Overview

Before joining the adoption team, each feature team was creating their own onboarding patterns which created a disjointed adoption experience across our product.

Not only was I tasked with creating adoption expreriences for our core features, but also creating a framework that could be extended to other products outside the Core Support product.

Current adoption experiences left users to their own devices, we needed to ensure there was constant support for new and tenured customers alike.

▫ This made the overall adoption experience feel disjointed and inconsistent, lack of one centralized place (in‑product tips, docs, training, launch guides, community etc.)

▫ No logic or system in place to govern when these ingresses or tooltips were shown. Collisions are frequent.

▫ Users had to jump between these experiences and stitch information together on their own.

▫ This led to long time‑to‑value, confusion, and “too many manual processes” for admins and teams.

▫ Each team creating their own adoption experiences means longer time to value for the product teams. 

▫ Users have a hard time figuring out where to start setup.

▫ Often existing onboarding experiences just drive users to complicated admin setting pages.

▫ Setups aren't specific for what a particular customer might want to utilize Zendesk for.



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▫ Existing flows focused on first‑time setup only.

▫ There was little structured support for ongoing adoption by new and tenured customers.

▫ Long‑term adoption of advanced features depended on “hero” admins instead of a unified, repeatable framework that could extend beyond Core Support to other products.

Conducted multiple rounds of user interviews, both moderated and unmoderated to understand customer pain points, desired workflows, reasons for utilizing 3rd party apps, and feature prioritization.

First we should aim to alleviate the top painpoints for our users then to start building the capabilities the 3rd party apps provide for our customers.  This work will give us the foundation to truly improve upon their and competitors capabilities looking ahead.

I went ahead and created an onboarding modal component along side our design systems team that could be used as a way to quickly set up complex features. These acted as an abbreviated or templatized set ups for users to get introduced to critical capabilites. The goal was to introduce these contextually so they could be discovered as a user explores and uses Zendesk.

A common complaint was it was difficult to track adoption or ifa user is taking full advantage of their plan. Launchpad created a centralized place to see all set ups available to a user. We also created an "Next best action" extension so this could be accessed from anywhere in the product. These tasks and categories were only focused on initial setup at launch.

Launchpad

One centralized place for all set up tasks available to a user. Organized into tasks and categorizes users can track adoption across key features included in their plan

Next best action

A flyout present available in the navigation to give users an ever present way to set up the Next Best Task available to them at any given time, reducing tooltip collisions.

With adoption and onboarding taken care of, the last piece to add was ongoing support for users to continue leveling up inthe Zendesk expereince as they matured.

In order to create a personalized and relevent experience for each instance, we partnered with our AI team on using our internal AI to be the brain behind recommneded tasks and catgories

Beyond Launchpad, Zendesk Copilot can be integrated into every step of the Try to Buy experience in Zendesk. Ensuring only personalized and relevant information are presented with users throughout their journey.

Initial releases recieve promising feedback, but there's still work to be done in terms of showing value and personalization.