Replacing the walkthrough video for online SaaS
As an online SaaS business, what do you do when customers need step-by-step support?
- Write a step by step text guide?
- Create a series of annotated pictures?
- Shoot a video walkthrough?
For staff these are time consuming to prepare and keep up to date
For the customer they're the headache of switching back and forth between browser tabs.. as they try to remember what they saw in that walkthrough video 3 minutes before..
It shouldn't be this way..
Instead, interactive walkthroughs can allow customers to self-service, solving their problems directly on your website. Helpful tool tips, educate and guide your customer through each step until they reach the solution. It's the same technology that has been widely adopted in onboarding, but applied to a new problem - customer support!
The results:
- Happy customers who are able to solve their own problems
- Knowledgeable customers who are more likely to adopt your product
- Fewer customer support queries
The way I see it working is customers click a custom URL, which brings them into the walkthrough flow. Walkthroughs are made using a browser widget - no coding required. The tech exists so I am sure this can be built. Not sure about the market though.
Feedback appreciated!
Do you have a use case for it?
I am trying to get in front of Customer Support decision makers - any ideas where they congregate, before I switch to cold email?
Thanks
Hi there,
as someone who has been in this space for the last 9 years (onboarding, digital adoption platforms with a SaaS called InlineManual.com ), I can confirm this is useful and there are plenty of use cases where you can use this. From my point of view, at this time, it is like asking whether there someone would use ride-hailing app (Uber, Lyft,...).
As for the concept - you can for example send a link with a parameter which would trigger a walkthrough. You can send that link in a chat, in an email, etc... You could trigger that through a campaign, e.g. someone is on a specific page, it will trigger based on the rules. Add to it contextual triggers in a form of little question mark icons to provide help where needed, and many more.
No need to validate this concept, it is there, it is working, people are looking for such things. Look into the market, see how you can make it better and offer better tool than others. Recently the market became quite saturated and people who are looking for such solution are evaluating sometimes up to 30 (!) providers.
Hope it helps. :)
Hi Marek,
Thanks for the feedback - really amazing to get your insights!
From the outside looking in, what I had been thinking was that tools such as yours are well adopted for onboarding in particular. As you say the space is crowded with WalkMe, UserPilot, Stonly, Inline Manual(!) etc. However it seems like most of the players position around being the solution for onboarding - because the market is proven and people are looking for a solution like yours for this problem.
Instead, what I am thinking about is making a positioning play, where I focus solely on a specific under represented use case - the customer support use case and build a tool which tries to be the best for this application of the tech. When I look at your lovely site for example, you seem to offer something a bit like this.. but it's not positioned so clearly.. instead it appears to focus more on supporting your own staff on an internal knowledgebase (https://inlinemanual.com/in-app-help/ ), but to me this seems like only a subset of the customers? Surely I am missing something here? What about allowing customer support staff to create flows for their most common customer queries for external customers (the links could be placed in a knowledgebase, FAQ page, or sent via DM by customer support staff). You could even create custom flows for high value customers with a specific problem? Have you had many customers using Inline Manual in this specific way? From checking your site and many others, I feel that if a newcomer was specifically looking to solve a customer support problem - I am not sure they would easily understand your product was a potential solution. Maybe, this is because the current solution (creating walkthrough videos / step-by-step guides for the most common customer queries) is a good enough solution, and nobody cares for the use case I am discussing?
Thanks again for your input, really awesome!
Sam
Actually, if you would like to go in that direction (it seems you have got already a working solution of some sorts), and would like to target "support" only, you would want to think about the larger scope/ecosystem of the company willing to use this.
Most of the companies have knowledge base, are you going to connect to it? You should, because the users might be searching through the knowledge base widget, will they find your content there too? How will they meassure success of those? You would need to have analytics, ideally plugged into CSAT score whatever they are using, etc... And then before you know it, customers will start asking you, whether it is possible to trigger it based on the rules (automation), etc... :) Then what about publishing flow, and so on... I don't want to put you off, it is where we started years ago, focus on in-app help/knowledge base. Not onboarding. But onboarding became main part of our business, because organically it went there - customers were heading there and they see more value in it. Easier to sell, easier to maintain, easier to show the value.
