Introducing Insights to Action

The new normal

It’s a cliche in business to say that companies need to stay agile, but in our current situation – well, it’s true. The sea of unknowns we currently face is far, far wider than what we could have imagined even a year or two ago.

Nobody knows when the situation will stabilize. But we do know that the companies that stay agile and move quickly during this period of ferment will come out significantly ahead of those who don’t.

Whether you serve consumers or businesses, the ongoing challenge has always been to gather signal on customer behavior that’s both 1) reliably predictable and 2) immediate enough to make a difference. Both of these are even more acute now. Right now it’s not about the weekly or monthly trend. It’s the daily signal that tells you what the trend is going to be – the micro-trend that gives insight into the macro.

How are companies supposed to do this? At Heap, we’ve always been committed to giving teams a full, autocaptured set of customer data, one that enables teams to fully understand how customers interact with your product. No waiting for engineers to instrument tracking code, no waiting for data to roll in. All the data’s there, all the time. It’s this full data set that provides complete and predictive insight. Want to know if customers are using your site or product in a new way? Because we report on all customer data automatically, it’s easy to grab information and isolate customer trends.

At the same time, we’re aware that bringing data into decision-making isn’t just about having the right data. It’s about making that data useful. Too often, data ends up in departmental silos or is cumbersome to access because it’s too hard to pull out of the tool.

These aren’t just problems of communication; they’re problems of agility and speed. A classic silo issue happens when Product and Customer Success teams use different information to evaluate “account health.” One may rely on customer interviews, the other on transactional data; teams tend to engage different definitions of adoption. The result? Mismatched or competing priorities and execution. Instead of moving quickly, you’re trying to fix alignment. You’re no longer a well-oiled machine; you’re mismatched contestants lashed together in a three-legged race.

Similarly, data sitting in different tools slows things down further. Finding resources to integrate data sources and make insights more accessible adds even more time and confusion.

It’s this set of problems – giving companies a complete, predictive set of customer data; making that data easy to access and use; helping companies eliminate siloed activity – that our latest launch is designed to address. Our two new features, Salesforce Data Connector and Report Alerts, were both built to make it easy to bring Heap data into your existing workflows, so that it’s shared, available, and complete. By eliminating the friction inherent in searching for data, logging into new tools, and having to remember to check dashboards, these features give the whole company immediate access to predictive data, allowing the org as a whole to move quickly and act on information as it comes in.

Bringing data into decision-making isn’t just about having the right data. It’s about making that data useful.

Together, these features take our complete, autocaptured set of customer data and make it accessible to the entire org. Lots of tools talk about agility. But allowing the entire company to anticipate trends and move quickly as a unit? That’s what agility means.

Here’s how.

Salesforce Data Connector The Salesforce Data Connector automatically syncs product event data to Salesforce contacts and accounts. The integration requires zero engineering investment, and zero technical resources for ETL development or instrumentation.

When Sales, service, and operations teams log into Salesforce, they’ll be able to access – without leaving Salesforce! – a complete view of customer adoption, engagement, and on-going usage of your product. Individuals and teams can immediately see how any given customer or account is engaging with your product, and can measure these against other customers and accounts.

Thanks to the Salesforce Data Connector, teams can immediately identify at-risk customers and engage them quickly. Rather than waiting for QBRs or feedback surveys, teams can have product usage events trigger outreach activities or campaigns for at-risk accounts. The best part: these activities all happen inside Salesforce, Gainsight, and the tools and workflows your customer success team already uses. This gives teams the opportunity to be proactive, rather than reactive when prioritizing efforts.

More importantly, it helps spread shared data across the company. Even if your customer success team is working in Gainsight, Sales is working in Salesforce, and Product is working in Heap, they’ll all be looking at the same data. Power Customer Segmentation or Account Health scores with granular usage metrics based on how prospects and customers actually interact with your product. You have the control and flexibility to customize the metrics within Heap and then surface these insights in Salesforce.

Teams maximize efficiency by using their current tools, but can act collectively and more effectively with a common view of product usage and insights Account Health scores can not only be based on actual usage data, rather than customer interviews, feedback surveys, and the like – those scores can be the same for everyone in the company. Teams can use whatever tools they want, but can prioritize and act from the same shared pool of information.

This is a game-changer not only for customer success and services teams, but for the larger organization.

Heap will be continuing to expand our ecosystem of Data Connectors to ensure customer behavioral insights can be leveraged across the organization.

Learn more about the Salesforce Data Connector

Report Alerts Report alerts allow teams to keep a constant eye on key indicators of website performance. Users can set alerts on any event and have Heap send a message via email or slack when a report’s value changes by a specified amount. There’s no need to even engage web development resources.

With Report Alerts, users can trust that until they receive an alert, flows and features are healthy, and that when things break, they’ll know immediately. It ensures you’ll get the information you need, and that information will reach all the people it needs to reach, immediately. This means faster information, shared across the team.

Powered by Heap’s autocaptured data set, users can quickly set up alerts for newly created events and still capture historical data, instead of waiting weeks to collect new data to understand trends as in other products.

As product and digital teams are iterating even more rapidly and releasing features and pages, Report Alerts are a key tool for keeping track of everything, being able to spot issues quickly, communicate information to the right teams, resolve issues effectively, and minimize revenue loss.

We typically see breakages in conversion flow every 6 weeks. Heap helps us identify, communicate and resolve issues faster. For example, even a 10% improvement in preventing breakages in our conversion rate translates into ~$1M in loan originations. Matt Gomes, Opploans Learn more about Report Alerts

Grasping the future Companies no longer have the luxury of waiting for macro-indicators to stabilize. They need to be “sensing” micro-trends and ensuring those insights are embedded at every level of the organization. We are excited to ensure Heap insights not only reach more users – but also bring these insights directly into the tools where teams are already collaborating to improve responsiveness.