How Vestd Creates Consistent User Experience with Survicate and FullStory

For high-quality UX research, you need to find a smart way to combine qualitative and quantitative data.

But it’s not always easy. Collecting qualitative feedback through interviews is very time-consuming. And while valuable, sometimes it’s hard to connect users’ subjective opinions with their behavior in your app.

On the other hand, numerical user data is not enough to discover what went wrong on a given user journey. You can see all your customers’ actions—but not the “why” behind them.

The key is putting the two together. You need to discover what was happening in your product as the user left their feedback or encountered friction.

That’s why Vestd, a share scheme and equity management platform, started running surveys with Survicate—and used our native integration with FullStory, a digital experience platform. The tools helped them get a full view of the user journeys and eliminate guessing games from app development.

Tom Alcock, a UX researcher at Vestd, told us:

• Why Vestd needed an in-app feedback solution.
• Why they went for Survicate—and stayed.
• How the product team uses Survicate and FullStory integration to create a consistent customer experience.

Read on!

In search of a survey software for continuous feedback collection

‍Vestd is a UK-based share scheme and equity management platform. It helps small and medium businesses reward employees with different kinds of equity. Vestd has helped thousands of start ups and SMEs. The company has grown considerably over the past 4 years.

But rapid scaling brings many challenges with it.

From a product development perspective, the need to expand the Vestd web app fast, with a quickly growing team, caused a few inconsistencies across the app. At first, the product team built the software without an extensive product design plan or user research.

Tom and the rest of the product team knew that disparities negatively impact user- and customer experience. They had to improve the consistency of the platform—both to boost the first-glance impression and unify all the user journeys.

But to make this happen and finally end the guesswork, they needed to know what the users really wanted from the app. 

Keeping the app in check and the existing users satisfied is crucial for Vestd, considering their current goal to increase the MRR not only by acquiring new clients but also by upgrading their current clients’ plans. As the customers’ companies grow, so do their sharing schemes participants and their needs for Vestd’s assistance.

Since Tom joined the team as a UX researcher, he’s been running customer interviews and email surveys to gauge their opinions and keep tweaking the app.

But he realized that with the current growth pace, they needed a quicker way to collect user feedback—and a way to do it consistently, without so much manual work on his part.

Enter: Survicate.

Survicate in-app surveys: Ease of use and continuous flow of feedback

Tom and his team knew that to get constant feedback from their users, they needed in-app surveys.

With no particularly good experiences from the previous survey software he used, Tom decided to search for the best product feedback tools on Google.

There were a few features his perfect survey tool had to have:

• The option to launch surveys on individual pages—to really drill down into user experience with specific parts of the app.
• Multiple survey question types, not only free text answers—particularly NPS (Net Promoter Score) and rating questions. Besides collecting bug reports and feature requests, Tom wanted to use surveys to measure happiness, satisfaction, and ease of use.
• Ability to target specific users based on different attributes—for example, to show surveys only to new customers or those who used particular features.

Tom’s research revealed that Survicate ticked all the boxes. So, he decided to give our free trial a go.

And it clicked. Tom launched a test survey to measure customer satisfaction in one part of the platform. He collected all 25 responses available in the trial version within a day. All the responses turned out to be high quality, too, with a clear satisfaction score of more than 80%. 

His team members were impressed with the results and satisfied with Survicate’s easy, intuitive interface. They quickly switched to a paid plan.

From that moment on, Survicate became integral to Tom’s daily work. Let’s look at a few use cases to see how surveys can power UX research.

Getting an overview of user journeys with happiness surveys and FullStory integration

The main Survicate use case for Tom and his team is a recurring monthly customer happiness survey.

The survey serves as a regular check-up with the customers. It includes a close-ended CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) question that lets Tom turn user happiness into a metric they can track and compare over time. Recently, Vestd’s satisfaction score reached an impressive 88%.

Besides that, the survey features an open-ended question that allows users to leave their feedback freely and describe any problem or hindrance they encountered.

Tom makes the survey appear on a different page every month. He chooses app features that are the most problematic—generate the biggest number of support tickets, or have been mentioned in the previous surveys.

‍The happiness survey helps Tom speed up the customer feedback collection. He still struggles with response rates sometimes since the users don’t visit Vestd daily. But automated in-app surveys still save lots of his time and help catch the users at their most engaged.

However, Tom and his team don’t stop at just launching a survey and calling it a day. Whenever there’s negative feedback, Tom passes it on to their customer success team to help them close the feedback loop.

Tom also integrates Survicate with FullStory, a digital experience tool that lets him track user journeys and see session recordings.

"I can actually see what [the users who left negative feedback] are unhappy about. I share that with Customer Support team and we can actually help the customers out."

This approach also helps him plan product updates and bug fixes in a smarter, data-driven way that lets the team keep up with the fast development pace.

"If a ticket has been raised on our product board that's come from CS, [the product team would] jump straight to a solution, which is not the way to do it. We need to actually understand the problem. So I will typically launch a survey on that page just to get some more qualitative feedback, as well as looking at FullStory."

Tom told us about when an unsatisfied respondent claimed that the company resolution feature didn’t work correctly. So, Tom looked at the related session recording and discovered the users hadn't been visiting the right feature at all---they got lost in one of the app's "alleyways" and couldn't get out. Digging further into session recordings and previous survey answers, Tom realized that wasn't the only user who had taken the same wrong route and that there had already been support tickets created around this problem.

The product team then knew that this user journey needed a redesign, and the team came up with a better path to reaching company resolution. It all boiled down to adding a link on the home page and making the access clearer within the navigation bar. 

Now, customers get where they want to be every time, barring a few exceptions. The support tickets related to the issue went from a few every month to zero.

The combination of qualitative and quantitative feedback lets the product team solve a pressing issue in an easy and hassle-free way. The perfect gain-to-effort ratio!

Checking new features and solving issues with contextual surveys

The monthly recurring happiness surveys aren’t the only reason Tom uses Survicate.

He also launches one-off contextual surveys whenever there's a particular case he wants to investigate.

Let's go through a few examples.

• Surveys launched on feature pages that generate support tickets. The surveys let Tom get more insights into what causes friction on a page.
• Surveys launched on every new feature that lets the product team get customers' opinions immediately.
• Occasional surveys that let Tom collect feedback on crucial areas of the app—for example, home page or summary pages. Combined with session recording from FullStory, the collected insights had already helped the product team make a few significant improvements, such as an addition of more user guides and a carousel.

The unlimited surveys and projects let Tom monitor all the new and problematic product areas. Spotting issues immediately helps maintain the agile development environment and keep up with the dynamic company and product growth.

Combining qualitative and quantitative with Survicate surveys

As Tom told us,

“Survicate is a great way to get continuous customer feedback on your product or service by targeting users with a survey at various points in their journey. And it's a really easy and accessible tool to use.”

The Survicate and FullStory integration turned out to be a perfect solution for Vestd. It helped them marry qualitative and quantitative feedback and semi-automate the feedback collection process.

Survicate helps Vestd:

• run recurring customer happiness surveys and keep track of their satisfaction score
• run contextual surveys to investigate emerging issues and gauge user experience with new features
• understand the motivations behind negative opinions and user behavior thanks to FullStory integration

Curious about your users? Let Survicate be your guide. Try it today for free!