Re-designing customer onboarding at SiteMinder

SiteMinder is a SaaS platform that helps hoteliers manage bookings, maximise revenue and optimise hotel operations.

I designed a self-service onboarding experience and scaled the experience across other products and the business. The outcome is a better and more efficient onboarding experience for customers and support staff.

For hiring managers: This is an excerpt of the full case study, which I can share more at interviews.

THE CHALLENGE

Shifting from handholding to self-service

At the time of this project, onboarding was a very time-consuming and complex process.

Customers don’t have transparency on what to do or expect. This is especially challenging for first-time hoteliers or those who are not familiar with hotel tech platforms like SiteMinder. As a result, customers often rely on support teams heavily, which incurs high operating costs for the business.

Our hypothesis is that with the right guidance, customers can self-serve and onboard more easily.

MY ROLE

Product Designer

My role as product designer is to service design a seamless customer onboarding experience.

Working with my product manager, I led the end-to-end design efforts and shaped the product vision based on customer research insights and business goals.

CUSTOMER RESEARCH

Discovery research on current pain points

I interviewed a dozen customers and internal support staff to understand where the bottlenecks of onboarding are.

Current state onboarding flow

The onboarding process currently takes anywhere from one week to three months. This is mostly due to how tedious it is to set up a property on SiteMinder - what we see on the front end of booking sites like Expedia may look simple, but the backend is in fact quite complex.

After setup, "Go-live" is a key milestone where hotels are successfully set up and ready to sell their rooms online.

🤯 Tedious and overwhelming

For new hoteliers, they need to learn new industry jargon and ways of operating. What is an OTA (online travel agent)? What does a channel (website customers sell their rooms on) mean? How should hoteliers price their rooms?

For experienced hoteliers, they spend lots of time figuring out how SiteMinder fits in their ecosystem of hotel tech stacks. For example, how does their property data communicate with SiteMinder?

🤷🏼‍♀️ Don't know what to expect

Customers feel that there’s a lack of transparency on how long the process takes, what they need to do and what results to expect.

Currently, they can only rely on phone calls and emails with support staff to guide them through.

😰 The Fear factor

Customers are afraid of doing the wrong thing. This fear is rooted in the lack of confidence and/or knowledge in the hotel industry, especially for first-time hoteliers.

FUTURE STATE USER FLOW

Service designing customer-staff interactions

I facilitated a few workshops with support staff across APAC, EMEA and AMERs to map out and ideate the future state of self-service onboarding and how that would impact business operations.

Future state blueprint (left) and user flow excerpt (right)

After several co-design sessions, the team aligned on the vision for our new onboarding experience:

A seamless and intuitive onboarding experience that will leave hoteliers confident and help unlock their business’ potential

DESIGNING THE NEW ONBOARDING

Guided self-service onboarding

We introduced several new features to guide customers through the self-service onboarding, one of which is a dynamic checklist depending on their subscription mix.

✅ Smart guide feature

I explored different patterns to give customers more transparency on the process and contextual tips to unpack some of the complexities.

Pattern 1 (top) integrates with an external tool Intercom vs Pattern 2 (bottom), a split screen design that optimizes for contextual navigation

Some of the key considerations include how customers land on the smart guideline, its interactions upon completion and where they can get help or escalate to a human if needed (scoped as an entirely separate project to create a better learning experience).

Both patterns pose technical challenges - with pattern 1 relying too heavily on external tools and pattern 2 being hard to scale, especially responsively.

Another place to host this feature is the default landing page after every login - the Dashboard. Essentially, this could become a "springboard" that redirects customers to the respective page to setup their property. This meant that we won't have to create new landing pages as the earlier explorations would have required us to.

Final design pattern hosted on the customer's Dashboard

For the post-MVP future state, I also explored an internal view for support staff to allow support staff to track customer onboarding progress and advise ‘next best recommendations’ to improve customer’s property health.

Staff view of the smart guide

REFLECTIONS

Onboarding goes beyond property setup

In most people's minds, onboarding is simply the activation phase where customers create a profile and in SiteMinder's case, setup their property.

But to design a cohesive experience, onboarding needs to be designed holistically from the moment customers discover your product, to adoption, and even to offboarding.

Another big learning was how to harness the power of co-designing with support staff. This was particuarly crucial during COVID as we paused all customer research. We wanted to respect hoteliers worldwide who were facing the many challenges and nearly 0 occupancy during the pandemic.

These are only few of several learnings here, but you can see my full spiel at one of This is HCD's virtual meetup! Recording below: