With nearly 17 million users, CricHeroes is the world’s largest cricket network. Originally a scorekeeping app for grassroots cricketers, it has evolved into a social sports network relying on performance analytics to improve how members play, watch, and understand cricket.

With CricHeroes, you can do the following:

• Score, analyze, and discuss cricket matches
• Receive detailed insights to improve individual player and team performance
• Find teams to join, tournaments, grounds, umpires, and more
• Register and manage your own tournaments

Smartlook features used

Session Recordings

Watch authentic video recordings of user behavior on your website. Replay sessions and segment recordings to focus on important user groups.

Events

Track all clicks and interactions across your website. Identify the most crucial events and browse session recordings to explore user interactions in-depth.rn

CricHeroes was looking for precise data regarding how their app is used so they can help improve user engagement and retention rates

CricHeroes wanted to continually improve their app’s features to grow their user base and ensure their customers were getting the best experience possible. The problem was they didn’t have access to data that allowed them to visualize how the user journey unfolded, including where users misclicked and got stuck. Without this data, CricHeroes couldn’t make informed decisions about how to upgrade their app’s features or develop new ones. 

To solve the problem, CricHeroes implemented a behavior analytics tool to generate the data and insights they needed. Specifically, they wanted:

• A step-by-step understanding of how people use their app
• To encourage behavior linked to higher user engagement and retention
• Identify points where users stop engaging and mitigate them
• Identify points of strong user engagement and amplify them

“If we can give users the value they are searching for in week one, they’re more likely to keep using the app. So, although onboarding is very important, it’s difficult as we have different user personas. So we needed to know which activities users were doing right after signing up. Based on that, we can improve our onboarding to retain more users.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHeroes

Smartlook is a flexible, affordable way for CricHeroes to analyze user behavior

CricHeroes chose Smartlook as it includes the behavior analytics features they wanted at a competitive price. 

Once Smartlook was implemented, the CricHeroes team was immediately able to access and explore insights into the user journey.  

CricHeroes improves and streamlines the user experience with data and insights from Smartlook

CricHeroes’ product growth team uses session recordings and events to streamline and improve the user journey. Now they have access to precise, real-life data regarding how users interact with their app. With this, they can adjust existing features and develop new ones to optimize the user experience. 

This includes improving the onboarding experience, removing unnecessary features, and encouraging user behavior (such as direct messaging) which leads to stronger engagement and retention. 

Boosting direct messaging by 11% by giving relevant nudges

Direct messaging is one of the app’s core engagement features. CricHeroes uses automated nudging to encourage users to exchange messages with one another. 

By analyzing session recordings, they successfully identified new points along the user journey where users are likely to contact other users. After adding extra nudges at these points, users sent 11% more messages.

Improving the onboarding experience to optimize user retention 

Now, CricHeroes is no longer in the dark about what users do after signing up. By pulling up data on specific events — such as viewing scorecards, creating teams, and visiting leaderboards — the CricHeroes team can view all relevant session recordings to identify and analyze behavior patterns. 

Seeing what users do before and after a specific event helps CricHeroes understand what users are looking for, what makes them stick around, and what turns them away. These insights enable CricHeroes to adjust their features and workflows to provide a smoother, more enjoyable user onboarding experience and maximize the likelihood that users will continue coming back.

Streamlining the user interface by removing unnecessary or unpopular features

Using Smartlook’s session recordings, the CricHeroes team realized that users rarely responded to pop-ups encouraging them to check their achievements. Instead, users tended to view their achievements after prompts from notifications. To resolve the problem, CricHeroes simply removed the pop-ups.

Analyzing session recordings for specific workflows helps the CricHeroes team identify and mitigate the obstacles that led some users to drop off early. For example, users can challenge other teams to matches. Before, users were required to share their contact information with opposing teams. But once CricHeroes realized this requirement was causing some users to abandon the challenge, they changed it.

Resolving customer queries faster using Smartlook

CricHeroes’ customer support team uses Smartlook to help them resolve customer queries faster. By filtering session recordings to search for user IDs, the team can see what occurred when a specific person was using the app and quickly determine how to resolve the underlying issue.

Next steps for CricHeroes and Smartlook

The CricHeroes team is excited to continue updating and developing new app features based on insights gained from Smartlook. Next, they plan to improve nudges that encourage paid users to repeat purchases. They’re also exploring how insights from Smartlook can help their sales team optimize their landing pages and sales funnel.

