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We built Hipmob because we couldn’t find good customer tools for our mobile apps. We wanted something that worked as well in our app, as Olark did on our site website.

As a result, we built the leading live chat service for iOS and Android apps. Given that we provide a support service to other businesses, we always try to stay ahead of their needs. Over the past few months, as we’ve learned more about the challenges our customers face in providing support, its become clear that we need to provide something more. Here’s a preview:

We’re calling it Jumpjet - its an SDK for real-time screensharing inside your app (Android first, the iOS). In practice, this means if you’re running iOS or Android apps, you can use Jumpjet to (a) see what your users see, and (b) guide them around the app.

If live chat is “tell”, then screensharing is “show”. You might ask yourself, why would I use this:

1. **QA** - recording problems that arise when an app is being tested, so that developers can play it back and fix the problem. This replaces the process of having to write/document how you created an error - your developer can replicate it just by sight.

2. **Usertesting** - Use this with your Testflight or Hockeyapp, and see how users are actually interacting with your app. Its just like sitting next to your user, except they could be thousands of miles away.

3. **Customer Support** - again, show, don't tell. This way, when a subscriber to your Saas service or productivity app, or a customer for your commerce business encounters a problem, or needs some guidance, instead of exchanging emails with them and having them pick up the phone, you can literally see what they see, and show them around, even clicking them through the specific flows to help them get their problem solved.

4. **Sales and demos** - if your sales folks want to show a customer how to use a product, they can do so without having to travel any distance. Get the customer on the phone, request a screensharing session, and show them how to use your advanced features.

At its heart, Jumpjet makes it easy to replicate problems users see, and resolve those problems for users in real time. If this sounds like something you might use, then

a. sign up here

b. email ayo@hipmob.com and tell us what features you’d like. We’re insanely responsive to feedback, so anything you could share would help.

Thanks for checking us out

Ayo/Femi/Hipmob

Discuss on HackerNews here

Some of our customers have asked for an easy way to survey customers right in the chat window. This way they know that the surveys are being shown to engaged visitors. You can use the surveys for a few things

1. Ask your visitors how you’re doing
2. Ask your users what features you should build next
3. Ask how they’re doing :)
4. Ask anything else!

For now the surveys work through Google Forms - so you’ll have to create a Google form, which will be displayed in the chat window. (And for now, surveys are only live with website chat).

GET STARTED WITH SURVEYS > > 

As always, we welcome your feedback - please drop me a line with any thoughts at ayo@hipmob.com.

Using the #open function, you can pretty easily send a user to the appstore for whether your app is on iOS or Android.

#open is a co-browsing feature that sends a user to a specific URL in your app. This is really useful if you want to direct your user around the app, to specific pages. To use it ordinarily, you’d instrument your app with specific urls attached to pages you typically send users to. Then, when a user asks to do something that’s on another page, you could first check with them to make sure they dont need anything else, then you simply send them to the part of your app that they need by entering:

#open [pageurl]

(where [pageurl] is the page you want to send them to).

This will direct them to the page they are looking for.

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You can also use the #open command to send your user to ANY URL ON EARTH. What this means is, if a user has enjoyed talking with you, and had a good experience (if they haven’t had a good experience, come talk to us, we can help!), then you can direct them to the appstore url, where they can rate and review your app. For example, for Wanderplayer, you would type:

“#open https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wanderplayer-hd-game-controller/id460030461?mt=8” and this would take the user to the appstore.

As always, more and better features are coming, and we welcome your feedback. Just drop me a line at Ayo@hipmob.com, and we’ll do what we can to help!

Happy chatting!

ayo

We’d like to welcome the latest mobile business to Hipmob. We’ve worked with Kenneth and the Fleur HK team for quite a while - they were one of the first businesses to join us with an app for the iPad.

Their latest creation is the Fleur HK iPhone app. You can see the release here, and you can download it here!

Some screenshots are below - check out the awesome UI! Welcome aboard guys!!

For the hardcore data nerds out there, we’ve long had the ability for your chat data to feed into Google Analytics or Mixpanel in real time. This way, you can view your support or sales chat data in the context of your entire business.

Go here if you use Mixpanel

Check this out if you use Google Analytics.

