our users looking for? What are their pains & challenges? How do we solve those for them?

What info do they need from users to properly onboard?

What type of user am I speaking to?
Where do I 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?

Marketing

Why Marketing is important in this process

After our Sales & CS team, Marketing does regular follow-ups with our users. They segment them into the appropriate buckets to make sure the content we send them is relevant to them.

What information I needed from them

What do the touchpoints we have with them look like?
How often are we contacting them?
How do you segment?

What info do they need from users to properly onboard?

Name
Email
Industry
Experience level with CRMs
Basically, the more I know about them, the more I can customize the content that we send

Product

Why Product is important in this process

We handle the product itself and are in charge of the onboarding process within the application itself.

What information I needed from them

Who are our users?
What core features are crucial to mention in the onboarding?

What info do they need from users to properly onboard?

Why are they looking for a CRM?
Are they experienced with CRMs?
Are they a “One-man-show” or are they a team?

Mapped out, this was what the current experience looked like:

What we extracted from this:

Human touch

A lot of users didn’t want to schedule a demo. For those that didn’t, we had not implemented a good solution for onboarding

Limited guidance

We only had a 5-min video to onboard users, but without in-feature context it wasn’t always very helpful

Too much, too soon

We had a lot of helpful features, but for less tech-savvy users, it could be quite overwhelming to get the hang of

What did we extract from auditing the status quo?

A portrait of our users

First and foremost, with insights from all teams, we were able to paint a clearer picture of our users and what they are trying to solve. This was helpful because it informs us why users come to Samdock, and was the first step to understanding what features drive the most value to each user type. Here’s a summary:

Process efficiency

I want to improve the structure and efficiency of my sales process

Contact & data management

I want to manage my contacts and relevant data in one place

Organization & collaboration

I want better organization and collaboration with my team

A list of important questions

Now that we know what value users are after, we brainstormed what questions we should ask in order to appropriately cater to their exact needs. However:

We cannot overwhelm users with too many questions
We needed to ask the right questions to customize the onboarding

The final contenders

Here’s what we landed on in terms of questions:

Email address

Password

Name

Phone

Company

What are your goals?

Have you used a CRM before?

What industry do you work in?

What is your team size?

Who do you want to invite to collaborate?

Why these questions?

These would help us figure out the following customizations:

The type of features we show
The order in which we present them
Whether team-related features were relevant
Whether they required a dedicated CS representative

Getting inspiration from other onboardings

We understood what we were not doing well in onboarding, but how are others doing it? I looked at a few different tools to see how they handled their onboarding flows. This included some CRMs and a few adjacent tools such as:

Here’s what I learned after going through their onboarding flows:

Transparency

Give users a peek of the tool as quickly as possible to keep interest high

Widgets

Widgets are common for onboarding, making the experience not-so-intrusive

Flexibility

Keep it flexible, so users can explore on their own if they want

Walking in the user’s shoes

Now it was time to illustrate what the user flow would look like with the proposed changes. There were a few things that all stakeholders needed to keep in mind during this process:

The fact that we had users coming from different sources (i.e. Lifetime deal users vs. Organic users)

The fact that LTD users had limitations on certain features

LTD users had limitations on certain features

Inviting users is an optional step only for those that put that they have 2+ users in their team

Experimenting with ideas

Our foundation with the flow was already established. Now we needed to figure out what was needed from a design perspective:

Account creation

We ask the user for their email and password to set up their account

Sign-up flow

We ask users a series of short questions to understand who they are

Onboarding widget

We take the information they provided and customize their onboarding

The solutions

Throughout every step, we gathered feedback from Marketing, Customer Success, Developers, and Product. This made sure that the solutions we designed were feasible and practical. But, I’m a firm believer that practicality is 90% of the solution, and the other 10% should be delight.

We decided to inject as much personality as we could into this experience. Here’s what the experience looks like.