Digital-First Customer
— 6 min read
Partnering with Heap to build data-driven customer journeys faster
Partnership overview
With the help of low-code Digital Customer Experience solution, Airkit, and low-code analytics platform, Heap, Bench Accounting, America’s largest bookkeeping service for small businesses, was able to 1) build great digital customer experiences without relying solely on engineering efforts, 2) collect and analyze data from that workflow, and 3) use those insights to identify and implement data-driven iterations faster.
The key to great CX: leveraging customer insights
According to Forrester, between 60 and 73% of all data collected in an enterprise goes unused. But, in order to construct exceptional digital experiences these days, leveraging customer insights is a must. Not all customers engage with a business the same way, and failing to correct an area of weakness in any particular digital customer journey could result in churn. Read on to learn how Bench avoided becoming a statistic and relied on their analytics to drive CX improvements.
The start of the Heap, Bench, and Airkit partnership
Bench engaged with Heap starting in 2015 to standardize their behavioral analytics program across their entire revenue funnel — from lead generation all the way to in-product engagement and adoption. By using Heap, the Bench analytics team was able to remove engineering overhead and promote self-serve insights faster across marketing, product, and UX. Because of Heap’s auto-capture technology and low-code product, Bench was able to get data to business stakeholders immediately, which enabled them to quickly identify points of friction in their sign-up flow.
Initially, Bench’s engineering team built a custom lead generation flow to prompt prospective customers to sign up for a free trial. Over time, the Marketing team wanted to iterate on this flow, but the Engineering team had other high-value projects competing for their time. In the effort to improve this workflow and sales conversion, Bench Marketing began the search for a solution that would empower them to control the experience themselves, without requiring serious coding knowledge. It was at this point Bench found Airkit.
Two low-code platforms are better than one
The initial experience
At Airkit, we talk a lot about the ability of low-code to empower both developers and non-developers to construct great digital customer experiences, and it’s true. Dennis Pavlina, Bench’s Sr. Manager of Inbound Marketing, and his team were able to use Airkit to build out a great customer onboarding experience in less than a month. In Pavlina ’s words, “Airkit’s platform has over 50 building blocks and preconfigured templates which make it easy to build and test workflows in weeks instead of months.”
The new and improved workflows are as follows.
Experience A: small business deductions consultation signup
- 1. Prospective customers answer a series of questions about their business to help determine if they are eligible for small business deductions.
- 2. Following completion of this short form, prospects and/or customers are provided suggestions for eligible expense deductions.
- 3. Bench is able to intelligently follow up with these prospective customers and register them for a consultation.
Experience B: trial sign up and lead routing
- 1. Prospects and/or customers visit a select webpage to initiate their trial account.
- 2. Airkit integrates with Marketo to validate whether the visitors are new or existing accounts.
- 3. Page visitors are prompted to complete a form collecting basic business information in order to qualify the lead for a first call.
- 4. Leads are then routed to Sales for further qualification.
Upleveling CX with data
After constructing these two experiences, Pavlina and his team thought, “What if data being captured through Airkit could be displayed and analyzed in Heap, as we do with data across the rest of the organization?” Airkit empowers organizations to create exceptional digital customer journeys, and Heap enables businesses to collect and visualize data, so the question for Pavlina was how could the team best take advantage of both solutions?
The answer was to integrate Heap and Airkit. By connecting both low-code platforms, the Bench Marketing team was able to create a seamless feedback loop between launching a new customer experience and measuring and optimizing conversions.
The results
With the new Heap and Airkit integration, Bench was able to collect and analyze data from 700+ small businesses after just four weeks of the lead generation flow being live. Heap allowed the team to view and understand how leads were progressing through the Airkit experiences, which enabled them to use these findings to power amendments to the original workflow.
Additionally, since Heap was being leveraged across multiple Bench organizations, teams outside of Marketing and across the company were also able to slice and dice this customer data in ways that made the most sense to their specific field. In turn, Pavlina and Marketing were able to evangelize Airkit’s CX capabilities to other departments.
Using the power of these two low-code platforms, Bench was able to make two to three significant, data-driven adjustments to their original experience in just a matter of weeks, all without Engineering help — something that would never have been possible without Airkit and Heap.
The result has been a 20% increase in unique visitor-to-client conversion rate by optimizing the signup flow to drive only high-value leads, all while decreasing the client acquisition cost.
In conclusion
For other companies looking to optimize their digital customer experience, Airkit and Heap empower you to build customer journeys grounded in data. The best benefit of this partnership is the speed at which you can iterate without relying on engineering resources. The faster that customers can test conversion rates and drive new actions, the greater the reward.
If you’d like to hear directly from Heap, Bench, and Airkit, tune into the live webinar.
About Airkit
Airkit empowers Fortune 500 and leading brands to build personalized, digital customer journeys across voice, web, SMS, or chat to drive customer action. Digitize any sales and service touchpoint through the customer lifecycle, from automated onboarding, self-service account updates, digital cross-sell, churn prevention, and everything in between.
About Heap
Heap’s mission is to power business decisions with truth. The platform empowers product teams to focus on what matters — building the best products — not wrestling with their analytics platform. Heap automatically collects and organizes customer behavioral data, allowing product managers to improve their products with maximum agility. Over 6,000 businesses use Heap to drive business impact by delivering better experiences and better products.