“Using Smartlook really makes my work easier. It’s informative, insightful, easy to use, and features a nice user interface. Even though there’s a lot of information, I don’t feel overwhelmed. It’s very easy for me to view whatever I want. And there are so many features to help me work collaboratively with colleagues — sharing sessions, adding notes, saving a particular segment, and revisiting it.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHeroes

The post How user journey insights helped CricHeroes improve their user engagement and retention rates appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Hookle is a Finnish startup that offers a social media management app for Android and iOS. Developed with Flutter technology, Hookle’s app provides an easy-to-use interface and a great user experience.

The app helps busy entrepreneurs and small businesses in managing their social media accounts and improving their brand recognition. So far, 10k+ users in over 130 countries boosted their social media presence with Hookle. 

Smartlook features used

Session recordings

Watch authentic video recordings of users’ behaviors on your website. Replay sessions or segment recordings to focus on the most important user groups.

Mobile heatmaps

Check where your website visitors hover and click to spot the most popular web elements. Get a clear picture of how users engage with your website.

The pandemic stopped Hookle from collecting user feedback

Not all companies treat feedback from their users as a gift. 

However, the Hookle team is different – they always want to hear from their users and learn if there’s room for improvement.

But when their product was ready to collect the first round of feedback, the COVID-19 pandemic hit with a vengeance. This is an exceptional factor because the Hookle team couldn’t meet with their users face-to-face. 

“When COVID-19 broke out, we couldn’t meet with our customers and learn what they thought of our app. During a team discussion, we realized that we actually need a tool to learn something about our customers and their in-app behavior.” 

Jere Seppala

Chief technology officer and a Co-founder at Hookle Inc.

They had very high expectations towards using a new analytics tool.

The Hookle team wanted to:

• Check which features in their mobile app are useful for their users
• Improve user experience (UX) and app usability
• Give their users fast and accurate support

On a more granular level, they wanted to check whether the chart is useful to their users or which buttons are the most important.

Another crucial case for Hookle was troubleshooting bugs. Problems with bug reproduction was an annoying experience, so the Hookle team wanted to find error sources faster. 

All those expectations came down to the most important goal – to delight their clients, so they leave 5-star reviews on Google Play, Apple Store, or peer-to-peer review sites.

Hookle wanted a mobile analytics tool that supports Flutter technology

The Hookle team developed their app in Flutter, so their new mobile analytics platform had to perform well with this technology.

In the beginning, the Hookle team tried UXCam, a mobile qualitative analytics tool.

“We tried UXCam, but the company’s pricing was hidden in a way. Thus we continued searching for and evaluating other available options in the market. Luckily, we found Smartlook that also supports Flutter technology. As it happens, Smartlook came out on top for us as a great investment with clear, straightforward pricing.”

Jere Seppala

Chief technology officer and a Co-founder at Hookle Inc.

Smartlook turns out to be a true gem in Hookle’s technology stack

Smartlook’s implementation and onboarding processes were straightforward. Good documentation helped Hookle’s developers connect Smartlook with their tech stack, in super quick time.

Now, it’s been 5 months since Hookle has been gathering valuable insights on how users experience their app, for real. What did the Hookle team achieve in this short but intense 5-month timeframe? 

Shorter and more intuitive user onboarding 

The Hookle team wants to provide a fast and intuitive mobile onboarding experience for their users. They want to make sure that their users know how to synchronize their social media accounts with the Hookle app.

“Instagram and Facebook didn’t make it clear to users how to sync their accounts. It required a certain amount of time and was troublesome for users. We wanted to make it more frictionless. With Smartlook’s screen recordings, we improved the app onboarding. Now, there are no failed onboardings and account connections.”

Jere Seppala

Chief technology officer and a Co-founder at Hookle Inc.

Hookle’s support team reacts to customer problems upfront

A happy customer is the key to exponential business growth. The Hookle team understands that concept very well, so they want to be proactive to their customers’ inquiries. 

But sometimes, it’s hard for the support team to fully understand the issue a customer is facing. For instance, there are mismatches between what the user describes they did and what actually happened. Session recordings from Smartlook make it easy to solve any discrepancies and find the root problem faster than any other data could ever do. 

