Leveraging Customer Messaging Platform to Understand Product Pain-points
All of us are continually striving to understand user behavior and solve their pain-points. While there are many ways to do this — user studies, interviews, design sprints etc. — The messaging platform which our support teams use to talk to customers can also be a great tool to analyze user behavior. It just requires some patience initially to go through all the conversations and a need for a standard process to make it sorted for future (Hint — automation) :)
We, at Townscript, use Intercom for customer messaging. It has been embedded in our user Dashboard .i.e. logged-in users can talk to our support team round the clock using Intercom.
To start off, I have read all the conversations in our Intercom of the past three months (1000+ conversations). As all the conversations will not be useful in the product perspective, I have documented all the pain-points/queries related to product told by users in Excel sheet.
After gathering more than a sufficient number of data points in the sheet, I have tried to categorize the messages in broad buckets. What I understood is generally when a high priority bug creeps into the system, there is a low probability that customers intimate team on Messaging platform. She/He will immediately escalate the situation on call/email or the worst-case social media :D
Coming back to broad buckets, here are three major categories which I figured out:
Bug: As pointed above, there are not many data points present in this bucket.
Feature Unclear: Customer conversations can be a gold mine to analyze if users are really understanding and using the features we build as they are supposed to be. Interestingly, there are a lot of questions and doubts raised by customers, which lead to considerable time waste of support team.
Example: At Townscript, we have built a robust KYC system for Organizers to ensure no fraudulent Events are happening on the platform. A new organizer who has filled her KYC details will naturally be eager to know when will the KYC status change to “VERIFIED”.
Almost 95% per cent of new organizers after filling KYC details would immediately message support team on Intercom asking when will the status change. The standard response of the team would be “Please wait for 24–48 hours for the status to change”.
A simple way to avoid all these conversations and anxiety of organizers is to communicate the above message as part of the KYC flow itself. We could simply show the, “please wait for 24–48 hours” message after users submit their KYC details.
New feature request: Some times, our customers come up with genuine pain from their side, which can lead to a useful feature building.
Example: At Townscript, we want organizers to create events in a hassle-free manner without any confusion at all. This is one of the most critical funnels for us. To make this experience easier for organizers, we have deliberately let go off some features as part of Event Creation. Though these features are present once the event is created.
One such feature which we did not include in Event Creation is “Edit Ticket” .i.e. Organizer will not be able to edit the details of the ticket(s) she has created during event creation. Sometimes, organizers make mistakes (After all, they are humans just like us) and would want to modify ticket details. Since new organizers do not know that they can do these modifications after event creation, they panic and immediately message support on Intercom asking what to do now :) The organizer is now stuck and that too in the most crucial funnel — Event Creation!
We are launching Edit Ticket in Event Creation very soon.
Here is the summary pie-chart of the gathered data points :
Some bonus tips for Intercom users :
1. Automation -> Tag messages: Intercom has a feature of tagging messages. We have created the above categories as tags, additionally support team is free to use feature tags too (For example — event creation, KYC flow etc.) Intercom has API’s which can be used to fetch tagged conversations and all the details associated with it.
We are building a feature for our internal team purpose, where we can view all the tagged conversations with the date and feature filters.
Exclusive sneak peek:
2. Reducing pricing: Intercom has a feature called — “Archive user”. When a user is archived, he will not count towards billing of that month. Intercom charges are based on the average number of users (.i.e. organizers in our case).
When an organizer signs up on Townscript, his object is created on Intercom also (with bare minimum details — no privacy compromise here). But not all these users message on Intercom, also some of them do not log in more than twice too. So based on the number of their “sessions”, these inactive number of users can be archived (Intercom has API to do this) regularly. This can help in reducing the billing amount.
What Next
We are going to monitor intercom tagged conversations regularly, which will be useful for a better understanding of our product and organizers too. :)
