One of the first things that grabs people’s attention when they begin using SaaSPulse is our real-time User Activity Stream.
As one of our beta customer recently put it:
“I’m already getting addicted to watching the real-time activity stream. Very Nice!”
There is something powerful about seeing the flow of customers’ activities on the service and getting a raw view of how it is being used and appreciated. Here’s how it works:
Global Activity Stream (Service Pulse)
Service Pulse is a global view of all activities on a customer’s web-service. The view updates in real-time as new events are received.
The top of the page shows key metrics such as the active users, new trial sign-ups and the top activities users are performing today.
Underneath these metrics is the stream of events. Each entry shows:
1. The time-stamp when the event occurred
2. The user who conducted the activity and the organization they belong to (for multi-tenant applications)
3. The activity details.
This global view of the service is extremely valuable for emerging services trying to get a better feel on the value their customers are getting from the service. Established services can use it to build an understanding of how new or changed functionality is being received.
As is sometimes the case with global views, it can get noisy. That’s why our activity stream allows you to drill down to an individual customer’s activities.
Customer Activity Stream
Clicking on any customer in the global stream drills down to an individual customer’s usage. Here we see key metrics on a specific customer: the amount and breakdown of activities, when they started using the service, when they used it last and so forth.
Similarly to the global view, this view shows a stream of the activities, but in this case, only those conducted by an individual customer. This view helps build an understanding of activities – and through that the value – that a customer is getting from the web-service. We call this “Customer Context” and have seen it help our users in the following ways:
1.Framing a sales-call with a trial account
2.Improving customer satisfaction by better understanding of a customer’s frustration
3. Uncovering common customer archetypes and tuning the product accordingly
Instrumenting SaaSPulse is simple
We provide a very simple API to send data to SaaSPulse. A single HTTP or Javascript call communicates events in the form “user X did action Y” . We collect these events, process them and use them as the base of our activity streams.
Summary
Activity streams are a great tool to understand customers. Often, seeing the stream of their own activity data is when our customers get their first “a-ha” moment. The visualization helps them realize the full potential activity data has on improving their business, even before more advanced functionality like scaling trials and improving customer satisfaction.
It’s all about increasing customer lifetime value but it starts with simple visibility, which is what makes Activity Streams such a popular capability of our product and why we plan to continue to improve it.
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