In case you’re new here - we help you provide killer support to your mobile and website users, and to increase your sales. Check us out here

For everyone else, we just released an analytics summary you can view at a glance to figure out how you’re doing. You’ll get the summary once a week, and it covers:

1. Total: Total visitors to your site (for website chat) or your support area (for mobile and tablet apps)
2. Conversations: How many of those visitors started a conversation
3. Growth: The rate at which your total visitors or your number of conversations grew or fell relative to the last week.
4. Missed Conversations: How many visitors you actually responded to, relative to how many customers asked a question
5. Performance: how quickly your team answered.

Hopefully this should give you actionable data on where and how to improve your performance. Below is a sample of what an analytics email looks like, and a breakdown of all the parts:

As always, we’re committed to improving so we’d love your feedback on how to make this better - at ayo@hipmob.com.

Here’s a quick breakdown of some tips we’ve used in our business. Thanks to the Intercom, UserFox, Mixpanel Engage and Customer.io teams for the tips. With these folks you can send your users personalized emails and messages, based on each users’ specific patterns of activity.

- When users reply, make sure the email goes to a real person, who can respond back.

Nothing sucks more than a user replying to an email generated by you or by your system, and that email bouncing, or going to a noreply@. Or worse, their message actually matters, and no one responds!

More from Peter @ Userfox here

- Personalize as much as possible

This comes from our experience. Users have responded far better when they feel

a. the email came from a real person, and 

b. it was meant for them specifically. 

In practice, this is fairly difficult to automate, but it pays off in spades. Some ways we do this:

- where possible, we check out the user’s website or app. Particularly easy if you signed up with your work email address

- we see if they have any other Chat widget or helpdesk/CRM installed (particularly any that we integrate with) 

- we tell you what we really think - if there’s a typo, if you have great design, if you’re switching from a competitor - we mention any and all those things because a. they matter, and b. we want you to know that we care that you do well. 

You CAN automate some things - using first names in the subject line and email, targeting users based on key activities they’ve just completed, and so on. 

- Be Proactive - establish trust.

@Brennandunn from Planscope has a great guest post on the Intercom.io Blog. The general thrust of the post is about providing better support than your competition. His point about being proactive though, is to

a. show the user that you personally care about them as an individual, and

b.  using your data to know when reaching out will matter the most. For example, when users are at high risk of churn, reach out personally to re-engage them, and bolster the relationship, and establish trust.

More on this later - we’ve been using these tips and some others which we’ll share in future posts!!

Ayo

When Zappos went mobile, they faced the challenge of bringing its “WOW philosophy” to the mobile environment. From the start, Zappos has been differentiated by a unique approach to customer success. This approach has made Zappos a massive success story, with a base of loyal (and vocal) customers. Here are some of the challenges Zappos faced when launching apps (now for the iPhone, iPad and Tablet) and how they were overcome.

To start with, Zappos mobile customers had pretty different needs (from Zappos.com customers)

A lot of problems were technical, the users’ context was different (home vs. office vs. on the go), and customers expressed happiness/dissatisfaction everywhere they could. To adapt, Zappos adopted a blended approach, including 

• a dedicated mobile support team (called the MobSki team), trained to handle the more technical queries related to the app(s) 
• offsetting account and transaction related mobile support traffic to the customer service team at large, and
• using the MobSki team as a liaison between mobile customers, the larger support organization, and the mobile development team(s). 

In addition, Zappos covered all possible channels. They went where the customers were, so a caring human was only ever a few clicks away. These channels include:

• email

• a link to a customer support area/FAQ inside the app(s)

• direct phone numbers (mobile users can click to call, while tablet users can reference these)

• in-app live chat 

• a dedicated twitter handle (more on this later) at: https://twitter.com/Zappos_Mobile
• paying attention to issues flagged in the iTunes & Google Play reviews

To date, most of the MobSki team’s support traffic is technical: related to app specific, OS specific or device specific issues such as crashes or bugs. As a result, Zappos makes sure to put this context front and center wherever possible: 

Email:

Email Best Practices:

Context about the device, OS, and app version are included in all support emails. The MobSki team uses this context, along with a variety of iPhones, iPads, and Android phones and tablets (kept on hand in varying form factors and OS versions) to quickly replicate problems before deciding what comes next.

In-App Mobile/Tablet chat (iOS only for now), & Voice

The chat system used in Zappos’ apps (shown above) also reports App version, OS and device specific info (which is not visible to the end user/customer).

