FirstRain

Personalized onboarding redesigned to scale

Enabled users to personalize new and existing accounts and condense configuration time from weeks and days to minutes.

context
FirstRain is a business analytics SaaS platform for sales representatives; it feeds the right business-critical information at the right time for sales representative teams to have smarter and informed conversations with their customers. This information plays a vital role in closing the deals faster, maintaining the high retention of renewals with the existing customers, and growing revenue faster.

FirstRain Admin/user configuration setup is the backbone of the FirstRain Platform. The admins or users can set up roles, accounts, companies, and interests data in different channels using the admin or user configuration setup. Once the user-specific channels with various data sources are set from the admin or user side, FirstRain uses AI, human intelligence, and advanced algorithms to give users their account relevant insights. This information helps them close the deals faster and retain the existing customers for a long time.
role
Design lead — discovery, design, testing
team
1 User researcher, 1 Product Manager, 15+ Engineers
duration
3 Months
status
Launched on Jan 2014
Old onboarding
New onboarding
the problem
FirstRain onboarding and account creation process was gated - requiring a user to sign up for an account via FirstRain CSS or Sales Engineers, and payment is paid fully before gaining access to the app. All the information from the user is collected by FR sales engineers and mapped manually into the FirstRain system. There is no free version to try before they get it. Due to time constraints and the obstacle of personalizing information based on their needs, usage data and analytics began to clearly show a significant drop-off (35%) in user engagement after accessing the platform. This resulted in a loss of user growth at a critical point in the company's growth cycle.

67%

The average user had to configure 40 different settings across ten pages—despite many of the settings being identical across these steps; there is no contextual help.

46%

Onboarding consisted of many distinct stages that affected the entire company or an individual user.

71%

After setup, many users still did not understand the value of Outreach and how to use it.
the solution
As new onboarding is a self-serve account creation and configuration tool, we observed that using the new onboarding experience, the average account, and configuration creation time for a single user was reduced from 2–3 days to 20 minutes. Not only that, but new users became weekly active users. A monumental stride for the company as over a 100 users and teams were on boarded at once. We could capitalize on the business's advantages: velocity, scalability, and customer experience.
outcome

2x

New user setup time‍
‍decreased by 2X

40%

Click rate on invite email
increased by 40%

4x

Weekly active recurrent
users in 3 months

300%

New users become weekly
active users
Existing flow audit

Early Insights

To understand the problems faced by our new and existing users, I teamed up with our user researcher to interview internal sales users, teams responsible for user onboarding, and customer support. I also attended onboarding sessions, talking with our customers to understand the current pain points with the existing workflow. Additionally, we started looking into mixpanel analytics on user retention and engagement of onboarding and account creation flow, and overall web app.
Solution
Introducing Onboarding / New and Existing Account Configuration
The redesigned FirstRain user onboarding and account creation process was a holistic experience. It seamlessly integrated the background of a FirstRain core app user experience. It also showcases to the user the tangible value upfront.
We  were successful in designing a solution that will address these three things:
         
             - Show the process as a whole to provide a user with  context.
             - Clearly show the steps that indicate the actual section where steps are being taken.
             - Provide user feedback on task status/completion.         
Paving the way for role, accounts and interests personalization - Progress bar
Users can select the role of the company they are working at. A couple of questions we asked in our questionnaire for further understanding were, "What are the accounts they are currently managing?" Addressing these areas of interest through our personalized questionnaire presented new user onboarding to determine the features, workflows, and settings they would be doing during the personalization process.

FirstRain new user onboarding and account creation process was a holistic experience. It seamlessly integrated the background of a FirstRain core app user's experience. It also showcased the user's tangible value upfront.
Accounts and interests customization
Integrated all the scattered information into a self-explorable and customizable knowledge framework.
Personalization and activity insights
Users quickly get a glimpse of how the insights are being generated based on the personalized information they have provided in the last couple of steps. In this step, FirstRain intelligent framework used AI to gather additional insights about the personalized information. Data were automatically extracted and organized, ready to preview in the dashboard.
Customer Testimonial
“Every day we’re giving back a month of selling time to our sales organization. You can’t beat those numbers. They ultimately lead to sales success: more deals, better deals, more profitable deals, deals that are more strategic.”
Greg Mihran
Senior Director,  Global Sales Enablement, Flex
PRESS & AWARD

FirstRain Personal Business Analytics® for Sales 2.0 wins a Silver@TheStevieAwards

‍https://onlineprnews.com/news/640059-1447177435-firstrain-platform-wins-marketing-excellence-award.html/

@TheStevieAwards
Outcome

2x

New user setup time‍
‍decreased by 2X

40%

Click rate on invite email
increased by 40%

4x

Weekly active recurrent
users in 3 months

300%

New users become weekly
active users
reflections
As new onboarding is a self-serve account creation and configuration tool, we observed that using the new onboarding experience, the average account, and configuration creation time for a single user was reduced from 2–3 days to 20 minutes.We could capitalize on the business's advantages: velocity, scalability, and customer experience. Not only that, but new users became weekly active users.

A monumental stride for the company as over 100 users and teams were on boarded at once.
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