Lean Support: The Case of HoloBuilder

When I started working on HoloBuilder.com over a year ago, there was no support. Of course, we would’ve immediately helped anyone who sent us a question via e-mail or Twitter, but those options weren’t communicated anywhere. Users accessing HoloBuilder ended up directly in our augmented/virtual reality creator, the only way for communication with us being a “leave feedback” option indicated by a line chart icon. However, “leaving feedback” is definitely not the same as “getting support” or “getting help”. Thus, following my UX rule #1, support functionality was de facto nonexistent. Also, we had neither a knowledge base nor a collection of FAQs, no support personnel and user feedback was still pretty rare.

Hence, due to the limited resources in a start-up, we decided for a lean support approach. That is, we rolled out HoloBuilder support in small pieces, treating every stage like a minimum viable product (this is also what Nate Munger describes on Quora).

Making Support Visible

First, we added a “?” icon next to the feedback option, which was visible at any time and clearly showed the user that they could get help. Since there were no FAQs available yet, clicking the new support option simply instructed the user to send their question via e-mail or Twitter. As you can see, we changed nothing about our support back-end, but we finally made the possibility to get help visible to the user, which is already a huge gain. This was confirmed by an increasing number of relevant support request that reached us in terms of e-mails and tweets.

Growing a Knowledge Base on Demand

Second, to continually grow a knowledge base, we created a blog for development news and tutorials, which can be found at createholo.com. In that blog, we publish solutions to (potential) problems on demand, i.e., when users get back to us with questions or when new HoloBuilder features are released. CreateHolo was then linked as “Tutorials” on our new landing pages, which we created to provide users with some introductory information and help before being confronted with the AR/VR creator itself. However, through heat map analyses, we found that the tutorials gained more attention when changing the link text to “Help & Tutorials”. This indicates that “help” is still the major keyword when it comes to support.

Adding Channels

In the next step, we integrated a tawk.to live chat into our HoloBuilder pricing page as soon as it went live in January 2016. In this way, we established a third feedback channel in our support back-end with almost all of our employees acting as support agents, thus providing a more direct and personal connection to users with urgent questions. Since our experiences with the live chat feature have been consistently positive so far, we plan to extend it to our different landing pages as well in the future.

Collecting & Organizing Feedback

Finally, all questions and pieces of feedback we receive through our three support channels—e-mail, Twitter and live chat—are collected and organized in a dedicated Trello board. Based on that board, on a regular basis, we decide on feature requests, tutorials to be written and continuously grow the aforementioned knowledge base. The FAQs collected in that knowledge base are at the same time treated as a list of to-dos for our internal UX team. Some particularly crucial FAQs are already featured on the HoloBuilder pricing page. Interaction with those FAQs is tracked anonymously to find out what users struggle with most. Interestingly, interactions seem to be not overly influenced by position bias since FAQ #8 at the very bottom receives the second-highest attention in terms of clicks.

To conclude, by following a lean support approach, we have established a well-working process and a convincing customer success rate within a year, without additional resources or personnel. The next big milestone of our process of implementing lean support for HoloBuilder will be the release of our knowledge base, so that we can provide an on-page support experience that’s just as awesome as MailChimp’s (disclaimer: I’m a fan).

This article is dedicated to Anna, our awesome support ninja.