Social Media

The mobile team also runs @Zappos_mobile as a dedicated twitter handle. They use this to engage customers directly, reply to tweets about the Zappos apps, and to direct customers to the other channels (where necessary). For example: 

(Twitter handles blurred out to protect users’ privacy)

Between all these, Zappos Mobile team has every channel covered. Email, Chat, and telephone as captive, private channels, and social media and the review/ratings sections of app stores as public channels.

The Mobski Team brings it all together

Organization

Team members rotate into MobSki every 6 months. On MobSki, they’re trained in the specifics of supporting an app. Afterwards, they rotate back to the general customer service group at Zappos, bringing their mobile specific skills back to the larger organization. 

Training and Liaison Role

The MobSki team has multiple roles:

• Liaison: weekly meetings with the engineering team to discuss upcoming features/releases, as well as any high profile bug fixes

• Debugging Support: learning how to read crash code and crash logs, and for example learning to separate app crashes from OS crashes

• QA: contributing bug/error tracking tickets where necessary around newly discovered or frequently occurring crashes (the internal bug tracking system used at Zappos)

“Mobski also provides valuable customer feedback about existing and future features.  We love to hear customer feedback about our apps and have added many features based on customer suggestions.   In addition to Mobski’s communications, we obtain suggestions through user reviews, customer surveys that are available on the apps.  We also like to know what features everyone likes.  That’s just as important.  ”

- Vincent Calderaro, Zappos Mobile Team

Going Above and Beyond

The Zappos mobile team also were generous enough to share some stories of how they go above and beyond to WOW customers. One story:

During the 2012 Holiday season, Vince (Zappos Mobile Team), shared a couple dozen $25 Zappos gift cards with the MobSki team. The team then gave these out to engaged Zappos customer via Twitter. Customers interacting with the app and tweeting about a product would unexpectedly find themselves on the receiving end of a gift card:

(Twitter handles blurred out to protect users’ privacy)

These interactions were tweeted (and retweeted) by grateful Zappos customers, sometimes to thousands of followers, who were becoming brand ambassadors for the app. In the words of Jim, Mobski Team Lead:

“Getting the word out about our app was definitely worth whatever amount of money we spent on the gift cards“ 

Jim Green, MobSki team lead

The development team also makes sure to have fun and craft a unique, personable experience for users. From Vince: 

“We use cats on the iOS platform so when you add something to your favorites or cart, a cat flys down from the top of the screen to the shopping cart.  There are some other easter egg features hidden throughout the app as well. “

Future releases (starting in the next few weeks) will include the largest Android release (including a redesign and new features) to date, as well as custom theming options for the iOS apps built around cats and dogs.

Actionable Items & Best Practices

Making your support team a little bit technical will save developer time:

• Train your support/community team to read crash reports/logs. If they can identify bugs vs OS problems vs. Device problems, they’ll solve customer problems more quickly and communicate with your engineering team more easily, saving developer time.

• Suggestion: Use a crash reporting service, of which there are several, and give your support & community team access.

Automate context - you’ll more easily replicate problems:

• Embed relevant technical information (about the App version/OS/Device) into your user interactions. Again, this will help them replicate problems more quickly, which will save time. 

• Suggestion: include the details in your feedback form or email, or use a mobile support service (a live chat provider in Zappos’ case) which includes this context by default.

Meet your users where they are 

• By watching every channel (email, voice, chat, social media, appstore) Zappos mobile team sees user issues whenever they arise. 

• Suggestion: One potential way to do this would be to respond publicly (via Facebook or Twitter) to problems/issues flagged in the reviews and ratings sections of the various app stores.

Use social media creatively

• This should be self explanatory :)

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This case study comes from an interview with Jim and Sean on the Zappos mobile support team. Our thanks to James and Jim from the Customer Loyalty team, and to the rest of the Zappos team without whom this would not have been possible. 

Disclosure: Zappos uses Live Chat in the mobile apps, but isn’t a customer of Hipmob :( We’re producing this case study to share some of Zappos lessons learned and best practices with our audience and the mobile community at large. The author is CEO of Hipmob, a technology company that provides live chat, and other tools that help retailers communicate with and support mobile customers.

HackerNews Discussion Here

We’ve been working with Rob and Noah at ProAudioStar for the last little while - they’re an authorized dealer of Pro Audio and DJ Gear, and help you get the best service and prices online. 

Check out their iPhone app here.

Welcome aboard team!