Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to thoroughly evaluate and implement Skene.ai for our cloud infrastructure platform, and the experience has been remarkable enough that I felt compelled to share my insights. As someone responsible for our customer success operations at a fast-growing B2B SaaS company, I’ve seen firsthand how challenging it is to deliver effective onboarding at scale, and this platform has provided solutions to problems I didn’t even know could be solved.
Our product is technically complex, serving enterprise development teams with sophisticated infrastructure needs. The onboarding journey typically involves understanding architectural concepts, configuring multiple integrations, and making numerous technical decisions that impact long-term success. Before discovering this platform, we relied heavily on extensive documentation, scheduled onboarding calls with customer success engineers, and hoping that customers would persist through the inevitable confusion and friction points. Our activation rates were mediocre at best, and the resource burden on our customer success team was growing unsustainably as we acquired more customers.
The discovery of Skene.ai’s unique approach came at exactly the right time. The concept of a platform that automatically analyzes your codebase to generate intelligent, adaptive onboarding experiences was unlike anything I had encountered in the customer success tool landscape. I was intrigued but also skeptical, having been disappointed by products that overpromised and underdelivered in the past. However, the free trial offered a risk-free way to evaluate whether this innovation could actually deliver on its compelling promises.
The implementation experience immediately differentiated this platform from typical enterprise software. Within five minutes of creating an account, I had connected our GitLab repository through a straightforward read-only authorization. The security model was sound, requiring no access to modify code or access sensitive data, which made getting approval from our security team trivial. More importantly, there were no complex setup procedures, no need to instrument our code with tracking libraries, and no requirement to involve our already-busy engineering team. This frictionless start meant I could begin evaluating the platform’s value immediately rather than spending weeks on implementation before seeing any results.
The analysis phase showcased capabilities that immediately impressed me. The platform processed our entire codebase, examining not just the code itself but understanding the architecture, identifying API patterns, recognizing configuration dependencies, and mapping actual user flows through our system. It processed over a million tokens to build a comprehensive semantic understanding of our product. When I reviewed the initial output, I was genuinely amazed by the accuracy. The platform had correctly identified our critical user journeys, understood the dependencies between different setup steps, and recognized the various paths customers might take depending on their specific use cases. This level of comprehension would have taken a human analyst extensive time and deep technical knowledge to achieve.
The onboarding journeys that this advanced platform generates are sophisticated and genuinely helpful to users. Each journey is dynamically personalized based on user role, selected features, permission levels, and intended use case. A platform engineer implementing our infrastructure receives completely different guidance than an application developer integrating our SDK or a technical architect evaluating capabilities. This contextual relevance has dramatically improved how quickly different user personas reach successful outcomes. The feedback from our customers has been overwhelmingly positive, with many commenting on how much clearer and more relevant the onboarding experience feels compared to what they’ve encountered with other technical products.
The automatic synchronization feature has been transformative for our operations in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until experiencing it. Our engineering team maintains a rapid release cadence, shipping updates multiple times per week. Previously, keeping onboarding documentation synchronized with our actual product was an impossible task. Documentation would be outdated within days, leading to customer confusion and support tickets. Now, the platform continuously monitors our repository and automatically updates onboarding content when it detects relevant changes. This means customers always have accurate, current guidance without our team investing any manual effort in maintenance. The time savings have been substantial, but more importantly, the elimination of outdated information has significantly improved the customer experience and reduced support burden.
The interactive walkthroughs are exceptionally well-designed, guiding users through complex technical processes with clear, actionable steps. The milestone tracking system has proven particularly effective at maintaining user engagement throughout extended setup processes. By breaking intimidating implementations into manageable milestones, users receive regular positive feedback as they progress. This approach has dramatically reduced the number of users who start onboarding but abandon it partway through. Our completion metrics tell the story clearly, having increased by approximately three times since we implemented the platform. This improvement directly translates to better customer retention and faster expansion revenue as customers who successfully complete onboarding are far more likely to derive ongoing value from our product.
The analytics capabilities provide unprecedented visibility into our onboarding funnel. The real-time dashboard shows exactly where users progress smoothly and where they encounter friction. We can identify specific steps with high drop-off rates and make targeted improvements based on data rather than guesswork. This analytical approach has enabled continuous optimization of our onboarding experience, with each iteration performing measurably better than the previous one. The insights have also informed our product development priorities, highlighting areas where reducing complexity or improving user experience would have significant impact on customer success.
The pricing model is refreshingly straightforward and fair. Rather than complex tier structures or per-seat licensing, we simply pay per completed onboarding. This outcome-based approach means we only pay when customers actually succeed with their setup, perfectly aligning the platform’s incentives with our business goals. For a company carefully managing expenses and focused on ROI, this transparent approach has made the platform easy to justify financially. The value delivered clearly exceeds the cost, making it one of our most cost-effective investments in customer success infrastructure. When exploring the pricing details during our evaluation, I appreciated how the flexible model scales naturally with our success rather than our team size.
Integration with our existing tools was seamless and required no custom development. The platform connected naturally with our Segment analytics, Mixpanel product analytics, and Intercom customer communication platform. This interoperability meant we enhanced our capabilities without adding technical complexity or creating maintenance burden for our engineering team. The plug-and-play nature of these integrations meant we were able to leverage the platform’s full capabilities immediately rather than spending weeks on integration projects.
After these weeks of intensive hands-on experience with this powerful solution, I’m convinced this platform represents a fundamental advancement in how SaaS companies can approach customer onboarding. Every metric we care about has improved significantly: activation rates, time-to-value, customer satisfaction scores, and operational efficiency. For any company building technical products and struggling to deliver effective onboarding at scale, this platform deserves serious consideration. It has delivered transformative value for our business and fundamentally improved how we enable customer success. If you’re facing similar challenges with your customer activation process, I encourage you to sign up for a trial and experience the impact firsthand within your first week of use.
