Kalv

Engaging with early users to learn Habits

As I've been working to get our startup Goodbits up and running I've been using many different tools to get as much insight on our customers activity. The one tool that I've been using the most has been Kissmetrics which has allowed me to look at specific events or actions that a user carried out on the site. Making it far more useful than the popular choice of Google Analytics or similar.

It has been very important to learn what daily habits our users are carrying out, so the better information I can compile the better I can deduce common usage patterns that I have to improve and refine. Check out this post from Nir which is an interesting read on Habit forming.

Now there is a new kid on the block and I'm loving it. Intercom, a web app that is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Tool on my customers with some serious powerful features.

How it works

Like with most of these services, you drop in a javascript snippet into your application and then set a bunch of settings, the email address of your signed in user, etc. By default Intercom then records information like 'signed up', 'last seen at', the number of 'sessions' & then looks up more information on that customer.

var intercomSettings = {
  app_id: 'app_id',
  email: 'john.doe@example.com', // TODO: User's e-mail address
  created_at: 1234567890, // TODO: User's sign-up date, Unix timestamp
  name: 'John Doe'
};

The added lookup on information is that it uses FullContact to link to their social media profiles, this gives you better insight of the type of user they are. It's great, with a couple of clicks I can see what field this customer works in, how interactive they are with certain social media tools and better understand the types of customers we have using our product.

"Whoa, this feels like getting a message from God"

It doesn't stop there, the interface is very well designed allowing me to filter by data stored for a user and then message them, yep message them. Either directly so that when they next use my site a popup would appear or through email.

I've always hated spam messages from an app I use, this filtering allows me to target specific behavior and I have seen that users engage back with us more than they would with a generic mail shot from MailChimp.

I have more confidence that they will engage back with me. Intercom have a column in their app with a heart in it for relationship.

Getting more from Intercom

You can also add custom information to intercom, which then allows you to further filter your users.

var intercomSettings = {
  // .. add this
  custom_data: {
    'invites sent': 4,
    'has added twitter service': true,
    'number of sections created': 5
  }
};

This can be quite intensive on your to render this data out on every request, so instead of caching it, I am posting this data in a scheduled task hourly using their API and Rubygem

Auto Messaging

You can now set up filters and then create an auto message which be sent out to customers that fall into that filter. I am using this for some great scenarios, ones where I've before written manual code to fire emails.

Constantly improving

They are adding improvements all the time, I wanted auto messages and it was something they released. I wanted to use my custom data in generated messages, deployed and notified. I wanted to easily see the number of emails being sent from their auto messages features, they updated the interface and deployed it. This reaction to customer needs is what I try to do with products I work on, so using a tool that do this for me, is satisfying.

I decided to write this post because Intercom is starting to become a must have for me in building web products. It's starting point in reviewing analytics is great, the customer.