Knowing your SaaS customers
by John Dennehy
We’ve been building SaaS HR and recruitment tools for over three years. We test a lot of development and management products. Most we try out and forget; a few stand the test of time.
If we could recommend any one tool to SaaS developers it’s “intercom”. In their own words it’s a “crm and messaging tool for web businesses”.
Here’s how we use it. Every morning we get an email with a list of new users that have signed up to Zartis.com. It shows their email address and the country they’re in. It’s a nice overview that compliments the real time messages we also get for new signups.
Every time we release a new feature or need to message our existing customers we do it through intercom. Our clients see the message as a box up pop when they login and it’s all nicely formatted. It’s a much better way to message people than sending an email because you’re getting their attention when they’re actually in using the product.
The other great thing is that you can really easily segment your audience for a particular message. For example, we recently added faceted search into Zartis. There’s no point telling this to somebody who’s just signed up and has three or four candidates. They’re not thinking about search yet. People with 100+ candidates are. So we use intercom to send a custom message about the new search function but only to customers with more than 100 candidates.
Intercom has also become our most regularly used source of communication from clients to us too. It’s effectively become our help desk. We are paying for other third party helpdesk products but people just don’t use them as much. What would be great to see would be more development in this area from intercom so that we can use one product for CRM and helpdesk. Hopefully that’s on the way at some stage.
We were going to build our own CRM and messaging app in Zartis. I’m delighted we didn’t. Intercom is simple to use, looks great and genuinely helps us build better relationships with our customers. They gave me a promotional code which gives us a discount for recommending it. I think that’s a good idea but I don’t want to compromise the objectivity of this message. It’s just plain good — try it.
