We’ve asked ourselves these questions as Intercom has grown. Our customers have become increasingly diverse in size, which has affected the order in which we previously expected common actions to be done. Early on the vast majority of our customers were small startups and our onboarding reflected that – it was designed to help one engineer install a JavaScript snippet. But our customers are no longer small startups working out of one room. We have to onboard companies where it may require more than one person to code, authorize integrations and teach teams how to use our products. We’ve learned great onboarding acknowledges that different groups of people take very different paths to get started, and gives themmultiple paths for them to progress as a team.
Designing a predictable set of steps for unpredictable groups
The mistake most companies make is trying to model their onboarding as an ordered series of steps. They have a very definite idea of what step should be completed in what order. This one linear sequence of steps quickly breaks down for groups of people. Not convinced? Let’s say you’re building an iPad app for a reception desk that lets guests sign in and notifies employees when they arrive. In order to be set up, a new customer might need to:
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