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.