Most Saas companies today are still figuring out how to get customers to move towards self-service, especially when it comes to support. But one company has figured out how to make it easy to find all the answers.

Customers at ProdPad are consistently amazed at how lightning fast their customer support is, especially when they learn that the company is still a startup.

Their secret sauce? A blazing fast help center search, powered by Algolia.

Andrea Saez, Head of Customer Success at ProdPad, tells us how ProdPad is using Algolia to provide consistently fast support to a growing customer base.

What does ProdPad do?

ProdPad provides product management software that helps product teams collect ideas, identify priorities, and build flexible product roadmaps.

How are we handling a fast growing customer base without an army of customer support agents?

With the help of our incredibly fast knowledge-base powered by Algolia.

Since we started using Algolia on our Zendesk Help Center, we’ve seen self-service become the preferred method of support for our customers.

Why?

Because they’re now finding answers on their own instantly, without having to go through the entire process of contacting our support team.  Even though our response times are surprisingly quick and our live support brings a 100% satisfaction rating, our customers prefer to help themselves.

Self-service is the best way for us to give our customers what they want – and Algolia is helping us make this a reality.

Here’s how Algolia is helping us support over 500+ customers without breaking a sweat.

Our Secret Sauce

You don’t know how much time you’ve been wasting until you use a search bar that just lights up with exactly the right article, even before you’ve finished typing.

Our Help Center has always performed well – we worked hard to create a well-organized support center with useful guides and self-help resources. Usually, as a user, you might need to click around for a bit, try a few different queries and multiple searches but you’d always find the right article.

But with our Algolia search, that same content is now instantly discoverable.

The impact  was immediate – we saw a dramatic drop in live support requests around the basic and recurring questions that used to make up a significant part of our support queue.

We’ve been able to create an experience our users absolutely love. They’re now finding support articles in just milliseconds.

Our new users notice it the most because they’re usually digging around and setting up different areas of ProdPad during their magically extending free trial – and our search helps them find docs and instructions in less than a hot second!

Fast, helpful support is something we’ve become known for, and now Algolia is helping raise the bar again.

We have more control over our support experience

Consumers generally try to help themselves before reaching out to live support. Today we’re able to monitor what they’re searching for so we can improve our overall product experience.

With our support traffic now divided between our knowledge-base and incoming support tickets, we’re constantly studying our data to understand how we can clarify and simplify information for our customers.

Our goal is to reduce as much friction as we can during our customer’s support journey.

We’re using Algolia and Zendesk analytics together to dig for answers to questions like:

• How many times do they need to contact support to fix a problem?
• Which searches result in tickets being opened?
• How long is it taking our customers to get the answers they’re searching for?

For example, we found that some users were searching for “google docs” and weren’t finding any results that contained that term.

They were looking for more information about our Google Apps integration, but couldn’t find it because we hadn’t included that specific keyword. It was an easy fix. I simply went in and added “google docs” to that article to ensure that from then on, the right article would pop up straightaway.

A quick change like this saves time and provides more bandwidth to answer individual support tickets. It also saves our customers from the hassle of opening up a support ticket for minor questions.

As we continue to make these improvements from our end, we’re making the support experience better for both our customers and ourselves.

We’re learning exactly what they’re trying to achieve

We can track queries in our Algolia analytics, so we know the kind of questions our customers are keying in and how they’re thinking.

Take a look at our top queries:

This tells us what people are looking for, how many results come out of that search, and how many times users click on a given result.

As product managers, this kind of data is a treasure chest for us. What could we be explaining better? What are customers trying to do within ProdPad? Where are they getting stuck?

We can use it to understand what areas of our product are pain points for our clients. Conversely, we can use it to see which areas they’re most interested in. We can and do spot search trends which help us identify what our customers are trying to achieve.

This has not only helped us make improvements to the app itself, but the way we communicate our features and functionality across touchpoints, from our in-app messaging to our blog.

The Takeaway

As the overall number of support tickets in our queue drops, we’re seeing a greater percentage of customers reach out for help with setting up custom and increasingly sophisticated processes in ProdPad.

This is an excellent sign for us. It means they’re becoming increasingly proficient in ProdPad and are finding it worth their time and effort to invest in our more advanced functionality.

That’s how we’ve become the product management tool that everyone loves.

Small team, big impact – Algolia has made a big difference.