Evaluation of current onboarding
Onboarding is the series of steps or instructions that get the user familiar with the product.
The current Freshchat onboarding needed to be updated as the product was going through a massive overhaul and getting a lot of additional features. One big change was the addition of FreshBots (a Freshworks product that allows users to create chatbot solutions for the business needs) into the existing live chat software.
Additionally, the data from the current onboarding flow showed us that several customers were dropping off and were raising tickets for account setup related queries.
DESIGN PROBLEM
To design a self-service solution that ensure users are given instructions on how to efficiently start using the product - easy account set up, reduce number of customer support tickets and also give good product overview to trial customers
Onboarding flows would be visible to two main personas -
Account Admins - Paid
These are typically Customer Support heads of Mid Market Businesses or C-Level executives of SMBs. Their responsibilities include - account setup, account maintenance and monitoring team performance.
Trial Customers
This segment may include admins, agents and other customer support individuals that are browsing products to compare features. Their goal is to get a good overview of the product and it's functionalities to help with their purchase decisions.
Market Segment
The main market segments for onboarding are SMB and MM customers, larger enterprise customers work with the Freshworks Onboarding Engagement team to set up their accounts.
Evaluation of current onboarding
This project involved satisfying the requirements from multiple teams as it was the first touch point of a customer with the product
Brand & Marketing Requirement
• Set the expectation on an 'Automation first' product
• Give the user a quick overview of what the product can do
• Collect some customer information to help the marketing team with their targets as this is the only touchpoint for trial customers
Technical Requirements
Data needed to be collected for operational purposes - Site ID and few more parameters had to be collected before the users begins his journey.
UX Goals
- Ensuring users are guided through the product sequentially in a tangible order
- Introduce the new Mint design system into the onboarding journey
- Ensuring the user isn't overwhelmed with information
- Making the system flexible, ensuring the user can skip or revisit the tour at any point in their trial period.
- Creating accessible designs to a VPAT certification
With the new product direction, the aim of the onboarding was to showcase an 'Automation First' product. Keeping this goal in mind we split the onboarding into three major phases.
PHASE 1: Account Setup
Forms are generally off-putting and appear to require a lot of work. In order to reduce cognitive load, we tried to reduce the amount of information presented in each step. Keeping forms limited to only 3-4 fields per section makes users reduce the amount they needed to think about each step.
Phase 1: Account setup
PHASE 2 : Chat + Bot Setup
The main goal of users for onboarding would be setting up the chat widget on their website to start interactive with customers or setting up bot flows.
We proposed a solution to have a "goal based" onboarding - Customers typically wouldn't want to see information that isn't related to their goal. Goal based onboarding would dynamically display steps to customers based on their goal - eg : " E-commerce Customer's goal is to have a chatbot solution that handles incoming customer complaints" the steps would be revised to show customers bot solutions first.
Due to time restrictions this solution would be planned for v2 of onboarding and the current approach was to go with Chat widget setup first followed by Bot solutions.
Phase 2: Chat and Bot set up
PHASE 3 : Extended Onboarding
Since most users main aim for onboarding - setting up widget and onboarding agents- is complete by this stage, we were aware that most users would skip this part of the onboarding section. However, for those that decide to stick on we decided to showcase some of the heavily used features. Using current analytic data we identified the top used features within the product across all plans.
Phase 3: Extended Onboarding
Accessible design is a big focus for our team while designing products. As part of our design process we add accessibility guidelines to the development team so that we can make designs that can be used by all users.
One of the goals for onboarding was to get the onboarding section of the product Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) certified. This involved ensuring that we took care of :
1. Tab Navigation
2. Alt text for Screen Reader
3. Focus Order
Accessibility Guide for Developers
One of the biggest challenges working on this project was the technical constraints. Multiple rounds of iterations were involved to scope the design to the version that we currently have. This project also involved multiple stakeholders. I had to get requirements from the product team, the analytics from the analytics team, language and content from the product marketing team, provide video details to the video team and icons from the visual design team. Overall, it was a great learning - once the project is out in development I can track the success of the overall experience and post a results section.