I’ve been a 1Password user for years. My whole family is on it. So when I decided to audit their customer experience end-to-end, I wasn’t going in cold.
I was going in as a customer who actually cares.
The good stuff is real
Their help center search is the main CTA with autofocus. Cursor lands right in the search bar. That’s not an accident. That’s someone who thought about the first thing a frustrated customer does when they land on a support page.
The chatbot (Ada) does something I’ve genuinely never seen before: after you establish your persona, it immediately surfaces any active service degradation. Before you even type a question. That’s deflection done right. Answering the question before it gets asked.
Knowledge articles are clean. White space. Images. Last published date visible. Article feedback tracked. Someone on that team knows what they’re doing.
But here’s where it falls apart
Everything is siloed.
The help center search only returns support articles. Not community answers. Not Academy content. Not docs. Not feature requests. Separate knowledge bases. Separate logins. Events that bounce you to a Zoom URL to register. A podcast nobody can find. An Academy that never once surfaced during my entire customer journey.
Every one of those disconnected pieces is a fork in the road.
And every fork is a customer you lost before they got their answer.
The fix isn’t complicated
One unified search. Community as the hub. Single login. Surface the Academy, the podcast, the blog everywhere—not just in the footer. Pre-fill the chatbot when someone escalates from search. Own the full journey instead of handing pieces of it to Zoom.
1Password is closer to getting this right than most companies at this size. The foundation is strong. The intent is there. But strong intent plus disconnected execution still equals a broken customer journey.
Hope you enjoyed the breakdown. If there’s a company you want me to look at next, drop it in the YouTube comments or hit me on X. I read everything.