Thanks to recordings, the development team saves 10 hours a week on bug finding and bug reproduction. That’s an amazing amount of work hours saved each week.

But that’s not all. Once a support specialist noticed that one user had a problem with publishing his posts, they reached out to him and showed him what was going wrong. And it didn’t take long for the customer to show his gratitude by writing a 5-star review, which you can read below.

Heatmaps let Hookle verify their hypotheses faster

In the Hookle app, a user can swipe the statistics chart in different directions. Hookle team’s first assumption was that users view the chart a lot and interact with it. They were also wondering what part of the chart is the most popular.

But the heatmap verified their hypothesis very fast. It turned out that their app users rarely interact with the statistics chart. Thanks to Smartlook’s heatmap feature, the development team resigned from making the chart more interactive and saved 2 whole weeks of development time. 

Results that sealed the partnership for years 

Thanks to Smartlook’s helpful insights, the Hookle team improved user experience and app usability. And the truth is, a steady stream of feedback about intuitive design flows down from review websites. 

This is how Smartlook changed the way Hookle works:

• Upfront action to solve customer problems before they reach out to the support team
• Fast hypotheses’ verification
• An intuitive and user-friendly app interface

“We still work on our product. Smartlook is one of the most important tools to understand our users and design a product roadmap that fulfills their needs. Smartlook is an industry pioneer – it’s intuitive, flexible, and easy to integrate. Oh, and yes – it supports Flutter technology, which is extremely important for us.” 

Jere Seppala

Chief technology officer and a Co-founder at Hookle Inc.

Joanna Kaminska

is a content marketing strategist at Smartlook. She is a seasoned writer interested in storytelling, SaaS and new technologies. Her goal is to create content that is easy to understand for all. After work, she enjoys hiking and nature photography. | LinkedIn profile

The post How Hookle saves 10 hours weekly on bug reproduction appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

StoragePug offers self-storage businesses a website platform called “Insights.” The platform helps rent out facilities faster and attract new tenants. Moreover, the platform has 2 modules: a Lead Manager and a Unit Manager. They help StoragePug’s clients manage facilities, nurture leads, and track data. 

StoragePug serves 600+ self-storage businesses in the US. The company has many client success stories that underline the necessity of their product for this industry. 

Smartlook features used

Session recordings

Watch authentic video recordings of users’ behaviors on your website. Replay sessions or segment recordings to focus on the most important user groups.

Funnels

Funnels let you analyze website user behavior step- by-step. Watch session recordings of each funnel step to discover why users drop off.

Heatmaps

Check where your website visitors hover and click to spot the most popular web elements. Get a clear picture of how users engage with your website.

Events

Track every click or interaction on your website. Identify which events are the most crucial and browse session recordings to explore interactions in-depth

StoragePug searches for the right analytics tool during massive growth 

With market traction, the brand broadened the focus from mom-and-pop to businesses with 30+ facilities in different locations. The change resulted in a 68% growth in yearly ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

But the fast growth came with many challenges. 2 of them being, how to keep their platform optimized and how to learn more about their customers’ behavior.

To tackle those challenges, their Head of Design came up with an idea to get an analytics tool. She believed it would help the company get the right kind of data about their users’ behavior and the unit rental process.

After giving Hotjar a chance, the StoragePug team realized that recent changes in that tool no longer helped them achieve their desired goals.

“We resigned from Hotjar because they removed funnel analysis, and we couldn’t see where people were leaving the page. It was crucial for us to see the exact moment that the person is leaving and watch the session recording of it. Also, the heatmaps stopped appearing properly on our websites, the hot spots were not in the right places (i.e. next to the button rather than on the button).”

Ana Batista

Director of design at Storagepug

As StoragePug wasn’t able to get all the data they needed from Hotjar, they started looking for a Hotjar alternative. The intention was to get a tool that had the following capabilities:

• Funnels and custom event creation
• Powerful APIs
• Always-on session recordings
• Advanced segmentation

After detailed online research, StoragePug decided to go with Smartlook.

StoragePug gets a smooth and agile custom implementation 

Besides installing a tracking code, the StoragePug team used Smartlook’s API to set up a series of custom events. 

