How Evisort brought contextual assistance to life with Bento

Evisort, a modern contracting platform, streamlines contract management for in-house legal teams. Extracting structured data from unstructured content using artificial intelligence and making this approachable is pivotal to Evisort's value proposition.

The product is clean and simple to use, but legal workflows are inherently complex and highly technical. This sometimes requires a guided experience.. 

While some User Experience teams believe that “easily self-serviceable” means “a self-explanatory UI,” Patrick Neeman, the Vice President of User Experience and Research at Evisort, believes that best practices and deeper help can augment a clean and intuitive platform.. 

“Everywhere I’ve worked at there’s also been complex concepts to explain for highly domain-specific environments. In that context, we’ve leaned on user assistance platforms that could help achieve that. Evisort fits that model,” said Patrick.

With this in mind, they looked for a platform that:

• Could seamlessly integrate into Evisort’s experience, versus stand out from it.
• Was easy to pick up for users of all departments, from product to customer education
• Flexible in how it can target and segment audiences based on context, persona and customer size.

“Our business goal is to enable self-serve user assistance and onboarding. This meant minimal hand-holding and enabling customers to solve their own problems. Bento has helped us achieve this while also ensuring our users still felt cared for,” said Patrick. 

Within the first quarter of adopting Bento, the Evisort team was able to launch in-app contextual guides ahead of schedule and see a decrease in low-level support questions. 

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Enabling greater self-serve user assistance

Patrick’s vision is to proactively serve help content in the product rather than requiring Evisort users to search through the help center. 

But proactive didn’t mean disruptive. 

The last thing he wanted was to stick “bandaids” into the clean product UI and litter it with tooltips and pop-ups. Evisort’s permission-based approach is more about the user choosing what they want to see instead of asking permission for a disruptive experience.

“Most user assistance systems overuse modals as a communication method, and we wanted the content truly integrated into the platform. I have been dreaming about a contextual, well integrated user assistance experience for the last 10 years, and Bento helps us achieve that vision,” said Patrick.

Success would be measured as:

• Increased Engagement: were users seeing enough value that they would proactively seek it? 
• Reduction in reactive support: in the form of tickets and support calls
• Confidence internally to jumpstart a self-serve experience, and the ability to iterate on that towards success

Selecting a tool

Patrick has found that it takes a village to evaluate these tools because it involves so many departments and stakeholders. For Evisort, The core team evaluating tools consisted of:

• Patrick and a principal designer, Polly Lee
• Rachel Bodnar, a Sr. Product Manager, thinking about engineering needs for integration
• Allison Gathard-Esposto, Director of Education and Bobak Shafiei, Instruction Designer,  for education and training
• Jake Sussman, the Chief Product Officer and Rachael McBrearty, the Chief Customer Officer for executive buy-in

The first step was a broad and deep tool evaluation. They were moving off Pendo, had prior experience with WalkMe and Whatfix, and were evaluating Bento against other applications.  

The overall evaluation took two months and included validating that:

• All the features and form factors they cared about were available
• The learning curve and time required to build native and customizable experiences should be approachable.
• Integrations were aligned to their tech stack (Slack, Segment, Amplitude)

Ultimately, they chose Bento for its high-quality end-user experience that integrated seamlessly into the Evisort UI and how fast it was to deploy. Evisort had Bento integrated into the Evisort in under a week for demonstration within the organization.

"Bento does not waste my time with font import and setup. I can customize everything to make it match my Figma and don’t have to publish to preview. With this, I can concentrate on content, targeting, and enhancing my growth experiments and strategy.” said Polly.

Finally, Bento’s deep integration with analytics tools like Amplitude allowed them to build a “best of breed” strategy where contextual help and self-serve onboarding is only part of a long-term strategy of guided everboarding experiences and measuring the outcomes.

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Results of the first experiment

Their first experiment was to bring page-specific contextual guides. For example, the guide on the Search page would highlight best practices like FAQ and support videos. 

• A user would discover these guides by clicking on the help icon on the horizontal navigation.
• The same icon, on different pages, would open different guides. 
• The user would be presented with user assistance with links to the knowledge base and contextual feature videos.

The experiment was a hit.

Evisort saw strong and repeated user engagement, indicating a shift in user behavior to seek these best practices and help. 

“Not only could we see where users were opening up contextual help in the section they were in, we could see in other platforms what knowledge base articles the users were reading. It’s pure gold to understand user needs in such precision so we can refine the context and better serve our audience” said Patrick.

Best of all, Evisort saw reduced support calls for simple issues and a decrease in support tickets. 

Other learnings included: 

• 23% of all knowledge base views originated from Bento guides. These were users who, after seeing higher-level information, wanted more.
• 19% of the users were power users of Bento guides and would repeatedly access the contextual help
• Users were more likely to watch videos than click on the link, showing how important it was for Evisort to provide content for different learning styles. 

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Looking ahead

Armed with more insights, Evisort’s team is looking ahead to the next chapters, for example:

• Creating a holistic onboarding experience for growth customers that takes a task-based approach with an outcome of onboarding new customers within a week. 
• Including more guided workflows in the application at a user level since the platform serves multiple personas with drastically different goals. 

Ultimately the power in Bento is to unlock the vision of the Evisort product and success teams, without battling for limited engineering resources. This autonomy, paired with the speed of iteration, is part of their overall strategy to bring the most modern and delightful contracting experience to their customers.