From zero to self-serve: how Carepatron built a complete customer experience layer from scratch

The situation

Carepatron is a fast-growing practice management platform built for healthcare professionals. By the time they came to Tovana, they had a product users loved — but nothing in place to help those users figure it out on their own. No help center. No onboarding flows. No support automations. Every question, no matter how simple, was landing with the team.

For a product in a regulated, high-stakes industry like healthcare, that’s a particularly acute problem. Users who don’t understand how to use a practice management tool don’t just churn — they lose confidence in the product entirely. Carepatron needed a complete self-serve layer, built from the ground up, that could match the quality and seriousness of what they’d built.

The approach

We started with a full audit of their product and the support conversations they were having — identifying the most common points of confusion, the questions that kept repeating, and the moments in the user journey where confidence was dropping. That audit shaped everything we built.

Rather than building in isolation, we designed the three layers of their self-serve experience to work together: the help center as the always-available reference point, the in-app onboarding as the guided first experience, and the support automations as the safety net that caught what the other two didn’t.

What we built

Help center and support automations — Intercom

We built Carepatron’s complete help center in Intercom — information architecture, article writing, and full configuration. Articles were written in plain language suited to healthcare professionals who are experts in their field but not necessarily in practice management software. We set up support automations to surface the right content at the right moment, resolving common queries before they reached the team.

In-app onboarding and product adoption — Appcues

We designed and built the full in-app onboarding experience in Appcues — flows, checklists, and tooltips that guided new users from signup to their first meaningful moment in the product. Onboarding was structured around the jobs users were trying to do, not around the product’s feature list. We also built product adoption flows for key features that needed higher engagement beyond the initial onboarding.

Analytics and monitoring — Posthog

We set up Posthog to give the team visibility into how users were moving through the product — where they were succeeding, where they were dropping off, and which parts of the onboarding were working. That data layer meant the work didn’t stop at launch: it gave Carepatron a foundation to keep iterating from evidence rather than instinct.

The result

Carepatron went from handling all support manually to running a self-serve system that resolves the majority of common queries without human intervention. New users now move through a structured onboarding experience that gets them to value without a team member on the other end. And for the first time, the team has real visibility into how users are engaging with the product.

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“Tovana was very good at identifying the best opportunities to improve customer success. Their combined knowledge of CX and product helped us meet customers at the right time and place. They applied the necessary tool stack for every interaction and made sure it was backed up by data.”

— Kate, Marketing Lead — Carepatron

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