Introducing Checklists: The fastest way to turn signups into superusers

Every SaaS business faces the same challenge: how to get new customers to realize the value their product can deliver, as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, simple, effective onboarding is a must-have within any product, and a crucial element of customer adoption and retention. But it can be surprisingly difficult to effectively communicate the steps your customers need to take.

Enter Intercom Checklists: a next-level approach to onboarding that guides your users through a specified set of tasks to deeply engage them and show value in a structured, progressive way.

Why Checklists?

Checklists have long been a popular way to show customers the ropes within your product, and guide them to that “aha” moment in a steady, clear way. We can all relate to the satisfaction of ticking something off our to-do lists, and checklists offer customers the chance to hit crucial product milestones at their own pace, with their own goals in mind.

From speaking with our customers, we knew that many of them were already using some form of checklists to onboard and engage their customers. But using custom checklists, or trying to integrate external checklist providers, meant these checklists were difficult to build and maintain, and lacked the customizability and targeting that our customers needed to meet their users’ onboarding needs. Not only that, connecting the dots to follow user progress, or learning more about how they used the product, was extremely complex.

We knew we could do better.

We built on the power of in-app messaging

At Intercom, we believe in-app messages are the most personal, contextual way to introduce your customers to new features or processes within your product. But when products – and customer needs – become bigger and more complex, how can you enhance the power of in-app messaging to effectively scale your onboarding process, and join the dots to ensure a smooth, delightful customer journey?

Checklists provide an engaging, contextual and scalable onboarding experience, enabling you to target, personalize, and customize content to suit your user’s unique needs as they progress through your product.

What’s different about Intercom Checklists?

We’ve worked to remove friction, clunkiness, and context-switching from the onboarding process, creating seamless, personalized journeys that build customer loyalty. Checklists makes things simpler for your team and your customers in the following ways:

No-code setup

Our codeless builder means that you can set up, edit, or build on Checklists in minutes without recruiting the help of engineers.

“The Checklists feature has been a great addition to how we onboard users to the Compass developer experience platform from Atlassian. The codeless builder makes it easy to set up and add content to the checklist, which provides a better onboarding for developers looking to intuitively understand the health of their services and see all of their dependencies in one place.” – Matt Boulton, Product Designer, Compass by Atlassian

Delivered in-context

Show and explain your customers’ next steps in a way that makes sense, by delivering guidance directly within the product through the Messenger. And, for a smoother brand feel, customize your checklists to look like the rest of your product.

Effective actions through effective integrations

Checklists connects with your existing Product Tours, Articles, videos, and more, so you can support a wide range of actions and learning styles – all within your product.

Personalized onboarding experience

A “one size fits all” experience often fits no-one. Checklists allows you to tailor your customers’ onboarding experience by user segments such as pricing plan, persona, lifecycle stage, and more – to ensure your customers are following the product journey that makes sense for their needs.

Automation maximizes completion rates

Keep users up-to-date with the progress they’ve made and increase their engagement in the process by automatically ticking steps off the Checklist as they complete them using user data you’re tracking in Intercom.

Measure and optimize with ease

Monitor your Checklists’ performance and spot opportunities to drive higher engagement with detailed step analysis and A/B testing. Keep track of what’s working and not working over time so that you can continue to optimize your onboarding and reach new heights of customer activation and retention.

Don’t believe us? Ask our customers

Back in October, we opened our beta, aiming to recruit around 500 customers so we could see if this product solved the real and pressing customer problem we hoped it would. In the end, more than 2,000 customers signed up, and we realized demand for a system of delivering seamless product-led onboarding was even bigger than we’d realized.

We’re excited to see how Checklists can help you take your onboarding process to the next level. If you’re already a customer and want to get started with Checklists, learn more here. Alternatively, find out more about how we think about onboarding at Intercom.