Removing friction from channel sign-up to scale self-serve acquisition
CLIENT
Relay
YEAR
2024
OVERVIEW
Relay Customer Cloud — Product Designer · Channels squad
Tags
UX Design, Self-service, SaaS, Onboarding
Signing up for a new channel required opening a support ticket and waiting for a person. For users, it meant leaving the product, waiting for a reply and finishing the purchase elsewhere, adding friction, errors and delays at a critical moment of the journey. For the business, the manual process didn't scale. Growth depended on customers signing up on their own, without support, to expand the base and reduce operating costs.
The challenge
Two factors changed the scope mid-project. First, the partner's API rules: the integration had to follow strict platform requirements, which limited interface decisions and forced us to adapt steps of the flow. Second, product changes: new customer profiles surfaced during the project, such as customers with no contract, customers with an active contract and new line requests, which meant redesigning parts of the solution without making the flow generic or confusing.
The design decision that came out of it: clear branches at the start of the flow that identify the customer's profile and route them to the right journey, cutting unnecessary choices for people who already know what they want.
My role
I was the designer responsible for the end-to-end sign-up flow, working directly with the PM to align scope and prioritize scenarios, partnering with engineering on feasibility and handoff, and continuously adapting the design to platform API constraints and product changes during the sprints.
Reviewing existing support tickets revealed the main points of error and doubt in the manual process: missing information, steps without clear confirmation and no visibility into the request status. Funnel data showed where customers dropped off or had to contact support again. User interviews confirmed that depending on people in the flow created uncertainty, because customers didn't know whether their request had gone through. We used product analytics and session recordings to gather the data.
Short sprints with continuous handoff to engineering, reviewing the flow with every new piece of product information to keep the scenarios consistent. Since scope kept shifting, the most important decision was to identify the customer's profile at the very start instead of forcing a single path for everyone. It reduced perceived complexity and made development more predictable. Platform policies weren't just a technical issue: they had to be explained clearly in the interface, so users understood what was and wasn't possible inside the product.
We built a self-service sign-up flow from scratch inside the platform, letting any customer subscribe to a new channel on their own, in a few steps and without leaving the product. The flow covers different customer profiles, with or without an active contract, and supports both activating a new line and adding extra plans, all within the same experience.
This project was part of a set of initiatives that contributed to the results below. The main goal was to replace a manual process with self-service, removing known errors and friction.
-40%
Platform churn since the new customer cloud launched
+35%
Customer satisfaction over the same period