Although StoragePug got a custom implementation, everything went swiftly. Below, are examples of custom events created via API:

• The number of visits to the Insights platform
• Portal log-ins
• Location page visits
• Log-ins to the Lead Manager
• Log-ins to the Unit Manager
• Button clicks

New findings that power up StoragePug’s website platform

StoragePug uses the full potential of Smartlook, from session recordings and custom events to funnels and heatmaps.

“Smartlook is a great help for us. When we release a new feature in our product, we want to see how it impacts our clients. So for the first couple of weeks after release, we watch session recordings and look for behavior patterns or any abnormalities. Some people in our company filter session recordings by custom events, which saves their time.”

Tomasz Modzelewski

Senior product manager at Storagepug

Smartlook provides insights about feature adoption

The StoragePug Product team launched a new feature called “scheduled email reports.” They wanted to see if their users prefer the new way of accessing data over visiting the interface of the Insights platform.

The team filtered session recordings, leaving only those with users who tried the new feature. After watching this set of recordings, they validated that the users prefer to access data via the scheduled email reports than visit the platform itself.

Based on those findings, and after seeing that this new feature remained stable, the team decided to promote it to their whole user base.

An even more user-friendly interface thanks to data from Smartlook 

At first, the Product team designed tiles in the Lead Manager that were small and non-interactive. Session recordings gave a completely new view into what the users’ expectations are. 

Recordings revealed that users tried interacting with those small tiles. They wanted to access a specific dashboard, for example, to see all the details about their new contacts. 

This information was a game-changer for the StoragePug team. When they saw loads of rage clicks in the tile area, they planned to change the Lead Manager tiles into their next feature called “Home screen”. The new feature had bigger, clickable tiles, and fresh microcopy. Now, users can get into their dashboard details with just 1 click. 

When it comes to making big-picture UI optimizations, the team uses heatmaps. They help them make decisions about placing certain features above or below the fold.

The customer success team saves 8 hours a week and becomes more efficient

By adding Smartlook to their tech stack, they can now provide an outstanding customer experience. When it comes to solving customer problems or tracking down bugs, they react fast and efficiently. 

“Smartlook helps a lot in the customer success team. You know, sometimes clients come to our support but often, they come with inaccurate information. Thanks to Smartlook, we can filter session recordings by the customer’s email and see where and why the problem happened. It saves our team at least 8 hours a week.”

Tomasz Modzelewski

Senior product manager at Storagepug

Session recordings help the customer success team explore any reported issue before they reach out to their developers. Only when the recordings confirm a bug, do they use their devs’ help.

For developers, recordings are also life changing. When they want to reproduce a bug, they watch what steps the user took that led to a bug. 

Strong data that strengthen the partnership 

Here are the 3 ways StoragePug has benefited from using Smartlook:

1. They are aware of how users utilize each feature and if it makes sense to devote time to develop them further. With this knowledge and past experience of which feature is useful and which isn’t, it’s now easier to build a product roadmap that’s more user-centric. 
2. Smartlook made the customer success team’s life easier. Before, they were often looking for problems with help from their developers, which was time-consuming for both parties. Now they can solve their clients’ inquiries faster, without their developers’ engagement. 
3. Developers reproduce and fix bugs 10 times faster than before. Before, it was hard to find the step-by-step journey that led to a bug. With recordings, they have a new view of what led to a bug so the fix time is shorter. 

Now, the StoragePug team is more efficient, agile, and data-driven. But what’s most important, they keep on innovating the self-storage industry, providing world-class software to the delight of their customers. 

“Thanks to Smartlook we stopped running around in the fog. We finally see real interactions between our clients and our product and ensure that it’s intuitive for them. Smartlook was super easy to put in place, and we can’t imagine our cross-team efforts without it.”

Tomasz Modzelewski

Senior product manager at Storagepug

Joanna Kaminska

is a content marketing strategist at Smartlook. She is a seasoned writer interested in storytelling, SaaS and new technologies. Her goal is to create content that is easy to understand for all. After work, she enjoys hiking and nature photography. | LinkedIn profile

The post How Smartlook became a perfect alternative to Hotjar for StoragePug appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Disqo is a marketing research company known mainly for its large survey base.

In the age of GDPR, CCPA, and “cookies-free” policy, it’s increasingly challenging to gain feedback from a target audience. One of the available options is to use surveys.

