Case Study
From siloed insights to a unified vision: mapping the customer experience for impact
💡 What to expect in this case study
Context
The Product
CoPilot AI is a SaaS lead generation and engagement tool that leverages AI-driven solutions to create LinkedIn outreach campaigns, enabling businesses to connect with potential clients more effectively.
The Business
When I joined CoPilot AI, the company was focused on improving product quality and enhancing the overall customer experience.
At the same time, different departments operated in silos, leading to misalignment and a fragmented customer journey.
The Customer
The customer base for this case study differed from "Designing AI-Driven Solutions for Sales Efficiency". It primarily consisted of financial advisors looking to enhance their outreach strategy and grow their client base. Unlike SMBs, which typically onboard small sales teams, financial advisors were often independent professionals seeking an easy-to-use tool.
For this study, it was important to recognize two key customer segments: those already familiar with the benefits of LinkedIn outreach and those still evaluating its value.
Despite these differences, their core expectation remained the same:
A low-effort tool that delivers high-quality leads and, ultimately, results in booked meetings—our primary success metric.
Problem
What’s missing in our understanding of the customer experience?
We lacked documentation that mapped out the customer's most positive and negative experiences. While the company aimed to become more data-driven and build a roadmap based on insights, we had no structured foundation to support that goal.
The product, built by engineers, was functional but burdened with significant usability debt. Customers frequently required human assistance to navigate the software, leading to high operational overhead.
On the bright side, CoPilot AI was relatively small (~40 employees), making it easier to interview key stakeholders and team members.
However, the challenges were clear:
No structured or organized customer experience data
Limited analytics to understand customer behavior
Customer support tickets were not categorized in a way that provided meaningful insights, among other issues
Bringing the entire organization into the customer journey
With so many issues to address, where should we start? Using the peak-end rule as a guiding principle, I decided to build a service blueprint to visualize both the frontstage (customer interactions) and backstage (internal operations) and connect them to the customer journey. This approach allowed us to identify quick wins before embarking on a more time-intensive customer journey mapping process.
To ensure alignment, I developed a research plan outlining key objectives and questions, such as:
What are the current workflows across internal teams, and how do they vary by department?
At what specific stages do customers interact with our service, and what prompts these interactions?
I involved stakeholders from all key departments, including:
RevOps (GTM)
Growth Marketing
Sales
Customer Success
Engineering, Product, & Design (EPD)
Additionally, I analyzed customer calls from the Sales and Customer Success teams to gain deeper insights.
The resulting service blueprint provided a comprehensive view of customer touchpoints. It also highlighted inconsistencies across interactions and revealed the need for a brand refresh to elevate perceived product quality—ultimately attracting more qualified leads.
Biggest negative peak: onboarding journey
Business
The lack of a scalable onboarding process meant that Customer Success teams were spending valuable time teaching customers how to use the platform instead of helping them with outreach strategy. This impacted revenue growth and expansion targets.
Product
Time-to-value (TTV) was below market benchmarks, which increased early churn risk. Customers familiar with LinkedIn outreach quickly recognized the tool's value and were more likely to stay, but those still evaluating its potential were at higher risk of disengaging.
Customers
It was taking 4 to 6 weeks to onboard customers through 6 to 9 touchpoints that relied heavily on the Customer Success team. There was no self-onboarding process, creating a bottleneck for both sales and customers who couldn't access the platform without human intervention.
Solution
Baby steps: from low-hanging fruit to major changes toward a unified vision
My guiding principle throughout this work was: "We need to tell the customer the same story throughout their journey with us."
Using the service blueprint as our foundation, I structured the design team around key stages of the customer journey. This focus allowed us to rapidly improve communication materials in a more strategic and cohesive way. By collaborating closely with Product Marketing, we enhanced a variety of touchpoints—such as onboarding decks and Help Center guides—to ensure consistency and clarity.
After surfacing key friction points, I led prioritization discussions in our weekly design meetings. I encouraged the team to think holistically—recognizing how their individual workstreams were interconnected and how one project could impact another.
I also guided the team in identifying areas where further research was needed, helping them define appropriate qualitative and quantitative studies to gain deeper insights.
For example, we were onboarding two distinct customer segments. I assigned a product designer to each segment and, after identifying common pain points through stakeholder interviews and customer call reviews, I asked them to dig deeper. Their goal was to uncover common first-week questions and segment-specific patterns. This helped us design onboarding experiences that respected each segment’s unique needs while also identifying shared elements we could scale.
In parallel, one senior product designer—bringing experience from web design, agencies, and tools like Webflow—and a junior visual designer focused on redesigning the website and other key communication assets to better reflect our unified story.
Before the Website Redesign
The previous design lacked clarity, causing customers to mistake us for an agency rather than a SaaS platform. The visuals, layout, and messaging failed to effectively communicate our product offering, leading to confusion and misaligned expectations.
After the Website Redesign
We refined the branding and messaging to clearly highlight key features and reinforce that we are selling software, not services. While keeping the same color palette, we polished the design to enhance credibility and align with a SaaS identity, ensuring a more professional and trustworthy user experience.
Prior sales deck
Manually created sales decks led to inconsistencies and extra effort.
New sales deck
Branded templates improved consistency, boosted confidence in demos, and strengthened customer trust.
Prior welcome email
The email was hard to read, lacked key information, and was so off-brand it could be mistaken for spam.
New welcome email
The redesigned email is clear, on-brand, and informative, guiding customers toward a smoother onboarding experience.
One of our product designers, who specialized in a specific customer segment, took charge of enhancing the in-app onboarding experience for both individual and team users. Given the complexity of the required product modifications, we introduced the updates in phases, as follows:
Short-term: Implemented a product tour using Userpilot to deliver immediate value.
Long-term: Redesigned the in-app onboarding flow to create a more seamless and scalable experience.
Userpilot, the short-term solution
The example below shows the kinds of components we leveraged in Userpilot to support customer onboarding and engagement.
In-App Redesign
The in-app solution is still a work in progress, but early user testing has shown a high task success rate. The step-by-step flow clearly communicates how LinkedIn campaigns work, making the experience significantly more intuitive.
Before: Customers landed on an empty summary tab with no data or clear guidance on where to start, making the setup process unintuitive.
After (WIP): The flow was redesigned into a clear step-by-step sequence, with AI-powered messaging suggestions to help customers get started seamlessly.
Impact
Measurable improvements in customer experience and business growth
Learning & Reflections
Leveraging insights to shape a customer-first strategy
The service blueprint became a crucial tool for demonstrating the strategic value of design and its alignment with business objectives, especially in areas like RevOps, which traditionally don’t have a direct link to design. It fostered cross-functional collaboration by establishing a shared vision, language, and metrics, positioning design as a key player in business strategy.
Additionally, this approach strengthened my relationships with other department heads, who now actively seek design input for their initiatives.
Overall, my vision is that one day we will have a customer experience strategy that transcends the product itself, focusing on the entire journey—because customers don’t see us as separate departments, but as a unified brand.
Ready to create something remarkable?
I’d love to explore how empathy, strategy, and a dash of creativity can elevate your product vision. Drop me a line at laura.rittmeister@gmail.com, and and let’s make it happen—together.