Project Align

Envisioning the future of a unified support experience at Atlassian to help teams align on a unified strategy and have a shared understanding of the desired customer experience.

Problem

Today, when a customer actually needs support, they consider one of two paths, they can either figure something out themselves or they can ask for help from Atlassian support staff. But these two paths are very disconnected and there's so much gray area in the ways that customers actually get help. When a customer gets help, they're going to different Atlassian properties, but all of those properties are owned by a different part of the business that don't really talk to one another. This quickly becomes a really overwhelming experience. The data supports this: 60% of customers that are attempting to find support end up bouncing. Ultimately, the way our support is set up today leaves customers confused and not getting the help that they need.

The Need

Deliver an actionable vision and strategy of the future of support at Atlassian to provide all customers with best-in-class experiences as we continue to scale.

Understanding Atlassian Support’s Strategic Position in the Market

When looking at the competitive landscape of support, one aspect that popped out was defining how Atlassian considers what support “is” for its business. In order to grow cloud business and stay competitive with increasing market competition and nimble point solutions, Atlassian must reposition Customer Support from a cost center to a fundamental asset of its strategic relationship and revenue drivers.

User Research

Qualitative research is based on deep inquiry (vs broad investigation), so it’s important to get the study mix just right to ensure a representative but diverse sample of participants. After defining our research objectives, I scheduled time with the people who can best answer our questions. For this study, we talked to 23 individuals representative of specific roles & contexts across our three cohorts (customers, partners, internal team members).

Understanding the User Journey

Based on the conversations I had with our customers and support staff, I created an interactive as-is journey that captures customers and Atlassians on their current-state support journeys to better understand their pain points and successes along the way.

Identifying Gaps Along the Way

The way we decided on which concepts and strategies needed to be defined for Atlassian was looking at the spectrum of the support landscape (based on what we heard from customers and auxiliary competitive research). What you will see below is the spectrum of support from “no touch” to “high tough.” It became immediately clear that Atlassian has emphasized their high touch support offerings, and so it was no wonder that customers were always opting to open a support ticket. This spectrum presented fertile ground to consider how we may close the experience gaps within our no touch, low touch, and medium touch areas.

From Learnings to Concepts

Based on an assessment of our current state customer support experience, Project Align identified five future of support concepts to support customers at scale…and at expectation! These concepts were used to drive our learnings in a very tangible way to the business to show where Atlassian should be investing their time and energy.

Bringing Concepts to Life

These 5 concepts were then brought to life in experience journeys that highlight the value to the many different types of end users and admins that use our products.

Experience Highlights

• Connected ecosystem - Carly is able to engage with Community and University right from her Atlassian Passport.

• Contextual history - Carly is able to post interactive media to community from her Passport from content she used to help herself. 

• Proactive engagement - We are able to bring Carly into relevant discussions to expand her engagement with our platforms. 

Experience Highlights

• Seamless onboarding - We are able to extend the migration and cloud experience by offering customers a place to go to continually grow their skillsets. 

• Contextual history - Integrating with services customers already love, we’re able to leverage cloud data, for pointed, just-in-time help. 

• Proactive engagement - Leveraging cloud data we are able to deeply understand a customer and their situation — giving us the ability to surface relevant, proactive help. 

Next Steps

• Unification of the contact experience

• Deliver cross-channel traffic and deflection strategy.

• Begin working on experiments with development team