Self-service applications have become a major consumer trend in the past few years. In fact, 80% of our BI(Business intelligence platform) customers preferred self-service over interacting with a human representative to set up/change their account information or solve an issue.

With self-service features, users can accomplish simple tasks without having to wait for assistance. The company can allocate sales and customer care resources more efficiently to focus on addressing more complex customer service issues.

Currently, a team of onboarding specialists helped new property users onboard the system. However, BI platfrom’s expansion to big hotel chains that have thousands of properties in their portfolio, one-on-one onboarding was not practical any more.

The task here is to get new property users onboard to the system quickly, accurately without interacting with a representative. BI platform needs an onboarding process that could enable widespread adoption of the product.

To understand what it takes to onboard a new property and how to translate that to a self-service flow. I teamed up with product managers of the platform to interview specialists that are responsible for property onboarding and attend onboarding sessions from beginning to end. There are the major challenges we are facing ahead:

2. Delay on dashboard generating

The first time a user signed into the product, they were met with an empty dashboard and no indication of what to do next.

3. Property and individual user onboarding

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

4. Overwhelming setup process

The average user had to configure 40 settings across six pages—despite many of the settings being identical across an organization (e.g. email provider).