Setting Up Account Setup For Success

In 2022, SumoQuote began formalizing a Customer Success practice. This process revealed many issues but in particular, our Accout Setup flow was identified as a confusing series of events that did little to demonstrate any real value to potential users. Using product-led philosophies, we refactored the experience in service of a mobile-friendly approach that would serve to increase adoption and organic trial conversions.

Project Summary

SumoQuote is a Saas sales enablement (quoting) tool for roofing contractors. In summer 2023 we modernized our Account Setup as a step towards product-led onboarding.

Roles: Product Design Lead (Individual Contributor) Team Size: 6+ (Design, QA, development) Timeline: 6 - 8 weeks

We were always challenged to connect with our users during their busy season (May - October) so we enlisted our Customer Success & Support colleagues to act as a proxy for our customers. We included these critical stakeholders in auditing our existing account setup flow:

  • We highlighted unnecessary steps, steps that were required but confusing, and steps that drove business processes

Auditing the Existing Flow

This audit exposed an additional challenge: users who completed the setup flow were simply dropped into the app with little to no direction as to what to do next.

“New users have reporting being confused by the “Your company” and “Your work” page, as they think these are buttons. They don’t see “Get started” as the call to action and get frustrated. On the next screen, the logo upload often gives a white colour as one of the suggested colours. This is typically quite problematic, as their title pages/some text in SumoQuote “vanish” by being white. We shouldn’t allow a white colour selection. When they’re selecting “their work”, the Call to action is also hidden/difficult to find for some users. We’ve found people stuck at this step. They have to scroll down a bit to find the button, and this isn’t always intuitive for them.”
— SumoQuote CS Team Member

Stakeholder Alignment Kickoff

The term “Onboarding” means many different things to many different people. For some account setup = onboarding, while others believe onboarding is exclusive to interface-related affordances such as in-app walk-throughs.

  • Using Ramli John’s ‘Product Led Onboarding’ framework, I led a kickoff meeting with senior leadership (CEO, Director of CS, Director of Marketing):

    • to create alignment around terminology

    • to set expectations for an iterative approach

  • We used this time to brainstorm moments of value perception (MVP), moments of value realization (MVR) and moments of value adoption (MVA); laying foundation for an onboarding approach that could be expanded

Surveying SumoQuote’s Customers for Insights

I deployed an in-app survey to learn:

  • How well did you understand SumoQuote the first time you used it?

  • What types of things might have helped you understand SumoQuote better?

    • ‘In-app tutorials’ was the highest-ranked answer, a key learning that would inform the second half of our approach

  • Was there anything that did help you understand how to get the most value from SumoQuote?

  • Did gaining familiarity with any particular feature increase your confidence?

Refining The Approach

Our discovery and research activities informed a two-part solution centered around Trial users and presented to stakeholders.

Part 1
We would refactor the Account Setup flow based on the feedback we had from our first workshop and to:

  • optimize the experience for mobile to improve conversions from our well-performing social campaigns

  • demonstrate user value by aligning each step to the problem that it solves in the hopes of increasing organic conversions

Part 2
Using a no-code growth platform (UserPilot) we would:

  • implement an in-app checklist to guide users through basic actions that to create a foundation for success/adoption (these actions were directly informed by the last question of our survey)

Designing a Solution

Our updated experience only reduced the number of steps by 1 but we succeeded in various other ways:

  • A more personalized solution

  • Decreased interaction costs with little to no data entry

  • Copy that aligned to value propositions and the benefit each step provides

Designs were reviewed by Support and Customer Success team members to approximate our user’s perspective

Increasing Interaction Cost to Decrease Pain

Our initial workshop revealed a downstream impact of a step where users are asked to select from a list of preferred brands. While this step allowed us to populate a user’s account with valuable prebuilt content, we heard:

  • users would make indiscriminate selections resulting in bloated accounts that our teams would have to clean up manually when users complained

Our refactored version:

  • provides context for this step

  • increases the interaction cost marginally by reducing the number of options displayed in the viewport, requiring users to browse the list by swiping in an attempt to slow down their decision-making

Resolving a Mobile-First Challenge With Delight

A key moment of value perception identified by our Customer Success and Sales Teams is the moment when customers upload their logo and see a visualization of their future quotes featuring their company’s branding:

  • our assumption was that anyone completing this setup on their phone is unlikely to have a copy of their logo sitting on their phone

    • we added a website field in the initial ‘Company Information’ step to present a secondary option for users; by scraping that URL for images we were able to provide a simple path to get them to that moment

SumoQuote 101

For our in-app, we leveraged our UserPilot implementation to:

  • Prompt users to complete foundational (activities) while explaining their value

    • Add your branding (uploading a logo)

    • Create a project

    • Create your first quote

    • Edit your quote

    • Unlock your sales potential (adding upgrades)

  • Each checklist item launches a guide to walk them through the task and is checked off once completed

Note: this step was not deployed due to shifting priorities of acquisition

Takeaways

  • Onboarding is a massive and ongoing undertaking but ‘beginning at the beginning’ allowed us to get started without being overwhelmed.

  • Product and marketing are not separate;

    • this work required me to think more about how alignment between my Product Design and Marketing can reinforce value-based messaging

  • An improved experience can still deliver value even if it’s not optimal

    • there were so many aspects of this project that I wanted to completely overhaul but beneath our account setup flow was a tangled web of business processes that would required an bloated scope and timeline to address