How Doccle improves product experience for over 1 million users with Inline Manual
“Inline Manual has been a huge help with reducing support tickets, providing instant information for the end-users, and improving in-app guidance when onboarding in Doccle.”
— Vera Martins, Product Designer, Doccle
How to boost customer satisfaction and speed up product adoption without overwhelming users and... developers
The Doccle team monitors closely the questions their end-users are asking. During feedback analysis, Vera and her colleagues discovered that users were missing in-app help. The feedback was clear - Doccle needed to improve the user experience within its app. And they needed to do it fast.
The biggest challenge was how to successfully implement in-app onboarding and communication without engaging the dev team at every step of the way. Vera and her colleagues were looking to improve product experience by providing on-demand, contextual help, and personalized messages.
In the beginning, the Doccle team thought about redesigning the app itself. However, it was a time and money consuming task, both for the design and development teams. As a small company, they couldn’t afford to stop every other project for the sole purpose of this.
Another option was developing their own in-app walkthroughs and tooltips, but that too would be inefficient. The Doccle team would always need to rely heavily on the dev team, and it would not work for urgent scenarios since they would be dependent on the release dates.
They needed something that everyone at Doccle could use without any coding background. That’s why they decided to start looking for a digital adoption platform like Inline Manual.
After research and trial periods with 4 different companies, Doccle decided to integrate Inline Manual into their application.
“We went for Inline Manual because it’s the company that most cared about Doccle. They weren’t worried about what other companies we were talking to, what they were offering so they could do better. Inline Manual always focused on Doccle first and the support that we got while we were on a free trial was outstanding. The quality of support is the same as now.”
— Vera Martins, Product Designer, Doccle
Doccle is an interactive application for storing, handling, and sharing documents from multiple different companies. The idea is simple: after creating an account on Doccle, you add companies from which you want to receive documents. Doccle is Belgium’s biggest and most innovative digital administration platform, used by over 1 million users.
When you design an application, users’ needs should be at the center. Ideally, new users will meet their needs with the software. But if they don’t, they’ll churn. Even though each application is unique, the problem is the same. Users need to see the value outweighing the costs. And they need to see it as quickly as possible. Vera Martins, the Product Designer at Doccle, is a perfect example. She understands why it’s crucial to continually improve user experience and exceed customers’ expectations. We reached out to Vera to learn more about how Doccle is using Inline Manual.
Since 2018, Doccle has been using Inline Manual to onboard and activate its users with in-app messaging. By providing personalized onboarding experiences, Doccle empowered its users and improved communication. All without getting in the way of product development.
Brussels, Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest, Belgium
Information Technology, Office Administration, Payments
B2C
Guide users with personalized in-app experiences
Doccle uses Inline Manual to improve the product experience and increase user engagement. They create onboarding and activation walkthroughs, add eye-catching hotspots, and announce major updates or maintenance plans with pop-up modals. The Doccle team wants to keep users informed and satisfied. As each person uses the application in a different way, they offer various flow scenarios depending on the experience of the user.
One of Doccle’s goals was to reduce the time spent on support tickets that have simple answers, such as tickets about planned maintenance. With Inline Manual, Vera is able to display a warning message about scheduled maintenance weeks in advance. Then, she can increase the frequency as the date draws closer. This way, the Doccle team makes sure their users are aware of possible delays in a frustration-free way. It shows how much they value their users’ time and, thanks to the schedule autolauncher feature, Vera plans multiple walkthroughs in one go, saving time otherwise spent on a repetitive task.
One of the features that Vera especially likes to use is a launcher, for example, a tooltip or a hotspot. Launchers help users instantly find what they are looking for without losing time on scanning or reading through the entire page. They are great for drawing users’ attention to elements of the application that are new or non-obvious.
“Tooltips really work with our users. We only use them from time to time but when we do, we see a big help on the conversion rates.” - Vera Martins, Product Designer, Doccle
When combined with other proven in-app patterns such as pop-up modals, launchers become extremely effective. Vera shared with us a use case she prepared for the eBox - an online letterbox where Belgian citizens can receive official documents from the government. By adding eBox to Doccle, users are able to receive their documents digitally and keep them for 7 years or more.
When connecting eBox with Doccle became available, Vera built a specific campaign encouraging users to activate this new option.
By clicking a button in Doccle’s email newsletter, users got redirected to the Companies overview page where they were able to view and add different organizations to Doccle. To immediately catch the users’ attention, Vera built-in a pulsing hotspot next to eBox. This way, users didn’t need to lose time searching for it.
At the same time, users that were inside the Doccle platform were prompted with a modal that announced the eBox was available on Doccle, and asked them if they wanted to add it to their accounts. When users clicked through the modal, they continued the Inline Manual experience on the Companies page.
Combining pop-up modals and launchers is a powerful way to improve feature awareness and adoption. Vera and her team were pleasantly surprised with the numbers:
“99% of the target users added eBox to their accounts. We promoted other companies before, and after, without using the hotspot and the results were far different. We noticed less conversion from our users. You may wonder: so why don’t you always use the tooltip? The answer is that we don’t want to overuse it, so only on very important occasions we bring out the ‘big boys’.”
— Vera Martins, Product Designer, Doccle
Increased user happiness
One of the biggest challenges in in-app communication is making users aware of the product features and changes and helping them understand how they'd benefit from them. All without overdoing it at the same time.
At Doccle, they understand this strategy.They leverage in-app communication patterns such as modals and tooltips, without overwhelming their users. And they get positive data:
By adding Inline Manual to their application, the Doccle team has reduced the number of support tickets and improved user experience.
We wish Doccle many more years of providing an astonishing in-app experience for many more users.
“Every time something goes wrong, the support team gets 40 to 50% fewer tickets when we warn users with a pop-up.”
— Vera Martins, Product Designer, Doccle.
