About Preply
Preply is a leader in online language learning. Its platform enables students to connect directly with tutors for lessons anytime and anywhere.
- Founded in 2011
- Employees: 100
- Location: Kiev, Ukraine and Berlin, Germany
- 5,000 tutors and 60,000 students on the platform
- Over 40 languages
- Funding: $5.6mm
- Techstars alumnus
Preply's feedback problems
Feedback data was lost on handoff (Customer Success to Product)
The Preply team has always focused on being as close to the customer as possible. With such a high volume of users (tutors and students) on its platform, though, much of their feedback data would get lost at the customer support level, never making it to the teams that were actually designing and building the platform.
Reactive approach to analyzing feedback
Additionally, they were more reactive in their approach to analyzing customer feedback conversations. If they started hearing a lot of users asking for a certain thing, they would create a high-level Intercom tag for it and measure it during the active sprint to see if they should push it into development (basically, try to see how big of a problem it was). If it looked to be a big problem, it would get worked on. If not, they would drop it and start measuring something else.
Numbers, but no context
They would also bucket requests into super high-level categories in order to see how many users had problems within certain categories. For example, tagging a bunch of users with the the tag "calendar" doesn't mean that each user has the same problem or feature request within the "calendar" portion of your app. This approach lacked specificity and stripped out valuable context from user stories and customer conversations, thus making it difficult to figure out solutions to the customers' challenges. Customer support could recall the conversations, but when this data got passed to product, it was just a high-level number, trend, or percentage with no context.
"There were no stories behind those numbers so it took more time and effort to find the context. At that point, we were working backwards and important things were constantly falling through the cracks." - Arnav Sachdev, Customer Care Specialist @ Preply
How Userfeed has solved these challenges
Preply was already a heavy user of Intercom on the customer success side. With Intercom being one of the main tools used by the Preply team, they knew what they needed:
- A simple way to push feedback from Intercom (including the Intercom users that gave it) to a central source of truth for the company without letting any data fall through the cracks on the handoff
- The ability to link user stories and Intercom conversations (the context) back to a particular feature request or bug
- A team to own the process of identifying customer insights
- A feedback loop that was "always on" instead of a reactive feedback process
Preserving valuable context
With Userfeed, they're able to gather feedback from users via the Intercom messenger app and link user conversations to particular feature requests using tags in Intercom. Instead of using high-level tagging that let conversations fall through the cracks, Preply can now attach a conversation to the exact feature request being managed in Userfeed. Then they can manage everything in high-level feeds for each of their modules within their platform.
"The way we've structured our process for figuring out what we're going to build next... Userfeed is now at the center of that. It's the one tool that is used across the entire product, customer support, and the dev teams. We love Userfeed, and get excited every time we receive a new feedback notification." - Arnav Sachdev, Customer Support Specialist @ Preply
Managing the feedback process
Preply puts Userfeed at the center of their feedback process from the Support team to their Product Teams. Now they have a continuous feedback loop in which they:
- Track feedback all the time (instead of just starting to track it after an assumption is made)
- Reach out for calls with users based on certain feature usage or requests they've mentioned in the past (they can see all feedback given by a user via Userfeed "Engaged Users" feature)
- Beta test new features with a select group of users, using that time to gather more feedback and push it into Userfeed
"Our product managers scan through new feedback to spot opportunities for product improvements & new features. Because Userfeed is deeply integrated with Intercom, it’s super convenient to connect with the user using a channel that they’re already familiar with. Nothing is worse than messaging the user in a bunch of different channels and threads. Userfeed solves this for us beautifully." - Elitsa Zaimova, Head of Customer Care @ Preply
Userfeed in action: Preply's screen sharing feature
Userfeed helped Preply introduce one of their most strategic features - Preply Space, a video communication tool for online lessons.. Thanks to Userfeed, they were able to quickly and efficiently understand their customers' feedback and make adjustments to the product on timely basis. For the Preply team, Userfeed has definitely helped better the product improvement process and close the feedback loop.
Intercom + Userfeed gave them the data and context they needed to find, understand, and fix a problem their users had, building a solution that helped them hit their desired product usage goals.
Results for Preply's users
This proactive feedback loop combined with the ability to link users and conversations from Intercom has enabled Preply to gather feedback from 1k+ new users a month. Every user's feedback is taken into consideration, whether it's about a common or unique issue.
Preply can now stay closer to the customer and provide a better customer experience. They've found that users are willing to give more feedback than ever before because Preply is actively listening and following up on their feedback.