Our Roadmap + Intercom set up, and why we love it
Right from its conception, we knew Simplay would have a major focus on community. Gamers dig community, and we dig gamers — so it was clear to us right from the get go. And community means, well — people obviously. The guys and gals that form our following, our clan of supporters.
To be truly community driven, we focused our early days on implementing communication tools that allowed us to easily talk to our users. We got a great recommendation from our friends at Zengaming about a product called Intercom.
Intercom — communications made awesome
Now, unless your startup have been living under a rock, you‘ve probably heard about Intercom. At the very least, you probably came across their signature chat bubble, implemented on so many sites today. But if you think that Intercom is just about chat, you should think again- it’s about so much more.
In a nutshell, Intercom is an event-driven platform that allows you to converse with your users, engage with them and share information and guides when they need them. It’s a support platform, mashed up with an analytics platform, mashed up with a chat app and a CRM. Think Skype meets Mixpanel meets Zendesk chat. It’s amazing.
At Simplay, we use Intercom to engage with our users while they’re browsing through our gaming plans, update them about new feature releases, and respond to their questions and queries. And the best part — we do it all in a conversational atmosphere that is light, concise and always in context. When a new user contacts us, whoever ends up taking ownership of the conversation (and we compete on who’s the first to grab any unassigned chat) has access to all relevant user data. You see, because Intercom is event driven, it tells us if the user we’re speaking with is old or new, what plan he’s on, what is his typical gaming session time and all of his previous conversation with us. It takes seconds for the responder to “just get” who the user is, what is his history with us, and how we could best help him. And that is exactly what were going for — a personal touch.
In addition to chat, which is awesome, Intercom also excels in drip emails and rule-based communication. We use it to contact our users near the end of their trial period to encourage them to upgrade to a full plan. We also use it to monitor when a user hasn’t logged in to play for a while, and we reach out to him to see if there is anything we could help with. It truly is an amazing platform, and we highly recommend it.
Roadmap — So what are you working on next?
A new jewel we recently came across, is a service called Roadmap. Roadmap is about sharing what you’re working on (your roadmap) with your community. And it’s super easy — you add stories (the main features you’re working on) to your public roadmap, and share it with your community. Your users can then comment on these stories, and send you just any feedback they feel like sharing. If a user relates to a story, and feels it’s valuable and worth doing, he can “clap” to support it. Users can also follow tasks under development and be notified as these progress from planning, to development, to done.
We loved it from the first time we saw it, and we knew we’d implement Roadmap eventually to share Simplay’s product roadmap with our users. And we’re super happy we were finally able to make it happen. You could check out our public roadmap here, and clap or follow the stories you find worth doing.
Intercom + Roadmap — where the magic happens
We use Intercom profusely in our day to day operation to talk to our users about support issues and updates. We also use it to gather feedback from our users about our product, and how satisfied they are of it. All of these conversations are great opportunities to generate feedback and bug reports — and this is where the superb Intercom+Roadmap integration comes into play.
Once set up, this integration lets you send user feedback directly from an Intercom conversation with a user to Roadmap. This feedback is then tagged accordingly in Roadmap as if it was entered by the user himself. Moreover, Roadmap pulls additional user data from Intercom like what subscription plan he’s on, or how valuable this user has been for us so far. And the best part is that since the user who provided the feedback is automatically added as a follower to this input, he’ll be notified when we decide to act upon his feedback and convert it to a story. He’ll also receive notifications when this story, or rather HIS story, progresses through development and eventually is shipped.
And We’re only starting to fully understand all that Roadmap truly offers. Their magic filter, for example, provides advice on what feature we should work on next, based on which users (and how valuable these users are) supported the feature. We’re confident that as we continue exploring it we could find additional awesome ways to use it.
Is this set up right for your startup?
Some companies might refrain from sharing what they’re working on, mainly due to curious competitors. Now does that makes sense? Well, surely for some it does. We, however, say it’s bollocks. With all due respect to competitors, we prefer focusing on the people we care about — our community. It comes down to a couple of really simple questions — does sharing our roadmap add value to our users? Is it valuable for them to know that the things they care about are being worked on? And if they’re not, is there value in giving them a platform to share with us what they think we should build next? The answer to all of these, is a resonating “yes”.
We love our Intercom+Roadmap integration, and we encourage you to check it out for yourselves. And if you haven’t tried Simplay yet, you could join our trial here, and share your feedback on our public roadmap!