Hey Sam,
that is exactly that bit: "Guide users through problematic parts of the software". We integrate with 3rd party apps, such as Workday, Oracle, Salesforce, etc... that is the whole Digital Adoption Platform space. Running walkthroughs on top of another website / or yours.
And when it comes to onboarding, the customers understand that walkthroughs are for in-app support too. There is no doubt about that. We have customers looking for knowledge base, guides, anything right within the app. I would say after the years, customers/prospects are already well educated on this.
The problem however is, that walkthroughs are hard to manage. The more you have, the harder it is to keep them up to date. It is much easier to keep up to date a knowledge base than walkthroughs that are attached to elements. Then you have dynamic products, with different access roles, so the user sees different UI, UI can regenerate with every page load, etc... I would be able to talk about millions of scenarios we have encountered during the last 9 years (and adapted to in most of the cases). :)
Hi Marek,
Really appreciate this feedback. Now it clicks - that's why you're called "Inline Manual", so you started there and moved over. Very, very interesting!
Targeting companies with knowledges bases was part of my plan, I was looking to reach knowledge base managers on linkedin - I was going to go cold reach out as I couldn't find a place to easily reach them. The idea was to try and get flows inserted onto those knowledge bases as links, which triggered the flow. However, probably my understanding of the industry and level of sophistication is a bit naive based on your comments.
I also had an idea about even hitting customer support for small-medium SaaS with a query, getting an answer and sending them the answer back as an inline walkthrough to show how it could be better and get a conversation going (but this required the MVP and I don't want to build without some good signals).
Hearing about the walkthroughs being hard to manage is interesting. I had a feeling that could get messy, I was hoping there might be a way to set it up so that a flow at least can self-test itself (a bit like a rails test) and know if it's "broken" or needs updating - to at least make managing it a bit easier. However, I can imagine with all the different use cases and services, permissions, it would get very tricky.
I am going to percolate on this for a while. Thanks a lot plenty to think about here!
Best wishes,
Sam
I am not sure, if someone is still reading this thread, but I would definitely suggest to try Ziplyne, it is there in the market since2017.
I do represent Ziplyne, and would love to show around if need be.
While I do think it's hypothetically possible, I believe it's insanely hard to implement. You'd need to integrate with every possible JS framework, not to mention constantly changing code, UI, workflow.
You would need a team of hard core programmers, and even then results aren't guaranteed.
Thanks for writing. Actually the tech is proven - it's exactly the same tech we use for running onboarding. I have a similar codebase for something else we built and could have an MVP in 2-3 weeks.
What I really want to understand is if anyone would actually use it in the use case I am talking about, before building out.
For example, customer writes into Amazon and says "how do I add a secondary shipping address and set it as my default shipping address", rather than the rep writing:
Step 1. Login to your account
Step 2. Go to the account panel by clicking the cog in the top left corner
Step 3. Find the billing and addresses section and click on it
Step 4. Click add new shipping address
Step 5. Fill out xyz
Step 6. Click confirm
Step 7. etc
Step 8. etc
They say "click this link and we'll walk you through it" and instead the customer is actively doing it in the page and working towards the solution, all whilst improving their understanding of the service - which can only be good for Amazon?
Do you have any thoughts on the use case? Thanks again for reaching out.
I understood from the get-go what you mean. I just think it's far from waaay more complex than you think.
Clearly, I may be wrong :)
I do understand the use for this -- not for me, since I have a desktop app, but for websites. The whole point is (at least in my mind) integration with the website's code, to understand what step the user is at, and provide hints, etc.
Good luck!
Thanks, I think you're right! It's usually more complicated than I think! ;)