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The DIY Onboarding Playbook: Slash Support Tickets with a Self-Hosted Product Tour

Your support team is drowning in a sea of repetitive questions about basic setup and feature discovery. This constant hand-holding burns through resources, prevents your team from tackling high-impact issues, and puts new customers on a fast track to frustration and churn.

For technically proficient teams on a tight budget, this playbook details how to implement a powerful, self-hosted product tour system using free, open-source tools. Build in-app guidance with Shepherd.js to directly address common user questions at the source. By pairing it with a self-hosted Matomo analytics instance, you gain full control over your data and can precisely measure tour effectiveness to continuously improve your onboarding flow.

Expected Outcomes

  • Drastically reduce the volume of repetitive 'how-to' support tickets and emails.
  • Improve new user activation and feature adoption by providing contextual, in-app guidance.
  • Empower customers with self-service tools, leading to higher satisfaction and lower churn risk.
  • Eliminate recurring subscription fees from expensive third-party tour and analytics providers.

Core Tools in This Stack

Shepherd.js

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Shepherd.js is a free, open-source JavaScript library for guiding users through your app. It's highly customizable, accessible (WCAG 2.0 compliant), and framework-agnostic, allowing you to create engaging product tours and user onboarding flows.

Key Features
  • Highly Customizable Theming
  • Framework Agnostic (React, Vue, Angular, Ember wrappers)
  • WCAG 2.0 Accessibility Compliant
  • Keyboard Navigation
  • Tour Events API
  • Conditional Step Logic
Ideal For

Company Size: Micro

Industries: Technology & Software, Business & Professional Services, Retail & E-commerce, Creative & Media, Education & Non-Profit, Health & Wellness, Other

Pricing

Model: Free, Open Source

Tier: Free

Ease of Use

Medium

Matomo

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Matomo is a powerful open-source web analytics platform that provides a privacy-conscious alternative to Google Analytics. It gives you 100% data ownership and can be hosted on your own servers (On-Premise) or used via their cloud service.

Key Features
  • 100% Data Ownership
  • No Data Sampling
  • Privacy by Design (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA compliant)
  • On-Premise (Self-hosted) & Cloud options
  • Customizable Dashboards and Reports
  • Heatmaps & Session Recordings
  • A/B Testing Platform
  • Funnels & Goal Conversion Tracking
  • Form Analytics
  • Google Analytics Data Importer
Ideal For

Company Size: Micro, Small, Medium, Large

Industries: Technology & Software, Business & Professional Services, Retail & E-commerce, Creative & Media, Education & Non-Profit, Health & Wellness, Other

Pricing

Model: Free, Subscription

Tier: Mid-Range

Ease of Use

Moderate

The Workflow

graph TD subgraph "Self-Hosted Open-Source Tour" direction LR N0["Shepherd.js"] N1["Matomo"] N0 -- "Sends tour interaction events" --> N1 end classDef blue fill:#3498db,stroke:#2980b9,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; classDef green fill:#2ecc71,stroke:#27ae60,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; classDef orange fill:#f39c12,stroke:#d35400,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; class N0 blue; class N1 blue;

Integration Logic

  • Shepherd-Matomo Custom Event Tracking

    This integration leverages Shepherd.js's built-in event system. A custom JavaScript snippet listens for specific Shepherd tour events (e.g., `show`, `next`, `complete`, `cancel`). When one of these events is triggered by a user's interaction with the tour, the script calls Matomo's `_paq.push(['trackEvent', ...])` function. It sends structured data—typically the tour name, the specific step ID, and the action taken—to Matomo as a custom event, which can then be analyzed in the Matomo dashboard.

Get the Self-Serve Onboarding Playbook

Learn how to slash support tickets and reduce customer churn with a DIY product tour.