Getting a life (on Saturdays)

Avlesh
to Ankit, Ravi, Manish, Prashant, Vikas, Aayush, Nitin

Brothers,

First, I am doing good, got back from the hospital, recovered over the weekend and raring to go now. I’ll see you in office today. Thankfully, after a bunch of tests, doctors ruled out any cardiac ailment – so, I’ll stick with you longer than you thought :-d

WebEngage is now a 5 day workplace

Now, on a serious note, I guess its about time to rethink a few things. I don’t know how it works with other people, but for me it took a health scare to get to rethink. All of us have worked incredibly hard to build a respectable company – mind you, we started from zero. And you know how much work has gone into it – code night outs, scalability nightmares, support calls at midnight from the US, crazy sales trips to squeeze 8-10 meetings in a day. We did everything to make it work. However, in doing all of the above, I have pushed each one of you to limits. I now realize that. Sorry mate.

I owe you a gift. I owe you your Saturdays. Go brother, its yours. Do things you like, spend time with your friends and family, let’s go for team outings (yikes, we haven’t had one in an year now!). And, if, you still want to code, come over to my place

We are now a 5 day working company. Yay!

- Avlesh

Bottom-line, we won’t we working on Saturdays anymore starting this week unless its a pre-planned one. Support emails for all the paid plans will still be answered promptly on the weekend. Enterprise plan customers will continue to get uninterrupted 24*7 support as per the SLA.

I have taken this decision to give much needed respite to the team that builds this awesomeness called WebEngage for you. They need love too

- Avlesh

9000 customers as on 15th May, 2013

I am excited to share this with you – in the last 30 days we have added another thousand happy customers taking our total customer count to over 9000 worldwide. Some of our latest prized additions include – Myntra, Purplle, Getlisted (acquired by SEOmoz), Nubelo, Shopnineteen, Caratlane, Online.nl, Cartrade etc.

Recently, we have done quite a few things that might be of interest to you. E.g. we released a sticky header notification layout which has caught the fancy of hundreds of marketers and product managers already, we released a Joomla plugin to make it easier for you to integrate WebEngage, we added the ability to add an optional welcome note for your on-site surveys and we added support for Bulgarian language taking our total supported language count to 27!

All of this sounds exciting? Follow @WebEngage or #WebEngageLive on Twitter for more – we are uploading some nice screenshots of our products in action everyday.

Miles to go before we sleep …

- Avlesh

Go ahead, use the world’s simplest and most powerful in-site customer engagement toolkit ever – in a language of your choice. We’ll continue to add support for more and more languages moving forward. Your language is missing? Are you willing to help us translate some 50 odd phrases? If you said yes, please get in touch.

Don’t know what WebEngage does? This 2 min explainer video will help:

Stay tuned. We love you!

Ladies and gents, we present to you our second Notification layout – Sticky Header! Underneath is a sample of how it looks on your website:

Sticky header notification in action

We are listing down a few use-cases when you’d like to use this layout:

• When you’d like to show a persistent header message to all visitors on your website … something like “Hey, if you need any help please call on 1-800-xxxx ..“
• When you’d like to make an announcement for a couple of days .. “We have a 10% off on all diapers this week. Check it out!“; and here’s why you should use us – because you don’t need to make any code changes on your website at the end of the week, as campaign dates can be controlled from within your WebEngage dashboard. Did you say “oh, wow!”? Thanks
• When you’d like to greet users who log on to your website and throw specific promotions – “James, great to see you back. Claim your $20 coupon now!“. For more on such application specific use-cases, see custom targeting.
• When you’d like to train your users on the product – “Hey Joe, having trouble using the loan calculator? Check out our user guide“. The message can be targeted at users who end up spending a-lot-of-time on certain pages in your product’s workflow.
• When you’d like to prompt visitors on your blog/website to “subscribe to your newsletter“. The best part? – those who close the notification, won’t get to see it again. So, no more worrying about irritating your users with the same prompt over and over.

Rings a bell? Cool. We are sure that you can think of hundreds of such use-cases in context of your application. That’s precisely the reason why we have made it super simple to create a notification. You can get up and running in less than 5 mins. Here’s how:

Step 1: Create a Notification (Dashboard > Notification List > Create)

Create a notification and choose sticky header layout

Step 2: Add message and call to action (see live preview)

Add message, call-to-action and see live preview

Step 3: Additional options and themes

Options (push down, stick-to-top, content alignment etc)

Choose from our themes or add your own

Step 4: Add rules to filter the audience which gets to see this notification (more on targeting here)

Specify rules to filter the audience which gets to see this notification

Step 5: Advanced options; activate and go live!

Activate the notification and go live!

