Solving Complex Integration: Paving the Way to Value for Your Customers

Product teams often fall into the trap of spending most of their time on the core functionality of the products they create.

But focusing on the core product can often come at the expense of thinking deeply about what the onboarding process will be (the actual process customers need to go through to start leveraging the product). Integration is critical to the success of your product

At Intercom, we are all about getting results. Without an accessible onboarding process, customers may never reach the stage where they can use the breakthrough features your team has worked so hard to create, making results difficult to achieve.

Focusing on the integration process early in the development of a new product is key to overcoming this problem. This is especially true when building for midsize and enterprise customers. Companies use purchasing committees to make the decision to use a new product. These committees are essential, even if the product is free, because each new product requires a process change.

"As companies grow, process changes impact more people and the buying committee tends to grow"

In a small startup, the "board" can be one person. But as companies grow, process changes impact more people, and the buying committee tends to grow. Larger buying committees mean more people and steps involved.

It's easy for customers to stop onboarding at any hurdle the buy committee encounters. At best, a poorly thought-out integration could mean that customers take weeks or months to start using a new product. At worst, a bad onboarding experience could prevent them from starting.

We experienced this when creating our WhatsApp integration. At the start of the beta, we realized that customers were taking a long time to launch, but it was not clear why.

"We had spent the majority of our time focusing on the day-to-day features that customers would like, but not the processes they would need to go through"

We had spent most of our time focusing on day-to-day features that customers would like, but not on the processes they would need to start using those features. We had to adjust our journey to understand (and simplify!) the onboarding process, but we lost valuable time.

We have created a simple framework to understand the onboarding process

When we moved on to creating Switch, our latest release, we knew we had to take our WhatsApp knowledge to heart right away. From the beginning of our product development, we considered two points of view:

What essential features does the product need for our customers to use on a daily basis? What does the onboarding process look like for the customer in real life, and what can we do to make it easier?

While we used to think about core features, defining the onboarding process from the start was new to us. We've developed a simple framework to understand it by outlining three things:

People: Who is on the buying committee and what is their role? The Steps: What steps should each role take - both in the product and in their organization - to get started? Questions: What questions do they have at each stage?

We worked with a small number of enthusiastic customers to define these three elements. We asked them directly who needed to be involved, what questions they needed to answer and what the next steps were.

We also observed their behavior and the obstacles they encountered along the way, asking ourselves "Where are they stuck?" ; "What's slowing them down?" "; "Where are they confused?" – and iterate on our onboarding process with each learning.

For your customers, installing your product is just one of many steps

There is a lot of change management involved in introducing a new product to a team. Outlining the people, steps, and questions can not only have a significant impact on what you build as a product team, but also strongly influence the direction of marketing and sales to streamline onboarding.

When we outlined the Switch integration process, we identified several factors that were slowing customers down and worked cross-functionally to address them.

Educate our customers on Switch use cases

We've identified support team managers as the key decision makers when it comes to getting started with Switch. T...