How Cloud Middleman Helps SaaS Companies Deliver Better Tech Support
As a SaaS company that also provides several mobile SDKs (iOS, Android, etc), at Tapstream, we’re often helping customers troubleshoot their SDK integrations. Whether it’s a simple issue of not initializing the SDK properly or something more complicated with our deferred deep linking or in-app landers products, providing fast and effective tech support is critical for long-term customer satisfaction. As such, our new product, Cloud Middleman, has become an indispensable tool in our support process that has not only reduced the average time it takes to close a customer support ticket but also increased customer satisfaction leading to less churn and higher conversion rates on premium account tiers. This shouldn’t be all that surprising really…Happier customers spend more and don’t leave!
The Bad Old Days
To better understand how Cloud Middleman saves us so much time, it’s helpful to review how we provided customers with tech support in the past. Once we received a support ticket, the first thing we’d have to determine is whether it was likely an SDK integration related issue. From experience, we generally know what to look for to determine this. Most often, comments like the ones below give us an indication where to start:
- “I’ve integrated the SDK but events aren’t showing up in the dashboard”
- “I can’t seem to get deferred deep links to work”
- “My campaign landers aren’t showing for new installs”
After a customer submitted their support ticket, we would send back a troubleshooting checklist of common implementation errors (taken straight from our available documentation) and if we were lucky, that would solve the problem. If not, we’d follow up and ask the customer to provide more detail about the specific issue they were experiencing. Needless to say, anytime you have to ask a customer to provide more detail, the resulting back-and-forth communication takes time and is also quite frustrating for the customer. This communication bottleneck often extended the time for a relatively simple support ticket to hours or days, especially if we needed a way to uniquely identify their mobile test device and dig through our back-end logs.
Enter Cloud Middleman
Since Cloud Middleman is a web based http(s) debugger that works with remote devices, we are able to mostly eliminate any communication bottlenecks. Now when we get a support ticket that hints of an SDK integration issue, we simply send back the troubleshooting checklist and, if that doesn’t help the customer, we include a Cloud Middleman invitation asking the customer to:
- install the device profile on their test device
- connect to the Cloud Middleman VPN, and
- recreate the scenario under which the issue previously occurred.
Afterwards, we can take a quick look in the Cloud Middleman dashboard and see all of the requests / responses from the customers device to and from Tapstream:
Now, with all the request data (including taps.io link clicks) we can usually diagnose the issue and send back detailed instructions on how to fix it. We don’t need to bother the customer for additional info as everything is right there for us to see! Furthermore, since Cloud Middleman allows us to share devices and / or session logs, we can invite the customer to view their own request data in the Cloud Middleman dashboard. This added benefit not only allows the customer to see for themselves the request data flowing between their device and Tapstream but it also enables them to continue logging requests through CM for future debugging, possibly eliminating additional support tickets.
Cloud Middleman has helped us at Tapstream streamline our tech support creating happier, more engaged customers. We invite you to try it out (free) for your own company’s tech support needs.
