User Experience Researcher & Service Designer
Workshop to improve the onboarding experience across Acquia products
Conducted an in-person workshop to align cross-functional teams on simplifying the onboarding process for three Acquia products: VWO, Optimize, and DAM. VWO is a testing tool for marketers, Optimize is an accessibility tool for website builders, and DAM is a Digital Asset Management tool.
About Acquia and Project Goals
Acquia is an open source digital platform, offering software solutions B2B primarily for website developers and marketers. We offer SAAS, IAAS, and PAAS solutions that are complex and require an implementation specialist to get set up, hence the various services roles that are either included with the solutions purchased or purchased separately.
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The purpose of improving the onboarding experience was to simplify the onboarding process, increase adoption, and reduce drop off for customers. The Customer Success Management (CSM) teams also needed to improve tracking and time to value for customers. The onboarding was inconsistent across all product and not process driven. First, we needed to align cross-functional teams on a new onboarding process. The focus of the in-person, one and a half day workshop was to develop:
- A guiding outcome per phase
- Exit criteria per phase
- Resources mapped to the exit criteria
- An impactful, effective, and fun onboarding experience for our customers!
Role and Responsibilities
I was responsible for creating the agenda and facilitating the in person workshop as a Service Designer. For alignment, a representative from each of the teams that were going to be most impacted by the process was brought together in person for one and a half days in Boston where the Acquia headquarters are located. The onboarding team included the Director of Customer Success Management, the Sr. Project Customer Success Manager, the Sr. Gainsight System Administrator, and the Director of Customer Experience Transformation who sponsored the project. We work remotely, so it was important to create an agenda that was impactful and concise to complete in one and a half days due to budget constraints on travel.
Process
For the workshop, it was important to create moments of divergent and convergent thinking to meet the goals outlined and within the time frame allotted in person. I created a detailed agenda outlining all of our activities and also left room to account for the unexpected. ​
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Activities - Warm Up
We started the workshop with introductions, reviewing the goals, the mindset, and some ground rules to set the stage for the next one and a half days.
We then completed a warm up to get the creativity flowing. I asked the team to reflect what was the best hotel check in/check out experience you ever had? What made it the great? What would have made it better?
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This activity gave everyone the opportunity to think what an excellent onboarding experience should be and created some guiding criteria as we entered the rest of the activities. We frequently went back to these if we felt stuck at any time. Some of the guiding criteria to make onboarding effective included:
- Accommodating
- Guided
- "It was like they already knew me"
First Onboarding Phase Activity
It was determined in a remote workshop I facilliated before meeting in person that there would be three onboarding phases. For each phases, the team needed time to ideate on what the guiding outcome should be of the phases from the customer's perspective. We played a game of mad libs to fill out the following sentenece:
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I am ________ in the plan set forth by Acquia to achieve our goals across _______, _______,
_______.
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The second activity was to ideate then vote on exit critieria that could help the team determine when a customer has successfully finished and to develop measurable outcomes for success. We played crazy eights to generate some ideas, then spent time dot voting on the criteria we wanted to use.
Mapping Resource and Who, What, and When
We spent time reviewing the resources available for onboarding and mapped which ones belong in the prepare phase. We outlined what roles will oversee what portion of the prepare phase and approximately when they would take the actions necessary to support the customer.
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This part of the workshop helped create actions items for each of the leaders to take back to their teams to gain buy in, as well as a structure to create in the tool Gainsight where CSMs could track their work and at any time we could see who was working with the customer, in what phases, and the actions they woud be taking that would require little administrative work.
Connect and Hypercase Phase Activities
We repeated the activities for the next two phases of the customer onboarding journey. This portion of the workshop required less time since the activites were understood and we moved speadily along.
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The next day, we spent time reviewing what we had accomplished for each of the phases and made tweaks to language and ensuring it was written from the customer point of view to end the workshop.
Outcomes
The workshop created the framework for three simple onboarding phases that could be measured for the Acquia products VWO, Optimize, and DAM.
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To gain additional traction and buy in from the team involved, I sent out a survey to choose the final names for each of the phases that woud resonate with customers and internal teams better. The final names decided for the phases was Prepare, Governance, and Success Planning.
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Some additional unanticipated outcomes of this workshop was that several CSMs teams were significanlty reduced shortly after. This new onboarding process allowed less hands on time for CSMs and more time spent in the build and test phase with Technical Account Managers. Aspects of the process became automated to account of some of the customer hand holding the lack of enough CSMs were able to provide.
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What I Learned and Would Do Differently
I have facilitated many workshops and learn something new each time.
For this workshop, I would have preferred a longer timeframe of two and a half days instead of one and a half, but budget constraints limited us. While I encouraged deep discussions on onboarding, I had to use ELMO and a parking lot to keep us on track. The team had valuable insights to share, and more time for in-person interaction and team building would have strengthened trust and collaboration. Despite the time limits, these tools ensured focus while allowing everyone to feel heard.
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