Connect Success
A SaaS customer success platform driving adoption, value realization, and business goals for enterprise
User Interviews
Strategy
Prototyping
Testing
Figma
Dovetail
Miro
Zoom
11 months
Launched
When VMware set out to transform into a SaaS-based company, one of the first challenges it took on was scaling the customer success business.
Customer Success Managers (CSMs) were dealing with a disorganized, painfully manual process. Time-sensitive communication relied on back-and-forth emails and phone calls, and critical information was scattered over spreadsheets, reports, and presentations. This inefficiency wasn’t just slowing things down – it was limiting how many clients success executives could support.
Customers felt the strain too. They struggled to track progress, lacked clarity on their goals, and often didn’t know who to contact for help. The business came to our team with the following ask:
Create a platform that digitizes the success planning process, streamlines collaboration, and scales to support VMware's SaaS goals
Our team joined early enough in the process to consult with multiple stakeholders for research. I partnered with my product manager and project manager, conducting interviews with key business members and very excited CSMs who were eager to be heard. These conversations provided clarity into our audience and their goals. Here’s what we learned:
Insights in hand, we set out to define the vision for Connect Success 1.0. I assessed feature requirements and task flows with my product manager, building journey maps to visualize how success executives and customers would interact with the tool. We plotted out the end-to-end experience of CSMs and customers, making sure to emphasize the relationship-building and collaborative functionality of the platform.
Working tightly with our engineering partners was crucial to making sure the tool integrated seamlessly with existing VMware systems, like proprietary AI/ML tools and customer data streams. These early conversations were helpful for understanding design possibilities, technical constraints, and building a feasible roadmap for the initial pilot release.
As a 0-to-1 product, Connect Success needed to not only solve immediate pain points but also drive measurable growth. To achieve this, we had to be strategic with documenting its impact. We identified three key metrics to track for the 1.0 release:
For the pilot release of Connect Success, we decided to put the customer health scorecard on the back burner. The level of effort required to pull in multiple data streams and accurately calculate health scores was beyond what our engineering partners could deliver within the given timeline. As an alternative, they recommended incorporating the customer's professional services credits, used to purchase consulting services, training and certifications.
With customer health temporarily on the bench, we chose three core components to prioritize:
Dashboard
Plan Details
Team
Taking the finalized roadmap, we set out architecting the tool and the required features that would live within it. I began with mapping out our tool and trying different UI treatments for:
We shared our initial designs with a group of success executives for testing. They were engaged and clearly excited because for the first time, they could see a solution to the inefficiencies they’d been battling for years and a way to speed up their workflows. The positive reception was encouraging and indicated we were heading down the right path.
CSMs offered crucial feedback to carry forward in my next design iterations, namely:
Avoid percentages for progress
Customers often associate percentages with academic grades and quickly get hung up on those numbers. Low percentages could be demoralizing and stymie progress.
Use language like “4 tasks completed,” focusing on completion instead of overall progress. This framed progress in a more positive, achievement-oriented way.
Celebrate success when possible
Success planning is a difficult, time consuming process. Customers need to feel encouraged often to prevent becoming overwhelmed with their long term commitments.
Include a dashboard section highlighting overall accomplishments and milestones. This section could quickly remind customer's of their completion activity while providing a visual progress timeline.
Be mindful of support metrics
Customers and success executives need visibility into support ticket activity to assess customer health. However, seeing a raw number of unresolved tickets could spark frustration and dissatisfaction.
Remove the total number of open tickets, focusing solely on escalations and high severity.
After our testing session I worked on updating the designs according to our feedback. While communicating these changes to our engineering partners, an issue with the customer credit count came up. Pulling in this data was proving more complex than anticipated, and the required APIs wouldn't be ready for our release date.
We decided to move this feature to a future version, and continued with the pilot release in the VMware customer portal, Customer Connect.
8 months after the pilot release, we saw the following ouctomes:
As customers continued using Connect Success, their feedback began to shape our next phase of development. Much of the feedback related to how customers access VMware learning content. Customer education is a core part of success plans – entire tasks consist of consuming such content. In the pilot release of Connect Success, educational content was provided via hyperlinks. These resources lived outside of Connect Success, spread amongst multiple VMware learning portals.
Customers felt confused, disoriented, and unable to track their progress while traversing across these different portals. We took this view to heart and created a proposition for Connect Success 2.0 to tackle:
Seamless integration of customer education into Connect Success, streamlining access to learning content.
Feature adoption metrics, customer feedback, and CSM input gave us plenty of ideas for improvements in Connect Success 2.0 beyond success resources. Due to low adoption rates and the product vision shifting to a purely success plan-focused tool, our team chose to deprecate:
To keep in line with the product roadmap, our team assessed which opportunities could be medium and lower effort wins, choosing to take on these additional areas for the next release:
A major part of my design effort went into enhancing the connection between parent objectives, child tasks, and assigned learning content. This hierarchy of success plan components, while familiar for CSMs, was not immediately intuitive for a large chunk of customers. While designing, my aim was to clarify these relationships with thoughtful atomic design and a natural-feeling integration of success resources.
After plenty of experimentation with complex nesting and webs of connectivity options, our team met with engineering to discuss the feasibility of building a library of learning content within Connect Success. This content would be called "Success Resources" and would behave as follows:
A year after launch, Connect Success was supporting over 200 organizations with their business goals. Success executives were managing more clients with better efficiency, and customers were progressing through their success plans with increased clarity and agency. Connect Success continues to undergo changes for strategic improvements, with upcoming roadmap features such as:
