{"id":10732,"date":"2016-10-26T17:00:23","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T16:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=10732"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:59:15","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:59:15","slug":"how-an-organisation-structure-affects-onboarding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/how-an-organisation-structure-affects-onboarding\/","title":{"rendered":"Does your onboarding look like an office directory?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a product scales the customer onboarding experience inevitably increases in complexity.<\/p>\n

The different teams responsible for different parts of the experience will inevitably optimize for their own success. But this just leads to increased complexity for the customer.<\/p>\n

We’ve previously explained how focusing on the customer will reveal a lot of low-hanging fruit in your product<\/a> that will up your onboarding game. This low hanging fruit lies not just within the product but within your organization as well.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to look for long to find poor onboarding experiences. Many of the world\u2019s best known consumer technology brands suffer from them. But don\u2019t worry; it\u2019s possible to structure your teams so they\u2019re aligned to create the best experience. You can make your entire organization work for you to create an optimal customer onboarding flow.<\/p>\n

Your users don’t care about your org chart<\/h2>\n

For example, we recently asked a number of teams at Intercom to reacquaint themselves with the experience of setting up a product. After all, even for those who have worked at Intercom for a while, it wasn\u2019t a flow they were likely to remember a lot about. Viewing the onboarding experience with fresh eyes, I noticed how the transitions between certain parts were jarring, and in some cases, plain wrong.<\/p>\n

For one of our products, Acquire<\/a>, customers were placed in the wrong part of Intercom once it was fully configured. When a customer installed a single Intercom product, the onboarding UI still referred to all Intercom products, even presenting install options that didn\u2019t apply. If I could see these inaccuracies, it\u2019s likely hundreds of customers had found them too.<\/p>\n

What struck me was that most of these mistakes were not down to design and engineering oversights. Instead, they exposed how different parts of the onboarding were handed off between our marketing, growth, and product teams. It was like reading an office directory \u2013 you could literally see the organizational structure of Intercom in our onboarding.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Multi-team onboarding \u2013 the wrong way<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Your product onboarding experience might reflect your own organizational structure too. Here are some things to look out for:<\/p>\n