TL;DR
The Problem:
Early-stage churn was disproportionately affecting beginner and small-business users at Semrush. Misalignment between product design and onboarding strategy led to user confusion, trust erosion, and mounting internal inefficiencies.
What I Did:
I initiated and led a mixed-method research initiative based on ~110 onboarding calls, identifying root causes of friction and internal misalignment. I translated these findings into actionable strategy artifacts: a service blueprint, customer journey map, and friction heatmap.
Outcomes:
Surfaced patterns tied to $10K+ in quarterly avoidable churn
Influenced Retention and VOC strategy with roadmap-ready insights
Reframed onboarding from a human-led process to a product-led opportunity
The Challenge: Misaligned Effort, Missed Expectations
CS teams were repeating the same high-effort walkthroughs, while beginner users remained lost after setup. Leadership focused on increasing onboarding attendance, but users didn’t understand what to do once they arrived. The true bottleneck wasn’t support—it was product clarity and trust.
“It looks easy when you do it, but I don’t know what to do.”
What I Did: Systems-Level Insight Gathering
Approach:
Analyzed 110+ onboarding sessions across a 4-month span
Mapped CS workloads, recurring user confusion, and product fit gaps
Cross-referenced churn data, VOC themes, support tickets, and lifecycle flows
Created visual artifacts to align teams around a shared problem space
Key Tools & Frameworks:
Thematic clustering in Notion
Miro service blueprint (internal handoffs, friction points)
“Trust–Break–Effort–Impact” prioritization framework (informal but effective)
Journey mapping aligned to behavioral stages (first login → activation)
Insights That Shifted the Conversation
Business-Aligned Question | What It Revealed |
|---|---|
Where are we using support as a crutch? | CSMs logged 10–12 hrs/week on repeat demos |
What breaks trust before value? | Surprise paywalls, unclear tool access |
Are we designing for experts only? | Beginners churned despite ‘successful’ CS calls |
Who succeeds vs. who slips through? | Advanced marketers retained; SMBs dropped |
What Was Breaking — and Why It Mattered
Fragmented Ownership: 5+ teams owned pieces of onboarding; no single owner of the full journey
Reactive Load: 500+ hrs of CS effort/quarter were tied to preventable confusion
Trust Erosion: Billing/paywall issues ranked top 3 in ticket themes within the first 2 weeks
Misaligned Fit: Tools favored experts, but the funnel was full of first-time users and solopreneurs
Deliverables
Service Blueprint (org handoffs + friction zones)
Customer Journey Map (behaviorally segmented)
Strategic Outcomes
Strategy deck adopted across Retention and VOC teams
Trigger-based onboarding is explored in the lifecycle roadmap
CSM insights began influencing upstream product prioritization
Shift from reactive onboarding toward product-led activation design
Reflections
When teams don’t share a picture of the journey, they end up shipping disconnected fixes. This work made the invisible visible, where trust broke, where effort was leaking, and what “better onboarding” actually meant. The result was clearer direction, stronger alignment, and smarter decisions about what to build next.
This initiative wasn’t just about user experience. It was about reclaiming effort across the organization, making retention measurable, and giving teams a shared lens to see what was actually costing us trust.
