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."
Saad Dar
Head of Business Development
About
Baselane
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.
Challenges
Lots of new sign ups, low activation rate
Hard to collect meaningful user feedback to improve the product
User surveys are slow and expensive
Email lifecycle campaigns have poor engagement
Solutions
Watch users struggle in realtime (no meeting needed)
Join user sessions to guide them with screen takeover
Ask "why are you here? Why are you stuck?" on a live video call
Activate new users and convert them to paying customers
Results
Faster product feedback
6X more user interviews month-over-month, higher activation/close rates
Collect realtime feedback you'd never learn from FullStory
Increased activation and conversion to paid.
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.
Saad Dar
Head of Business Development
The solution
How Baselane increased activation with in-product video calls
“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, don’t know how to use it, or simply don’t show up to the meeting.
“Instead of sending a Zoom link, or saying, ‘Hey, let me send you a calendar invite’—which wastes precious minutes on the phone—we can join their session immediately, see exactly what they’re seeing, start a live call, and visually guide them, all in a matter of seconds.”
With Rep.ai, when a customer is stuck, Baselane can instantly call them, not only to see what’s going wrong but also to understand why.
Then, Baselane can say, “Hey, it’s easy, just go over here,” while navigating the user to the right feature with screen takeover.
Proactive onboarding with Rep.ai activates more users than traditional product tours. With Rep.ai, the user actively engages with the product.
When you guide users through the platform and let them use the product on their own, they retain far more information than they would by sitting through a demo.
Activation and conversion to paid rates skyrocket, while future support requests and churn risks decrease.
The result
Faster product feedback
Roughly 20% of the customers Baselane calls engage with Rep.ai, and those customers close faster and more often than through other mediums of engagement.
Aside from higher close rates, the amount of customer feedback Baselane collects with Rep.ai is priceless. It has had a massive impact on their roadmap, influencing design thinking and feature prioritization.
Real-time product feedback combined with improved free-to-paid conversion? Not too shabby!
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