B2B SaaS Self-Serve Flow

Design Leadership / Hands-on Design /
Product Strategy

Allowing our B2B customers to create an account and subscribe to our product was always “in the future.” When the future finally arrived, our team moved fast, shipped iteratively, and saw our new customer rate improve by 4x. (Yes, really!)

My role

During the first phase of this effort, I was the primary product designer.

When I handed over the reins to another designer, I led as the design manager – guiding designs through feedback and review sessions and facilitating collaboration with PMs, engineers, marketing, and product leadership.

Project Background

Product strategy via design

Since I started at Hiya, it had been clear to me that Hiya Connect – our B2B SaaS product allowing customers to display custom branding on their customers’ devices – would best serve users by letting them serve themselves. However, the product grew out of close-knit relationships between our sales reps and customers and the sales and support teams often did “the hard stuff” for users to keep them happy. In essence, we were afraid to let go and let customers be successful on their own.

Over time, I pushed the team toward building features and tools that gave customers autonomy. A few examples:

Step toward self-serve future:
Make the phone and branding management tools easier to use.

Short-term business rationale:
Increase the time that sales reps can spend selling to high-value customers by reducing the amount of hand-holding they do with existing customers.

Step toward self-serve future:
Provide clear, real-time statuses about customers’ numbers and branding and give them a help center where they can find quick solutions to their problems.

Short-term business rationale:
Reduce customer success team’s overload, diminish ticket response times, and provide better support.

Step toward self-serve future:
Create a dashboard and deeper analytics features with with clear data and insights to help customers measure success, make better decisions, and know how and when to take action.

Short-term business rationale:
Reduce customer churn by proving the value of our product and increasing success over time.

The “quiet strategy” method of moving slowly toward self-service led to our call branding product being the best in the industry (thanks in no small part to our skilled engineering and sales teams). Customers chose our service in part because it was easy to use compared to our competitors (in a survey of our customers, “ease of use” was the most common factor at a whopping 79%).

And then it happened…

Org changes led to an injection of product-focused energy at Hiya, and it was decided that Hiya Connect would finally fulfill its destiny as a self-serve product, letting sales focus on high-value enterprise customers.

The self-serve account creation would serve Hiya Connect’s Branded Call subscription-based feature and a new free product, Hiya Registration. The PMs on the Hiya Connect team were charged with delivering a fully self-serve account creation and subscription experience, from scratch, within a few months.

The Process

Hands-on Design and Delegation

This project was going to be the first major effort for a designer who had recently moved onto the Connect team from another part of the company.

Although he brought other strengths to the team, we both agreed that some aspects of his visual design skills would benefit from more practice and coaching. This self-serve project was a perfect opportunity to provide structured practice on a high-value project – giving this designer goals, hands-on practice, and meaning for his work.

The team wanted to move fast, so I kickstarted the process by working with PMs to expand on designs I had explored for a previous self-serve effort. We mapped out the user flow, including the standard account creation steps as well as the more complicated business vetting process required by our product.

Retrofitting and refining the older designs with the requirements of the new project and designing experiences for desktop and mobile, we created the basic flow that we agreed on as the foundation for “Milestone 1.”

Leadership, coaching, and Trust

I handed the project off to the other designer. With the foundational designs and our existing design library, he had all the tools he needed to iterate and solve problems for each milestone.

We scheduled twice-weekly one-on-one design feedback sessions. I continued to meet with PMs in regular 1:1s to provide higher-level input and feedback about the project, while they worked with the designer to do the day-to-day collaboration and iteration.

The PMs were supportive and enthusiastic about his contributions, the project moved along smoothly, and his higher-fidelity design work showed continual improvement.

The outcome

Checking all the boxes

The team continued to iterate, refining the flow and adding a big new piece of the puzzle with each milestone. After a few months, the team had delivered everything it committed to:

1. Self-serve account creation for the free Hiya Registration product

2. Self-serve account creation for subscription-based Branded Call product

3. Responsive signup experience for desktop and mobile web

4. Pay-as-you-go subscriptions via Stripe integration

5. In-product upsell motions from the free to paid product

6. Volume-based subscription plans

7. Easy self-serve payment and cancelation flows

Wow-worthy Metrics

When all of the milestones were in place, the business impact was dazzling:

• Hundreds of new users per month sign up for the free Hiya Registration product, creating an avenue to build relationships and offer paid products

• A 400% increase in new paid subscriptions each month, compared to our sales-led approach

• Massive ongoing growth for our North Star Metric, branded calls per month by our customers

• A re-invigorated team, excited to design, build, test, and iterate (thanks in large part to top-notch PMs guiding the ship)