How Acquia Is Building Self-Service Onboarding with Base AI

Acquia provides the leading cloud platform for building, delivering, and optimizing digital experiences, and its customers and teams are spread around the world. Jenn Sramek, Vice President of Customer Onboarding and Adoption, leads the team building Acquia's new onboarding and adoption experience on EverAfter by Base AI. The goal was to bring consistency, efficiency and AI together into something "just different and better." Not just different, she is quick to add. "Not just different for different's sake, but better."

The Challenge

Acquia customers are keen to get moving. "A lot of our customers get services, but they want to get started before we can," Jenn said. "So they're like, we want to start tomorrow." Acquia already had the ingredients: documentation, courses and e-learning. The next step was to turn them into a guided path, connected to the product, that works the same way for lots of people in lots of countries.

We would like it to just feel like the onboarding, the material, the information, the conversation, the chat with an expert if you need to, the reaching out for customer support is all in one place.

What the team set out to do:

• Give customers a consistent experience, globally.
• Let customers take onboarding as far as they can, so they are "more setting the pace."
• See not just how happy a customer is, but "where exactly are they struggling? What precise step are they stopped at?"
• Bring a person in when it counts, then "back away again and let them continue."

The Solution

Acquia compared a shortlist of tools and chose EverAfter by Base AI. "We chose you because of the match of what we needed and what your product offers," Jenn said. The team builds the journeys, and each journey guides the customer step by step.

• In the product and outside it: "I think the in-product aspect of being able to put it in the product and also outside of the product, having that option was really big."
• Ease of use and speed: "Ease of use, speed, able to host it in whichever space."
• Built with AI Studio: The team uses AI Studio to create wizard-like, step-by-step experiences "walking people through the thinking before they actually have to do a task."
• A plan customers can take with them: Customers export a PDF plan and take it around their own organization. "It's not stuck in the product."
• Checklists started with AI: A spreadsheet the team developed gives AI the information it needs to build out the right checklist, including links to the right documentation.
• Connected to Gainsight: The dashboard and the Gainsight integration keep the customer view connected for the team.

How It Works

The experience guides customers on their own and brings people in at the moments that matter.

• The first question gets answered: "We always wanted to ask our customers this and we can never get them to answer. And we're like, oh, we just make it the first question. Of course they're going to answer. We got them fresh. They're full of energy."
• Flags replace watching the calendar: "There's a flag that goes up if they take longer than we expect to do any step." If people have not accessed the experience five days after the welcome email, "it flags somebody, whether it's a CSM or a customer support or just our own team to do something about it."
• A clear route for every question: A playbook sets out who picks up each situation, so the team is prepared before each journey launches. "We know where to send things."
• People at the pivotal moments: "I don't know anyone who wants to just only do something by themselves," Jenn said. "So we need to keep people in pivotal places."
• One to many: Sessions can reach more customers at once. "It's just a more efficient way to speak to all the customers at one time, or one to a couple, or one to many, however many join."
• Better with every journey: Each conversation feeds back into the content, the journey and the docs. "First get the human back on track, then fix the breakdown."

Finally we can use these people for what they're most useful for instead of like, we don't need a person to present the same 15 minute deck to 100 customers. Like their time is so much more useful than that.

The Results So Far

You guys tell us what you want us to do and we'll hitch it up over here and try it out. But like in a couple of days versus, you know, however long it takes product to develop, a sprint at least or whatever.

Asked how the product makes her feel, Jenn answered in one word: "Flexible." It also gives her team something new to offer Acquia's product teams. They can try a couple of options, let people go through them, see what works, and hand that learning to product. "Having them see that we can actually almost A/B test things in EverAfter and see which one is going to really work best before they commit engineering resources to it is one of the big selling points, I think."

The data travels too. When Jenn explained what the journeys can give back to the business, a colleague on the data project told her, "Just when you said it that way, I suddenly got like the aha." Decision making, planning and prioritizing can all draw on what customers share.

For the team, it opens up time. "If you're overwhelmed, this is how you can be un-overwhelmed," Jenn tells her colleagues. Acquia will measure the rollout with its net promoter score and customer surveys, including a survey as customers finish each phase.

What's Next

Acquia is rolling the experience out in stages, and learning at each one.

• Adoption for DAM: The first cohort is standalone DAM customers looking for what to do next.
• Initial implementation: "How do you go from like welcome to Acquia to we have a DAM that's functioning and we can go further with it."
• Every product: Journeys to guide customers on each product, including a journey around adopting AI tools.
• Faster each time: The team is turning what it has built into a spreadsheet for the next product. "It'll be faster, I think, the next time we do it."

For Jenn, the point of all of it is AI and people together. "That's going to be the magic if you can find that middle way where the humans can use the AI most effectively to do the things they want to do." And what does that do for her? She has an answer for that too.

So where I could get it to just help make me faster and better. Superwoman me.