Echosec saves two sprints of maintenance work in a year

About Echosec:

As shelter-in-place and work-from-home mandates spread across the world, employees quickly shifted from traditional corporate offices to remote environments. For many teams, this transition came with challenges in communication and collaboration. Through it all, the team at Echosec realized it could use product analytics to reduce costs and improve feature usage. To learn more about their experience, we spoke to Erin Kerr, a Product Manager at EchoSec.

“One way we’ve been able to cut down on costs over this time is by identifying features that are no longer worth maintaining. Using data and the Paths tool in Heap helps us compare a feature we’re considering removing with the alternative paths that users could take. It also shows us what other users of that feature are doing after they use it."

"This type of data helps us identify low-usage features and gives us an idea of how users who use that feature might be impacted if it were removed. From here, we can make sure that the user’s goal is still achievable without this feature and make sure this is communicated back to them."

"We’ve also increased our keyword query usage using Heap. One of our products, Echosec, allows users to search by geolocation, keyword, or author name across multiple social media and news sources to gain situational awareness and detect threats against their organization or executives. By looking into usage data on these query types, we realized a very large proportion of searches had geographic boundaries specified, meaning results that didn’t match this criteria were being missed."

"Together with the account management and customer success teams, we updated our knowledge base and made sure the importance of varying query usage was explained during onboarding, and have since seen an increase of keyword queries of over 55% in new accounts this year. The high-level trends visualized in Heap helped product, customer success, and account management teams collaborate to inform our users how to produce better outcomes."

"Heap is one of my favourite tools. I use it daily, and its value has only been reinforced as communication and collaboration methods have changed overnight.”

Top metric they’re watching during COVID-19:

“Since we work with a lot of open-source intelligence trainers, I check on weekly active users as a part of my dashboard because it helps me identify longer-term users. I segment this view into groups: one for the older version of our product and one for the new, so I can see if newer users are more likely to drop off than more established users during a crisis. Then I inform the team who may need additional support."

"Sessions and pageviews also help us decide how we inform users about new features or changes. Spikes or drops in activity visible in Heap help us decide what the best method is the best way to reach our customers, such as in-product, email, or a good old-fashioned phone call."

"With the COVID-19 pandemic presenting different challenges to our customers every day, having the granularity visible in Heap is vital to ensuring that our customer communications are appropriately delivered and providing value.”

How they’re using Heap:

“Autocapture has been incredibly useful for us, and it’s the foundation that makes all of the other features so valuable. As a non-technical PM, the visual event definer is also crucial, along with the graphs feature. The ability to filter out internal users and group by segments is powerful on its own and also provides a great starting point to understand whether other reports such as Retention and Funnel would be helpful for a feature or workflow."

"The Paths and Funnel reports have helped us validate observations of usability testing on a larger scale than our sample. In our last round of usability testing, we saw users performing an unexpected behaviour, and upon investigating in Heap we realized this wasn’t uncommon at all! We were able to adjust our UI to clarify the process on this page, and data from Heap played a key role in that change."

To learn more about how Echosec helps companies search for hidden online threats, visit their website here: https://www.echosec.net/