Customer Story
How Baselane increased activation with in-product video calls
"For early-stage companies, collecting meaningful product feedback and converting new customers is hard. Emails are hard to time. Surveys are expensive and slow. ServiceBell is an efficient way to accomplish both at once."
Baselane is a next-generation financial operating system for the 11M individual landlords & real estate investors in the United States. Their mission: empower landlords with tailored financial services to help them save time, increase their returns, and grow their investment portfolios.
How Baselane increased activation with in-product video calls
Baselane was looking for a better way to engage their customers, because of two big problems:
- Spending tons of money on new user acquisition, but new user activation was low, and they didn't know why.
- Lifecycle email engagement was low because they didn't know what to send, when to send, how often to send, etc.
Baselane wanted to get in front of their customers at critical moments - eg, friction points in the onboarding process - and ask "why are you stuck? How can I help?"
The theory was: "if we can talk to customers and learn about what they're doing while they're here, we can figure out how to better engage them and build a better product."
They tried user surveys in the past, but found it hard to get real, actionable insights from them.
Surveys are slow and expensive. $100 for a 30 minute call. You can only field a few calls per month. And the time between the user getting stuck and the survey is so long, users often don't remember what was really going wrong. Not like they would in the moment.
In addition, surveys/session replay tools like FullStory are retroactive - you can't impact that user's session at all. They joined, left, and are never coming back.
Experimenting, learning, and iterating faster than others is the name of the game. Baselane needed a better way to learn from their customers, and iterate their go-to-market strategy.
There was huge value in watching realtime behavior. I could ping a customer when I saw them struggling, and jump on a live video call in realtime. We're learning a ton about our customers, and helping convert more to paid at the same time.
Watch users struggle in realtime (no meeting needed)
"We decided to create a new initiative: calling all new trial users directly."
Before, the move from free trial sign up to meeting was a bit clunky, even with Zoom. Some people don't have Zoom installed, or know how to use it. Or they don't show up to a meeting.
"Instead of sending a zoom link, or saying, 'hey, let me send you a calendar invite' - which is minutes on the phone being lost - we can join their session immediately, see exactly what they're seeing, start a live call, and visually guide them, in seconds."
With ServiceBell, when a customer is stuck, Baselane can instantly call them, and see not only what's going wrong, but find out why .
Then, Baselane says "hey, it's easy, just go over here" as they navigate the user to the right feature with screen takeover.
Proactive onboarding with ServiceBell activates more users than product tours. With ServiceBell, the user has "touched the product".
When you guide users through the platform and let them use your product on their own, they retain far more information than sitting through a demo.
Activation and conversion to paid rates skyrocket, as future support requests and churn risk decreases.
Faster product feedback
Roughly 20% of the customers Baselane calls engage with ServiceBell, and those customers close faster and more often than other mediums of engagement.
Aside from higher close rates, the amount of customer feedback Baselane collects with ServiceBell is priceless. It's had a massive impact on their roadmap in terms of design thinking, and feature prioritization as well.
Realtime product feedback combined with free to paid conversion? Not too shabby!