Step 6: Get real-time stats and reports

Real-time stats

An interesting bit with this is latest feature is that we have designed layouts keeping third party developers in mind. The idea is to allow developers to make use of our infrastructure, API’s etc and build+distribute such layouts. More on this next month .. if this interests you, do keep a watch on our docs.

Liked what you saw? Let us know. In coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out all the other notification layouts. Existing customers can log on to their dashboard and start using this new feature; and, for the new ones …

Sign-up today for a FREE trial →

Stay tuned. We love you!

Ravi Datanwala - VP (Sales, IN)

In yet another milestone, we have shed our all_engineers tag on the company by bringing on-board one of the most seasoned software salesman of our times.

Please welcome Ravi Datanwala as our VP (Sales, India) – linkedin.com/in/ravidatanwala

I am extremely excited to bring Ravi on board – not only for his 18 years of diverse experience; but also, because he can write SQL queries! Yeah, you heard that right – so unusual for a sales exec with such experience. However, unlike most of us, he doesn’t use foul language. That was sort of a disappointment, but we still hired him because he agreed to a massive paycut. That’s Ravi for you – level headed, tons of valuable experience and clear on his goals – basically all things we stand for.

Our enterprise sales story in India is now known to one and all. We take immense pride in powering customer engagement on some of the largest e-commerce players in this country – Flipkart, MMT, Jabong, Snapdeal, HomeShop18, Yatra, Freecultr, Healthkart, Zivame .. you name it! Take a look –  webengage.com/customers-and-testimonials. Ravi has promised me that he will add all the remaining ones here . Ravi will head sales efforts in India and help us plan to move into other geographies.

Ravi will be adding a few members to his outreach team in months to follow. If you are keen, make sure you get in touch with him – ravi [at] webengage ]dot[ com.

Finally, I get the much needed respite. I am currently in the US on a month long business development trip. With Ankit and Ravi at helm of affairs – respectively on tech and sales, I can now focus on growth and product which were otherwise overshadowed too much by operations. Insert *i-am-so-so-so-freaking-happy-emoticon* here.

We are now a 9 member team, all set to move into a new office. I am elated – on road to building that company which you’ll be proud of … soon.

- Avlesh

Now, you can add a welcome note to your surveys before popping the questionnaire to users on your website. Here’s a sample of how a post purchase customer satisfaction survey with a welcome note might look like:

Liked this? We have been working real hard to keep the user experience on your site intact while collecting valuable insights for you from your customers. Be it our targeting capabilites or this new feature (that implements user opt-in) – these are our small li’l steps in that direction.

How to use this feature?
We have pushed an update inside your WebEngage Dashboard. The “create a survey” workflow has changed a bit. “Welcome Note” and “Thank You Message” are now a part of the Questionnaire tab in your workflow. Welcome note is an optional field. If you don’t add any, the survey displays first question. Here’s a screengrab of how the new screen looks like:

Adding welcome note and thanks message to surveys in your dashboard

Do let us know if you find this useful.

Stay tuned. We love you!

Custom Data: Fork your user/application data with WebEngage products for deeper analytics

In yet another attempt to bring some great insights for your business, we are pleased to announce the release of Custom Data feature inside all WebEngage products.

What is custom data?
In layman terms, it is a hook for you to push customer or application data to us while using WebEngage products on your website. Upon doing so, we store the data and present it back to you in far more insightful ways. So, e.g. if you are passing “Customer Type” information for the feedback product, you’d be able to filter your feedback data based on this criterion in your reporting module. i.e. you can find out all feedback that were submitted by your “Gold” customers. Sweet, ain’t it?

Is this similar to pushing data/events inside Google Analytics?
Yes. Very similar w.r.t how it works. However, very different for what its worth. GA is restricted to visitors on your website. We extend it further to users submitting feedback on your site, clicking on promotions (aka notifications) on your site or participating in in-site surveys. Imagine being able to dice-n-slice all this data with your own application data. Sounds powerful? It indeed is …

Ah, I don’t buy into ideas that easily. Tell me more.
Let us show you some samples of what you can get out of custom data for each of the WebEngage products. The screenshots underneath show you a quick preview of how to pass data via our API’s as well the analytics you get on top it for all the three products.

Custom Data in Notification

Custom Data in Survey

Custom Data in Feedback

Wow! Super cool! Where’s the documentation?
Thanks for buying into our idea. Finally . We have tested this feature with over half a dozen existing enterprise customers before announcing this release. Here’s the JavaScript API on how to pass custom data for – feedback, survey and notifications. These API’s are a work in progress and are bound to get better with time.

Now tell me about the moolah involved. Will you?
Except for Google, no great software should be free. Keeping that in mind we have added custom data feature ONLY under the paid plans. So, you at least have to be a Basic plan customer to be able to use this feature. If you are in the free tier currently, an upgrade will automatically make this feature available in your account.

