What's New: Creating Customer Centric Onboarding Experiences (2023 release wave 2)

Overview

The session presents a vision in which any customer can find, explore and start using Business Central plus add-on apps by themselves, and in which prospects are matched with the right partner and solution from day one. It describes a partner-driven workflow: a questionnaire on the partner’s website profiles the prospect, the answers are stored in a system table in Business Central, and the trial is created with the standard trial plus the partner’s AppSource app and its dependencies.

The demos cover the building blocks of the experience: a custom role center, a welcome banner, an onboarding checklist, assisted setup filtered to a custom category, just-in-time data loading, Excel spotlight tours, Excel report layouts, teaching tips on report request pages, and analysis mode. The session also gives design guidance for trial versus go-live checklists, points to the onboarding sample app on GitHub, and recommends Application Insights for telemetry.

Key points

• Questionnaire answers from a partner website are stored in a system table in Business Central, available before sign-in, so apps can change the experience based on the prospect profile.
• The trial is built as the standard trial plus the partner’s AppSource app and dependencies. The partner configures which apps load for which profile combinations.
• Checklists are designed for five to seven items. Users can navigate freely and skip tasks, so order is not guaranteed. If there are more items, wrap them up in an assisted setup.
• Trial and evaluation checklists should be short, low-friction and show minute indicators. Go-live checklists should be role-oriented, preconfigured as far as possible and free of irrelevant tasks.
• Assisted setup can be opened filtered to a custom category by calling the open assisted setup function from a guide experience item.
• Teaching tips should focus on about three key elements with brief text. They support markdown and links, and they cannot prescribe business processes.
• Spotlight tours currently focus on Teams and Excel features. The onboarding sample app on GitHub can be forked as a starting template.

Features

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• table “system table” at 10:51
• page “assisted setup list” at 15:52
• other “open assisted setup function” at 23:41
• other “guide experience item” at 23:41
• other “role center” at 22:16
• other “onboarding sample app” at 34:51

Not found in BC28-30: table “system table”, page “assisted setup list”.

Quotes

• 1:21 “the vision is simply that any customer can find explore and start using business Central plus add-on apps by themselves”
• 2:01 “it’s super important that we match and Prospects and customers are matched with Partners the right partners and the right solutions from day one”
• 2:35 “our onboarding philosophy is not to drag all users through all setup now it is to template as much as possible and then let”
• 2:55 “you have domain knowledge and you have things that you do over and over again and that work that you do over and over”
• 8:39 “to be able to give the most relevant experience you need to know something about that potential customer like for example what industry are”
• 10:51 “we then store the information from the questionnaire the answers in a system table inside business Central and you can use those before the”
• 12:48 “the combination of these choices imply a collection of onboarding elements checklist tasks Banner rooll Center what have you in a coherent experience”
• 13:49 “we create the environment with the standard trial on top but we add your special sauce we add your appsource app and its dependencies”
• 14:49 “this checklist is not intended to be the great checklist for you to onboard a customer but it’s intended to give you inspiration”
• 15:52 “call the assisted setup list page but it’s filtered now only to contain my setup elements and that’s a great way”
• 17:33 “I want to show a great Spotlight tour that that’s Spotlight the Excel integration capabilities”
• 18:33 “the new thing here is you see the teating tip popping up for the request page for the report request page educating me about”
• 21:55 “this app that I loaded here is available on GitHub is the onboarding sample app and you can go Fork it today”
• 26:14 “at the role center in business central the banner is there to greet them”
• 27:07 “the user can move and navigate freely between the tasks and might even skip some of them to revisit them later”
• 27:27 “consider the difference between a checklist for the aval trial situation where um you want the you you want the users to experience the”
• 29:40 “the checklist is designed for five six maybe seven and if you have more than that you can wrap those up in an assisted”
• 30:00 “Spotlight tours are a really powerful way of showing some of the key selling points in business Central such as teams and Excel”
• 34:30 “you can start right away with forking the sample app that’s on GitHub so look for onboarding sample app for GitHub”
• 36:08 “use application insights to track telemetry it’s not hard to set up it’s super cheap”

Disclaimers in the video

• 18:33 preview: the new thing here is you see the teating tip popping up for the request page for the report request page

Presenters (as heard): Sarah, Cern, San, Turn.