Redesigned Sesimi's user onboarding strategy to be scalable, intelligent and personalised, reducing support load, increasing engagement and improving retention through AI-optimised content and guided product interactions.
As Sesimi transitioned thousands of users from its legacy platform to a new microservices-based SaaS product, it faced a critical challenge: users didn’t know how to use the new platform and it showed. Despite webinars and training sessions, adoption was low, engagement was inconsistent and churn rose sharply as initial licence periods expired.
Onboarding was broken. We needed a solution that could meet users where they were tailored to their feature set, usage style and journey stage. So I rebuilt onboarding from the ground up.
After migrating thousands of terabytes of assets and users onto the new microservices-based Sesimi platform, we rapidly grew both our client base and user volume. While this growth was a success in one respect, it revealed a serious gap: users struggled to adopt the new platform effectively.
At the time, our onboarding strategy relied heavily on live webinars and training sessions. However, this approach depended on users turning up and staying engaged. Many didn’t. Others who were familiar with the legacy product found the new platform unintuitive, facing an empty interface with no clear next steps after logging in. The training videos and written documentation we offered weren’t scalable or effective enough to meet users where they were.
Because Sesimi's platform was nuanced, with different feature sets activated across different client accounts, the traditional, one-size-fits-all training model failed even further. Some users needed deep engagement with creative templates, others were primarily focused on compliance, reporting or account management. No two user experiences were exactly the same and our onboarding didn’t reflect that complexity.
The impact was severe. We saw rising support requests, high user frustration and eventually, a notable increase in churn as first-year licenses expired. Users simply weren’t achieving early success or realising the value of the platform quickly enough to stay engaged.
It became clear that to scale Sesimi sustainably, we couldn’t treat onboarding as a single event or a blanket training session. We needed a tailored, dynamic onboarding experience. One that adapted to different user needs, stages and account setups. Our goal was to create a scalable system that could guide users contextually inside the product, reduce reliance on manual support and ultimately increase retention.
Recognising that onboarding wasn’t a one-time event but an ongoing journey, I led a complete redesign of how Sesimi welcomed and supported new users.
Leveraging the principles from Better Onboarding and other UX strategy frameworks, I reframed onboarding not around front-loaded education, but around guidance through action. The goal was to deliver the right support at the right moment, helping users move naturally from first login to becoming confident, self-sufficient platform users.
I began by mapping out user journey frameworks for three key user types: Content Creators, Compliance users and Admin users. Understanding that no two accounts looked exactly the same. Using Miro, I worked backward from each user's core success state, identifying critical actions, feature touchpoints and likely friction points along the way.
We rebuilt onboarding around guided interactions inside the platform itself. Through a combination of Intercom Product Tours, contextual messaging, lifecycle emails and targeted help articles, users were nudged toward their next best action based on their actual behaviour, account type and feature access.
If a user had access to templates, their journey guided them straight to creating their first asset. If they had compliance tools enabled, a contextual Product Tour would launch when they accessed the Compliance tab. Users who became inactive after 30 days received re-engagement emails encouraging them back into the platform with clear, actionable next steps tied to their original goals.
Throughout the process, I collaborated closely with engineering, design and customer success teams, running agile sprints to roll out incremental improvements while gathering live user feedback through Mixpanel, Smartlook, Intercom and direct customer surveys.
Critically, I also rewrote and restructured our support documentation to optimise it for AI-based responses inside Intercom, ensuring that users who asked questions via chat would receive immediate, context-aware support aligned with the new onboarding journeys.
The result was an onboarding system that was scalable, adaptive and deeply tied to actual user contexts, helping Sesimi’s diverse user base navigate a complex platform with confidence and significantly reducing the need for manual intervention.
Leading the onboarding transformation at Sesimi reinforced for me how critical it is to meet users where they are, not where we assume they are. True onboarding isn’t about showing users everything at once; it’s about guiding them, contextually, toward early wins and long-term confidence. By thinking strategically about user journeys, behaviour patterns and scalable guidance, we not only improved user engagement but created a foundation for sustainable growth.
