Improving client onboarding and internal tooling to reduce client tickets by 42%

After a product update, the Identity team engineers were bogged down with client issues

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As a Customer Data Platform (CDP), Simon Data has an Identity function that records all incoming data and assigns it accurately to customer profiles. To resolve discrepancies about which profile a piece of data should belong to, Identity runs on a set of "Identity Rules," which clients decide during onboarding.

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Simon had recently transitioned from its old Identity product (ID1) to a more powerful version, ID2, which allowed clients to set almost anything as their Identity Rules. This would ideally give them the most accurate data possible.

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However, since the rollout, the Identity team had been overwhelmed by client issues, leaving them unable to build new product features.

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The goal was to figure out why engineering was bogged down with client issues and what we could do about it.

Clients were confused by our onboarding questionnaire, and Client Solutions lacked the tools to help

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I conducted interviews with all three groups involved in the Identity Rules setting process: clients, Client Solutions, and engineers. And the big takeaway was: it wasn’t just engineers, everybody was frustrated with the current process.

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From the interviews, I identified the two biggest contributors to the engineering team’s overwhelming ticket load:

1. A confusing onboarding questionnaire: Clients were setting incorrect rules because they didn't understand our questionnaire, which used overly technical language and exposed them to irrelevant questions.
2. Lack of tooling for Client Solutions: Client Solutions couldn’t independently answer client questions or troubleshoot issues, so they had to escalate everything to engineers.

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These insights helped me reframe the problem: Client issues that are not being meaningfully addressed earlier were cascading into engineering problems. By better serving clients earlier in the process, we can reduce the burden on engineers.

I led the redesign of the questionnaire and a sandbox tool, reducing client tickets by 42%

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To address the core issues, I led the redesign of the onboarding questionnaire and created a new sandbox tool to test Identity Rules.

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For the questionnaire, I facilitated workshops with our Product Manager and Client Solutions to map a decision tree and determine the ideal order of questions. We built the questionnaire in Typeform, using conditional logic so clients only saw questions relevant to them. We also rewrote the questionnaire using plain, accessible language.

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Compared to the two months prior, fewer clients had questions, needed to redo the survey, or had to flush their historical data.

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To support Client Solutions, I designed a sandbox tool that let them test and debug Identity Rules. I conducted 9 usability tests using real client scenarios. In 8 out of 9 cases, participants were able to correctly determine whether the Identity Rules were behaving correctly, implying that when using the tool, they wouldn’t need to escalate to engineering.

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After both tools were live for three months, client tickets assigned to the Identity team dropped by 42%.

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