Disqo is running a massive online community, Survey Junkie, where millions of users are willing to share their insights and provide feedback. The online community serves as a service for companies eager to get genuine answers from real people.
People at Survey Junkie use a designated website or a mobile app to fill in questionnaires. Once they finish a survey, they are rewarded with gift cards or cash.
Disqo uses its survey platform, among other tools, to help companies evaluate their advertising campaigns or test a new design.

Over the years, the team at Disqo integrated Smartlook deeply into the company and developed a system on how to get the most out of behavior analytics. Let’s look at a year-by-year overview:

2017: Customer support discovers Smartlook

Disqo officially became our customer on February 13th, 2017, for the symbolic monthly fee of $100. The company was amongst one of our first paying customers. It was just 1 year after Smartlook was founded, and all resources were invested into development and almost none of them into promotion, making Smartlook a new under-the-radar tool.
Why Smartlook in particular? Because customer support at Disqo was looking for a tool that makes identifying their customers easier. The team at customer support could now search users by their email address or their ID. They also highly appreciated the ability to sort users by their location – that filtered out people from countries that were not supported.

Smartlook was quickly integrated for everyday customer support tasks, like:

At this phase, Smartlook is used solely for the purpose of watching individual users who are reporting issues.

2018: The product department gets involved

It simply happened by coincidence – David – one of the company’s product managers, noticed a tool on a screen of one of his colleagues from customer support. David had never heard about Smartlook before but immediately he started to investigate if there could be any use for this tool in his product department.
Instead of waiting for dissatisfied customers to contact customer support, David decided to proactively use Smartlook to prevent problems in advance. By measuring activity in the Events manager, the product department was able to anticipate particular issues on the website where customers were struggling.

One of the parts that required special care was the sign-up process. Product designers at Disqo looked at videos of the initial sign-up experience to see where users were getting stuck or having trouble continuing. Perhaps a lot of users were clicking on the wrong button or answering the initial questions incorrectly.

“After implementing insights retrieved from Smartlook, 20% more people were able to finish their registration successfully,” says product manager, David Agajanian.

Events were also perfect for finding out if a new design works as expected – if there are only a few people using the new feature, something was wrong.

2019: Developers are part of the Smartlook group

So far, customer support and the product department are working together to report and prevent issues. One piece of the chain is missing, though – developers who repair bugs in the first place.
A new product manager got an idea to implement Smartlook directly to the developers’ teams and share the reports with individual developers in order to create an effective debug workflow.
Regular reports were created, warning developers about possible issues that could easily be achieved by observing spikes and other irregularities in events, which often signals a potential problem.

Another new process involved regular UI testing – from now on, every change in design was evaluated by using Smartlook tools – especially events. If any new design didn’t have good numbers in Smartlook, subtle changes were made, and customer support carefully evaluated the users’ reactions.

2020: A well-oiled machine with a single goal – destroying bugs

In 2020, more people were trained to use Smartlook, especially those coming from customer support. That gave the product managers and developers more tips for uncovering bugs.

Debugging workflow: From reporting the issue to fixing the problem

Over the years, Smartlook users at Disqo developed a well-oiled machine on how to get rid of bugs.

Weapons against bugs:

The future:

Smartlook’s NextGen platform released at the end of 2020 brought several positive changes. The main one is that NextGen made it much easier to focus on user privacy.
Besides, it is now much simpler to switch between the different developer environments from testing to staging to production. NextGen was designed to work in teams. Currently, Disqo is trying to fully utilize the report sharing and user permission system to polish their already well-developed workflow.
Anomaly detection released in the spring of 2021 made life easier for the product department. Instead of manually investigating spikes in events, product managers simply wait for an email announcing a sudden change.

The biggest upcoming challenge will be to integrate Smartlook into the mobile app using Smartlook Mobile SDK.

Wrapping up:

The Disqo case study is a mirror of our development journey at Smartlook. In the beginning, they used Smartlook as a simple gadget for customer recordings. Gradually, as we offered more and more features, the great team at Disqo was able to fully utilize Smartlook as a powerful all-in-one tool.
Unfortunately, many of our customers still get stuck on the basics and are using only basic features such as recordings and heatmaps. Using advanced features and connecting different departments helps deal with issues and prevent problems while streamlining the overall flow of projects.

author Petr Vecek

Content Manager

The post Disqo and Smartlook: Growing together since 2017 appeared first on Smartlook Blog.