Keeping in mind our goal to make the platform more self-servable, we set out to create an installation flow that didn’t require the help of an onboarding manager or website administrator to get through. Some questions we asked ourselves were:

• What CMSs are our users using the most? (i.e. Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, etc.)
• Do users manage their website on their own or do they have a website administrator that completes the installation?
• How might we tailor the experience to better suit the CMS they are using to increase completion rate?
• What are the existing drop off points?
• Can we better integrate the different Podium tools that need a CMS connection into one installation flow, rather than needing multiple connections?

We started by running an audit to generate accurate documentation for the most up-to-date instructions for installing the Podium script for every CMS that we supported. We then updated our out-dated instructions and eliminated unnecessary or redundant steps. While design worked to build a new, self-servable structure for the installation flow, dev worked to move every org over to a new architecture that supported the use of one-script-for-every-tool rather than one-script-per-tool.

We learned that over 50% of our users leveraged Wordpress as their primary website builder which allowed us to circumnavigate resourcing shortages and focus on a tiered approach to release. Additionally, we discovered that the largest drop-off point was a step requiring users to enter their URL. We worked with the Growth and Onboarding teams to collect the user’s URL during onboarding and hand it off “down-stream,” which greatly reduced the drop off we were seeing.

The experience that we shipped greatly reduced the steps required for connecting a user’s CMS—in most cases to less than 5 steps. We updated and increased the visual identifiers throughout the process to eliminate ambiguity. Additionally, we learned that roughly a third of users had website administrators that that would be handling the installation. In order to help with the handoff, we made sure to include multiple entry points for the user to send a highly specific email with installation instructions to their administrator if they were going to abandon the flow.

Finally, we wanted users to be able to validate the successful installation of their website tool on their site so we implemented a test as the final step in the flow. Again, keeping in mind our self-serve goals for the product, we wanted users to be able to self-correct upon a failed test. We built a support funnel that narrowed if a user continued to return a failed test.


Overall, the redesign was a huge success, pushing the Webchat install rate to the highest we had ever seen—from 27% in Q2 to 63% in Q3. Additionally, we saw a large reduction in support cases by 59%.