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Appreciation post: the ops guy at my last company who said to keep the dumbest possible onboarding flow, and he was dead on
Two years ago I was pushing hard to rebuild our customer onboarding as a multi-step guided wizard. Fancy checklists, progress bars, the whole thing. Our ops lead Dave looked at my mockups and said to just ship one welcome email with a calendar link in it.
I thought he was killing the project out of laziness. He wasn't. He said every extra screen was a place for a new tenant to get stuck before they ever paid us, and stuck tenants just open tickets or go quiet.
We shipped the dumb version. One email, one link, one human on the other end. Activation rate went up 18% over the quarter. Turned out people didn't want a wizard, they wanted a person to answer in under a day. We spent the savings on a second CS hire in Cleveland.
Now I fight the urge to add steps every time someone asks for a "better flow." Curious if anyone else has had adding LESS to an onboarding actually stick, or if that was just us being small enough that it worked.
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gavin4694d ago
Learned the same thing with a rental car counter once, where the guy with the clipboard waving people to whichever car was closest beat the fancy kiosk every single time. People just want someone to point at the next step, not a maze with a progress bar. Half the time the "better flow" is really just a way to avoid hiring a person.
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