Measure the impact of friction in your app on your organization’s support costs. Heap can help identify areas to streamline on key funnels to help lower your support costs
Step 1: Define your “Support” event and identify desired funnels
You’ll first want to determine what event indicates the Support Team is being 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 Paths and run a report to see common paths into your support event.
Step 2: Analyze your features!
Now it’s time to understand the support calls triggered by this funnel and uncover key steps that lead to drop off.
| Queries #1-3 | Establish baseline metrics around Support |
|---|---|
| Graph | – Count “Contact Support” – Add Comparison and select appropriate comparison period |
| Graph | – Count “Contact Support” – Add Graph – Count Unique “Contact Support” |
| Funnel | Funnel report: Create a two step funnel 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” |
This will tell you the percentage of users that begin a certain flow that end up needing to contact support. This will help give you a baseline of the support burden you can help reduce
| Query #4 | Understand Drop Off Points |
|---|
| Funnel | Funnel report: Create the full funnel you’re analyzing and make sure to include the key steps your users would go through |
This will give you a summary of the steps with the largest drop offs or highest areas of friction.
| Query #5 | Understand Conversion Rate Number |
|---|
| Graph | -Conversion Rate Between “Contact Support” and last step in funnel from query #4 |
What does this tell you?
This report 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 users who contacted support, how likely were they to finish the flow they were stuck in?
Note
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.
| Query #6 | Influence of Support Team |
|---|
| Influence | – Conversion Goal: Last step in funnel – Touchpoints: “Contact Support” as a single touchpoint |
What does this tell you?
This report can help you understand the impact the Support Team has on conversion. Directly compare impact of Support by adding additional touchpoints such as help center pages, 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 query 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 article on A/B testing, or the Heap Play: 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 funnel you created in Query 1. The Heap Play: Measure the Impact of an In-App Guide talks through setting up guides as well as the recommended queries to analyze.
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.