To make the most of this guide, you’ll need a baseline understanding of key concepts like events, charts, and properties. If you are still learning about Heap (meaning those terms don’t mean anything to you), we recommend taking our Hello Heap course or reviewing our Setting Up Heap guide prior to jumping into this guide.
Introduction
Heap can help you identify areas of key funnels so you can lower your support costs. Use this guide to measure the impact of friction in your app on your organization’s support costs.
If you’re new to analysis in Heap, we recommend reviewing Create Your First Chart, which covers helpful charts 101 info.
Step 1: Label your “Support” event and identify desired funnels
First, you’ll want to determine what event indicates the Support Team has been contacted, and define it in Heap. Common events are “Contact Us” “Contact Support” or even a simple “Help” button. You will use this event to establish a baseline of the amount of support tickets.
You’ll then want to begin focusing on key funnels that may trigger a support ticket. Common funnels to analyze are new user onboarding flows and password resets.
Not sure of which funnel to focus on?
You can also do some preliminary analysis via a Journeys chart.
Step 2: Analyze your features!
Once you’ve defined what it means to contact support, it’s time to understand the support calls triggered by this funnel and uncover key steps that lead to drop-off. These charts will allow you to do just that.
Charts 1-3: Establish baseline metrics around Support
To start off, set up the following charts for some baseline metrics:
- A usage over time chart measuring counts of your “Contact Support” event, with a comparison to an appropriate time frame in the past.
- A usage over time chart measuring counts of your “Contact Support” event and count unique of the same event.
- A two-step funnel chart using the first step in your funnel and the support event. For example, you can build a funnel: Step 1 “Click forgot password” > Step 2 “Click Contact Us”.
What do these tell you?
These charts will tell you the percentage of users that begin a certain flow that end up having to contact support. This will help give you a baseline of the support burden you can help reduce.
Chart 4: Understand drop-off points
Next, set up one full funnel chart for the journey you’re analyzing. Make sure to include all of the key steps your users would go through.
What does this tell you?
This will give you a summary of the steps with the largest drop-offs or highest areas of friction.
Chart 5: Understand your conversion rate number
With the context from the charts above, set up another usage over time chart to measure the conversion rate between “Contact Support” and the last step in your funnel from chart 4.
What does this tell you?
This chart can give you an idea of the impact of support on completion of your funnel, and give you the number of users who successfully converted. Of all of the users who contacted support, how likely were they to finish the flow they were stuck in?
Measure support ticket info
Additional support team and support ticket properties brought into Heap can help you get even more granular in your analysis here. Things like number of submitted tickets, open tickets or even closed tickets can be helpful in understanding user behaviors and need of support and the impact support had on their successs.
Chart 6: influence of support team
Last but not least, set up an influence chart with the last step of your funnel as your conversion goal, and a single touchpoint of “Contact Support”.
What does this tell you?
This chart can help you understand the impact the Support Team has on conversion. Directly compare the impact of Support by adding additional touchpoints, such as views of help center pages, your marketing blog, or anything else that may help customers successfully make it through the desired funnel.
Amount property
If there is a cost associated with the Conversion Goal, be sure to incorporate it into this chart so you can have a dollar amount associated with the impact of the Support Team.
Step 3: Interpret your results and take action
Once you’ve identified the areas of highest friction in your funnel, you can begin testing your hypothesis on the reason for the drop-off. Many PMs validate their hypothesis through A/B tests, which you can also measure in Heap.
Check out our how-to guide on setting up A/B testing in Heap or our guide on Using A/B Testing to Improve Usage.
You can also utilize in-app guides to better enable your users to get through the funnel. You’ll be able to measure the impact of the changes you make on your support burden by revisiting the first funnel you created. The guide Measure the Impact of an In-App Guide walks through setting up guides, as well as recommended charts to set up to measure the effectiveness of these in-app guides.
Conclusion
Reducing friction in key funnels in your app is a great way to reduce support costs for your organization and keep your users happy.