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Create a "Customer" portal that transforms how our customers interact with us.

We are creating a dedicated customer portal to transform how our customers interact with GitLab, moving from fragmented touch points to a unified, self-service experience. This portals goal is to provide customers with 24 X 7 access to their account information, documentation, and support resources. By empowering customers to find answers independently while maintaining seamless escalation paths when needed, we'll improve both customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

  • Customer Journey end-to-end Mapping

Project

To Create a unified Customer portal that serves as a single destination for all GitLab customer needs. The portal will streamline access to resources, reduce support burden, and deliver a seamless customer experience at GitLab. The Customer portal will tie together all areas (Support, Administrative information, marketing, education, etc.).

Why are we doing this ?

  • Current Challenges Resources are scattered across 40+ locations, creating a fragmented customer experience Manual support intervention frequently required for basic customer needs (e.g., invoice retrieval) Multiple authentication systems without centralized SSO Inefficient processes that create unnecessary friction for customers and internal teams Limited self-service capabilities, especially for usage-based billing customers
  • Strategic Goals Simplify Customer Experience: Provide a single destination for all customer resources and needs Reduce Support Burden: Enable self-service for common customer requests Improve Accessibility: Create intuitive navigation and search across all customer resources Enable Business Growth: Support the evolution to usage-based billing with proper tooling Maintain Brand Consistency: Ensure unified look and feel across all customer touchpoints

What Options are being investigated

As we look at the needs for a customer portal, we want to make sure we are looking at what is available today and where we need to go (Future)

  • Centive.Ai - investigated a third-party option (Cost, etc.available)
    • All in one tool, external resource, Budget considerations, timeline may be longer, internal resources required.
  • Customers Portal (customers.gitlab.com) - already exists.

    • Benefit: Already exists, Can be customized, Minimal Budget Considerations may be less, Dog-fooding

    • Could we use the Customers Portal as it exists today expanded to allow for more information for the customer?
      We currently have a "customers portal" that is driven by fulfillment . 

      Customers Portal is under SOX compliance, so any changes that we make get scrutinized by our compliance team.  This is the reason that I said it's not as customizable.  We can certainly expand customers.gitlab.com to include other functionality, we just need to understand how that might affect compliance

What is in Scope / Out of Scope for this Customer Portal:

Scoping the project, looking at what we need and what we can utilize for resources elsewhere

What do customers need from a Customer portal?

  • Account details (administrative)
  • Billing
  • Case information/ Tickets  (tie with Support Portal) 
  • A way to get help (Ticket)
  • A way to get to documentation, knowledge, community

What should be part of a customer portal today?

We currently have (Billing, Subscription, Invoices) Features, can we expand on others? 

  • Single Sign on - uses gitlab.com today

  • Entitlement -  Using Salesforce?

  • Federated Search 

  • Subscriptions (Available today)

  • Billing   (Available today)

  • Invoices  (Available today)

  • Account Details 

  • Contact us - Submit a ticket

  • Links to other areas - so that the customer can navigate more easily.

  • Customer Support

  • Sales

  • About.Gitlab.com (marketing)

  • Product Documentation

  • Knowledge Base

  • Partner

  • US Gov | Federal

  • GitLab Education (Training)

  • Handbook

Can we change the UX Design to be more aligned with the GitLab look (Docs.gitlab.com, Support.gitlab.com, about.gitlab.com)

As we work through making our customer journey consistent in look and feel could we update the page to be more consistent with about.gitlab.com and/ or docs.gitlab.com?

Alignment

  • Fulfillment - @tgolubeva
  • Entitlement. -
  • UX (Design) - @esybrant
  • SOX Compliance  Team (for changes, questions, etc.)
  • Others ?
  • [ ]

Links:

Edited by Kirsty Allen