With digital customer service increasingly becoming another opportunity for marketing, startup UserCare is today launching customer service tuned for mobile apps.
The service, available to developers through an SDK for iOS, Android and the Unity game engine on both, has been in a private beta since mid-November. It is the first product of the Mountain View, California-based company, which was spun out of app-focused ad agency Manage.com last October.
CEO Barry Coleman told me that “a lot of customer service in mobile will push [users] out of the app, to web and then to email,” often without a lot of information about what the user was doing before requesting help. In fact, UserCare says its research indicates only about eight percent of iOS and Android apps provide in-app or mobile messaging support, while about three-quarters direct users to Web-based support.
By contrast, he said, UserCare offers in-app messaging with an agent, and it tracks user events, like a crash. It also tracks what FAQs have been seen, Coleman pointed out, so “the agent doesn’t say ‘read the FAQs.’”
The agent has the ability to help a user around an obstacle in an app, if so empowered by the developer, and to send push notifications if the app is closed.
UserCare also provides its own customer relationship management (CRM) profile system. It records, for instance, all of the publisher’s apps that the user installed, as well as in-app purchases and other publisher-related history.
Here’s an agent’s screen showing a messaging interaction with a user of a supported app:
The UserCare profiles allow an app publisher to segment its users so that, for instance, the most valuable customers can get a higher level of customer service, an offer of discounts to new versions or special encouragements, like 100 free coins in casino games to boost participation.
But UserCare is not set up to directly interact with an existing CRM in real time, so users can’t immediately be segmented according to other behavior or characteristics outside of what UserCare collects. The UserCare CRM does, however, support exporting and importing with other CRMs.
Coleman pointed to HelpShift as UserCare’s biggest competitor in app-based customer service, because of its messaging and ticketing. But, he added, they don’t track in profiles such historical data as user actions.
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