Anything else?
Oh, yes. A whole lot. We have set our eyes on offering you enterprise class analytics. Not only on top of WebEngage data but also by mashing your application data with it. The idea is to give you instant insights on your business to sleep over or to present in your board meetings. We love data (for SEO reasons, let’s call it BIG DATA) and we want to help you visualize it better.

Give this a spin. We look forward to your feedback.

Stay tuned. We love you!

Not any more.

We have rolled out customization capabilities for these fields by allowing you to rename the field, mark it as mandatory, optional or hidden and sort these fields in conjunction with your custom fields.

This new enhancement is done to your existing Feedback Fields screen in the dashboard. Screenshot underneath. To access, go to Dashboard > Feedback Settings > Feedback Fields

Dashboard > Feedback Settings > Feedback Fields

Some samples on how this new feature set is being used on customer websites underneath.

The default feedback form. This gets added to your account the moment you sign up. You can customize categories at Dashboard > Feedback Settings > Feedback Categories

Default feedback form; For custom categories Dashboard > Feedback Settings > Feedback Categories

Feedback form with optional email, that too, as the last question in the form

Feedback form with optional email field

Advanced feedback form with custom fields and category dependent sub-fields. You can create custom fields (drop-downs, checkboxes, radio buttons, file upload fields, text boxes, comment boxes etc) from Dashboard > Feedback Settings > Feedback Fields > Add Custom Field

Form with category dependent sub-fields

And, here comes the super anonymous feedback form. Nothing, but the feedback!

Nothing, but the feedback

We hope that this customization capability will give you more controls on how you want to render your feedback form. More importantly, the control to just ask questions that you think are relevant for your online application. Let us know if you find this useful.

Not a customer yet? No better time to join the club, than now. Sign-up today for your free trial – webengage.com/pricing

Stay tuned. We love you!

What does it do?
In simple terms, it lets you transfer your (or your account admin’s) rights to someone else.

Why do I need it?
You will find this feature helpful for a couple of use-cases. We are highlighting some underneath:

1. Agencies, who manage WebEngage accounts for their customers, typically sign-up on their behalf. As, a next step, they would add the customer as an administrator for their account and then remove themselves altogether. With more and more agencies coming on board WebEngage, we realized this was a pain point. Now, with this feature, agencies can thank us.
2. An employee, currently managing your WebEngage account, decides to leave the company and you have to transfer the responsibility to a new person. We know that this situation is traumatic; so, we made sure the pain and friction is reduced on our end, as much as possible
3. With the FREE tier, there was no way to “delete” yourself and “add” another admin to the account, because the feature “add admin” isn’t available in the free plan. Free plan customers will no longer need to update their personal email info to receive end user feedback in a different mailbox.

Ah, got it. How does this work?
This option is available for each of your widget accounts. Navigate to Dashboard > Settings > Administration and follow the steps underneath:

Step 1. Navigate to your administration area. Click on Transfer Ownership

Navigate to your administration area. Click on Transfer Ownership

Step 2. Add details of the new owner

Add details of the new owner

Step 3. An email is sent to new owner. Transfer is pending activation (as per instructions in email)

Email is sent to new owner. Transfer is pending activation

Step 4. Yay! Bbye old admin. Welcome new admin.

Yay! Bbye old admin. Welcome new admin!

Stay tuned. We love you!

Very soon, we’ll be adding a cool new feature inside Notifications – Layouts. The idea is simple – at its core, a Notification is Title + HTML description + Call-to-actions. With layouts we intend to present this core data in different UI formats to address specific problems. Samples underneath:

Classic: THE original WebEngage Notification layout.

Callouts: This layout will allow you to pin point new features on your site and make it easy to announce them to your users. The description can be rich HTML content containing images, URL’s etc. And of-course there’s a nice call-to-action.

Notice: Need “there’s a live update for you” kind of notices for your users? Look no further. We heard you …

Slider Top: Greet your visitors/users with a page slider message positioned right at top of the page. You can embed small images/icons and call-to-actions etc in the message too!

Sticky Footer: Want a persistent footer for announcements and promotions? This layout is designed to show up in fixed format in the footer section of your site.

Technically, we are building layouts in an extensible manner. In layman terms, we’d allow customers and developers to build their own layouts on top of our basic framework. We’ll publish more documentation on this soon.

Even with the Classic version (that is currently available), we have seen some amazing UI customizations. Underneath are a few samples of how customers have been making great use of what we have built. These are some small little pleasures that keep us going …

Layouts are a work in progress and we intend to release a version one around first week of March, 2013. Can’t wait? Let us know, we’ll give you priority access.

Like what you see? Please spread the word for us. If you have some interesting layout ideas, leave your comments here. We’ll definitely work on the ones that gives us and our customers goosebumps.

Sign-up today for a FREE trial →

Stay tuned. We love you!