In our recent “North Star Report”, almost three-quarters (74%) of executive decision makers identified digital transformation as a priority for the year ahead, with 41% reporting that it's a priority because there's a need to improve customer experience.

For more than 19 years, Salesforce has put the customer at the center of everything we do and a big part of doing that is Success Cloud. It ensures that every customer and all their users get the best answers to questions about our products and solutions.

In order to get the right answers in the hands of our customers, we needed Salesforce Help to be both searchable and relevant. We saw this as a key resource in enabling our customers to be more successful with our products. In order to achieve that we took a different approach by learning more about our customers and users. We stopped building new features and decided to run Envision, a Salesforce design-led program focused on understanding customer needs, gaining internal alignment, and crafting a new vision to set in motion.

Transforming customer self-service: an experience-first approach

At Salesforce, we’re constantly focused on delivering an amazing customer experience across all touchpoints and making the necessary shifts to do so within our walls. Aligning all of our internal stakeholders on a deep understanding of our help portal users was a key step. Also, by looking across industry trends like efficient shopping on Amazon, comprehensive searching on Google, and data and intelligence on Uber, we knew our new help portal needed to be intuitive and engaging across all digital touchpoints.

The Salesforce Help Portal is the main channel customers use to get self-service support and success guidance, and is a key ingredient in how we help customers navigate their Salesforce journeys successfully. Over 45 million Salesforce users rely on the help portal every year. Whether they’re looking for simple fixes, logging a support case, discovering new ideas, or learning best practices from the experts, our help portal most likely has the answer.

The Salesforce Envision Team helped us understand the key users and personas that we needed to keep in mind — their goals, needs, and the larger journey they took to get help from all parts of Salesforce.

A smarter, faster Salesforce help portal, powered by design thinking

Through Envision’s well-honed design-thinking process, which included hours of interviews with customers and internal stakeholders, we unpacked two big breakthroughs. First, we came to a clearer understanding of who our customers really are and what actually matters to them. This led to the second revelation: an effective help portal meant more than just break or fix support (traditional service experience of logging a case and getting it resolved). It also meant continuous learning and product guidance.

The new experience we created reflected that two-part journey. We kept the functionalities of logging cases, but also decided to pursue a customer help portal design that highlighted our Getting Started, Trailhead, and Documentation resources to address each need.

These have become the cornerstones of our experience-first approach to innovation and how we work to keep developing the right product for our customers:

1. Fast and Relevant

We learned that our customers don't have a lot of time. Let’s be honest — no one really wants to take extra time out of their day to log cases instead of doing their jobs. Our design had to reduce customers’ efforts in determining support options, finding recommendations, and figuring out how to connect with the support team. Accurate information delivered as fast as possible was the key driver of a meaningful experience.

      2. Cohesive End-to-End Story

We had never thought about structuring the overall experience and organizing the content around a narrative that would reflect the customer help journey. The Envision Team allowed us to design a help page UI that not only aligned to our brand, but also became the connective thread tying big and small details together.

      3. Intuitive and Personalized Experiences

Based on the many 1-to-1 customer interviews, we learned that customers wanted an experience that was intuitive and simple. This was also a breakthrough on its own. We designed the experience so we could intelligently surface the right information (based on their Success Plan and Salesforce products) without having to talk to their customer success manager or account executive.

Utilizing our own Envision Team was a great way for us to bring all our stakeholders — product development, support organization, and most importantly, our customers — to the table and use their feedback to define a clear vision of how we would improve the end-to-end customer experience of the Salesforce help portal.

Establishing guiding principles up front helped us prioritize the right features, and made it easier to make trade-offs along the way. Furthermore, focusing on the customer experience helped drive business results. The performance of the platform improved; development times and technical debt were reduced, and we saw more than a 50% increase in engagement resulting in case deflection improvements.

Hear more about this transformation and watch a demo of our enhanced Salesforce help portal. This video also walks through how we partnered with the Envision Team to make this vision come to life.