Onboarding Roast: Intercom vs Crisp 🚀

One of the key things we build towards is getting users time to value counting down from the moment they press sign up on your software.

I thought it would be fun to play a weekly game with our AI insights:

I get to roast some companies’ onboarding experience, test autoplays’ AI insights and send a feedback loop to my AI engineering team - TRIPLE win.

🚀 Onboarding Roast or Toast:
⏱️ 5 minutes per tool + self recording
🎯 One clear intention.
📹 Documented Burns + Earns.

Last week’s intention:

Find a provider to build an AI-powered chatbot trained on my help center.

Intercom

Burns:

• I got frustrated by the page loading time at the start.

• I got confused on submitting my url for the knowledge base.

• The onboarding checklist was only accessible from the homepage. When I needed a reminder of the next step, tab-switching created disorientation and broke my flow.

• The ”guidance” section on configuring the chatbot tone was confusing. I couldn’t tell if tone was applied globally or to certain customers. Without more context or walkthroughs, I was left second-guessing.
  

Earns:

• The checklist itself was great - showed me what was possible and gave a clear picture of the journey ahead.

• The UI quickly aligned with my intention: setting up an AI-powered chatbot on my knowledge base.

Did I Get to Value?
No

Autoplay Analysis:

(https://lnkd.in/dqTqgxkr)

Burns:

• It didn’t pick up that I got confused on the "Guidance" section and that the "Guidance" section UI is what threw me off and caused me to go back to the home page to re-orient myself.

Earns:

• It picked up that the loading time of page responsiveness caused frustrations on my end: “The user exhibited impatience during loading sequences by clicking on new sections before the previous one had fully loaded”.

• It picked up that I was struggling with submitting my URL: “The user might have been unsure about the precise format or correct URL needed for synchronization”.
  
  

Crisp IM

Burns:

• I couldn’t upload a simple URL to create my knowledge base. That’s all I wanted: to drop in a url link and go. But I couldn’t get it to work.

• I was taken to the workflow section before I even had a v0 of my chatbot set up.
  

Earns:

• They asked about my intentions at the very start, so the flow felt personalized from the beginning.

• I loved that the onboarding checklist was available everywhere. I always knew what I could do next and in what order.

Did I Get to Value?
No

Autoplay Analysis:

(https://lnkd.in/dNgCUDFG)

Burns:

:)

Earns:

• It understood that the url submission is what prevented me from completing my task: “When attempting to import content into their knowledge base via URL, the user was prevented from proceeding by a system error stating that a custom domain was required”.
  

The onboarding flow I would have loved instead:

1. Login

2. Select/write my intention

3. Submit the url of my help-center for the chatbots’ knowledge base

4. Immediately interact with the chatbot trained on my knowledge base to get a feel for it and understand how its responding

5. Only then start to customize tone and response format etc

This triggered some interesting ideas linked back to Autoplays’ offering:

Currently Autoplay works backwards from your action sequences on software and compares them with similar users to infer your intent out of all the 1….n possible intentions in the software.

But we could boost its speed and accuracy by integrating with the intention forms you fill out during onboarding - so the AI instantly knows exactly what you’re trying to do.

This would give the AI more context, and feed the real-time copilot instant intention data to steer the user in the right direction on the software.

Autoplay could also work faster once it locks in your goal, spotting friction points and tailoring everything to your specified intention.

Any thoughts? Feel free to drop them in the comments below :)