Customer Support was very generous with their time in helping us understand proxy troubleshooting. And they were very pleased with the output of our collaboration. “This will resolve 80% of our ZenDesk tickets.”

What problem are we trying to solve?

A little background info: If someone tests a site or application behind a firewall, they must use a tunnel (or proxy) to access it. Sauce Connect is a proprietary proxy server that opens a secure connection between the Sauce Labs test environment and the app or website they want to test without exposing their company’s IT infrastructure to security risks.

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Although Sauce Connect works well, creating and configuring tunnels can be complicated, even for those with experience. Customers often contact Sauce support for help and has exposed the following issues:

• The current system for solving customer issues is inefficient and costly. Sauce relies heavily on Solution Engineers and the Support Team to hand-hold customers through their tunnel setup. Leadership raised this as one of the top issues impacting the company’s ability to grow revenue and avoid churn heading into FY 24.
• Learnings from several enterprise clients indicate that self-diagnosing is an area where Sauce could improve.

What is the impact?

• Customer frustration — they can’t solve issues without contacting Sauce.
• Internal frustration — we spend time supporting customers when there are alternative means.
• Impeded revenue growth
• Potential increase in churn

“How might we improve the experience of setting up tunnels so customers can easily configure and launch without the need for support?”

Project Goals

• Help the customers self-serve
• Reduce the reliance on Sauce personnel for support

Stakeholder Interviews

The PM and I conducted interviews w/ Customer Support and Customer Success Managers. We learned several things:

There are two times when customers need help troubleshooting:

1. When they’re initially setting up a tunnel — “I can’t get a tunnel up and running.” “I can’t start a tunnel.”
2. When a once-functioning tunnel stops working — “I can’t reach the site I want to test.” “My tunnel is stopping randomly.” “My test is slow.”

The customers who use tunnels are not typically well-versed in how they work. What Support hears often:

1. “Sauce Connect is too hard.” The persona that Sauce Support interacts with, QAs, differs from the persona that knows the ins and outs of Sauce Connect. They’re not power users. So, there is a knowledge gap.
2. “It’s easy with BrowserStack.” One of our top competitors, BrowserStack makes it very easy for less-technical users to start tunnels.

There’s a lot of existing tunnel information that would be useful to customers if only they had access to it. For example, users don’t have visibility into the traffic that goes through a tunnel, which would help them to identify a potential root cause of a tunnel issue.

Our logs are difficult to read and our documentation is not useful for troubleshooting.

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What is the proposed solution?

• Develop tunnel troubleshooting workflows for the two main use cases.
• Improved documentation for Sauce users and Diagnostic Reporting for their IT support teams.
• Explore the idea an app solution to allow less technical users to easily spin up tunnels.
• Create a tunnel details page to surface existing and useful information to customers.
• Improve our log organization.

Guiding principles

• Employ Conversational Design techniques. Make it engaging.
• Create learning opportunities. Provide opportunities at critical points in troubleshooting for the user to learn more about a topic.
• Help the whole customer. The ‘customer’ is the user and the team that supports them. As the user goes through troubleshooting, build a diagnostic report they could bring to their IT person when further help is needed. This information would help the whole customer return to work quicker and shows their IT department that we care about them, too.

Design Workshops

We conducted workshops to gain a deeper understanding of how Customer Support assists users and identify areas for improvement. One key finding was the importance of following a specific order of steps to resolve issues. The output of the workshops was a troubleshooting workflow designed to aid Customer Support, enhance documentation, guide users visually, and serve as the basis for a troubleshooting wizard in a desktop app.

Refined workflow:

I also conducted sessions with Customer Success to understand important tunnel detail information for users. The output of the exercise was an affinity diagram that informed the new page design. I created modules for each grouping utilizing our design system components and accounted for iterative building.

Customer Support was very generous with their time in helping us understand proxy troubleshooting. And they were very pleased with the output of our collaboration. “This will resolve 80% of our ZenDesk tickets.”

Next Steps

The plan was to introduce this functionality iteratively.

• Incorporate the troubleshooting diagram into documentation and support scripts. Track usage and get continuous feedback to see how to improve.
• Develop a diagnostic report worksheet.
• Implement an MVP of the tunnel details page. Track usage and get continuous feedback from customers. Iterate.
• Develop an app for creating tunnels (separate project)