It’s easy to measure metrics in pure numbers. Analytics tools can provide you with graphs and charts that tell you your community is growing or engagement and sign ups have fallen. But if you want nuance and context behind these numbers so you can make informed decisions? Well, that’s a little harder to achieve.

Until Caravel.

What is Caravel?

Caravel brings all your feedback — support tickets, emails, call transcripts, surveys, Slack threads, product reviews, and chats — into a single space. 

It scans through all your conversations across these platforms in real time, so you can get hard data on what your community is talking about, whether they’re happy or not, and what action you can take to turn negative experiences into positive ones.

How can Caravel help you?

Caravel helps you understand what’s important to your community members so you can build better experiences for them throughout the customer journey.

With Caravel, you can surface feedback from your community to improve your product, services, and business. Caravel helps you:

• Find out what issues are trending and make informed decisions to fix problems with your product or customer experience
• Learn what customers are happy about so you can expand on these experiences across other teams and products
• Get Slack or email alerts about urgent issues and priorities so your team is never caught off guard
• Assess the impact of product changes on customers so you can take action before sentiment turns negative

Let’s dive into some specific ways teams across your company can use Caravel.

1. Stay on top of discussion topics

Manually staying on top of the thousands of conversations happening daily is a mammoth task, and there’s a goldmine of data in those conversations that can get lost without the right tools. 

Caravel helps your teams learn what questions people are asking your Support and Success teams and in your community, how frequently these questions are asked, what conversations people are engaging with in the community, and who’s frequently engaging.

Specific use cases

Community: Discussions in your community are a great source of inspiration for creating content that your community wants to know more about. Your Community team can see what questions and discussions are active and come up repeatedly, and who’s engaging with these topics. It can use this data to create community content, such as hosting events that answer these questions, finding experts to serve as panelists at these events or guests in an AMA, and working with the Marketing team to create blog posts, podcasts, eBooks, and videos.

Marketing: Not only can your Marketing team create promotional content (and find great sources to interview from the community), it can also use Caravel’s data to solidify your product education efforts. Your Marketing team can see patterns at scale on repeated ‘how to’ questions about a feature or use case. With this data, it can create more text or video tutorials, host webinars, publish blog posts, or send newsletters that answer these questions. It can even work with your Support and Product teams to update the Knowledge Base or add a new Knowledge Base section.

Product: Your Product team can identify which community members know the ins and outs of your product — and are ready to help — based on who is frequently answering product-related questions. With this information, they can find people to join a Customer Advisory Board or beta test new features and updates.

2. Increase efficiency and accuracy with support ticket tags

Your Support team needs to tag each conversation to add them to the correct categories and understand the themes that are emerging. It’s time intensive, costly, and leaves room for errors. 

Caravel automates this for you so your team no longer has to sift through hundreds of tags after each conversation and select the right ones. With hundreds of agents across multiple offices no longer tagging thousands of tickets a day, you can save around 30 seconds a ticket and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Specific use cases

Support: The time saved lets your Support team answer new tickets faster and handle more cases every day. It also lets them provide in-depth customer support when needed without jamming the support queue. These tags are saved in Caravel and your support ticketing platform, so your team can choose which platform to use for analytics.

Product: Your Product team can use this data to see patterns at scale — e.g. whether bugs or security issues are popping up frequently, or if there’s a high level of complaints or feature requests — and understand the problems and opportunities that exist to better fit your product to customer needs. The increased accuracy of the tags means Product Managers have more reliable data to use when deciding what to prioritize in their road map.

3. Proactively improve community and customer health and reduce churn

The human context in a community and customer base is just as important as the stats and analytics. Caravel combines the two to deliver reports that show you not just what your customers and community members are talking about but also how positive or negative they’re feeling about a topic. You can use these insights to get ahead of problems before they arise and give folks a customer and community experience worth staying for.

Specific Use Cases

Community: Your Community team can see what the overall community sentiment is and how this changes with any shifts in community programs, activities, or rules. It can use this data to improve community programs, anticipate (and plan for) negative sentiment, and be proactive with content and communication.

On a 1-to-1 level, your Community team can use the data to identify your super users who have a positive influence and strong relationships with the community as potential community ambassadors. On the flip side, your team can also see which members are likely to leave the community and take steps to improve their experience so they stay.

Support and Success: At a glance, your Support and Success teams can see which customers have good standing and which ones are most likely to churn and require your time. With constant access to data that’s updated in real time, your team can jump in early to drive up customer satisfaction and save an account that’s on the fence. It can use our Customer Experience Score — measured overall and for specific tags — to see which areas of Support and Success need more training or resources, or which issues need escalating to the Product team, before they become very negative.

Product: Caravel’s reports highlight hot topics based on how often they’re being mentioned and how positive or negative these conversations are. Your Product team can quickly tackle emerging issues — topics that are talked about often but people unhappy about — and fix the problem before it impacts more customers. These actionable insights provide recommendations so your Product team can act fast instead of poring over charts and metrics that don’t share context.

4. Get direct feedback any time

Sometimes you have a specific question you’d like data for, and you can create surveys with Caravel to ask your customers and community exactly what you need. 

You can use surveys to calculate important metrics such as Customer Satisfaction Score and Net Promoter Score. Then dig a little deeper with an open-ended follow up question to get more context on why the respondent gave the feature or experience this particular rating. 

Caravel analyzes all the answers — both on a rating scale or open-ended — to give you a sense of how your customers feel about the topic at hand.

Specific use cases

Product: Your Product team can gather sentiment around new features, learn how customers view the onboarding experience, or understand how happy your customers are with your product as a whole — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The team can use this data to prioritize which features to improve based on customer needs and usage.

Support and Success: Your Support and Success teams can use surveys to analyze the overall quality of support, find snags at specific points of customer interaction, and improve customer loyalty and experience. The feedback can help the teams amend their processes (if that’s needed), determine training opportunities, and even identify your Support and Success superstars to give a shout-out to!

Community: To measure the success of a community event, your Community team can send attendees a survey in a follow-up email to learn what worked and what didn’t. This feedback — coupled with tracking chatter about the event on your community platform — can help your team improve future events for the community. 

5. Help Support and Success teams provide great customer experiences

Bad customer experiences can lose you millions of dollars in lost customers. And great customer experiences? Customers will stay with you (even if your team makes an odd mistake), make repeat purchases, and feel loyal to your brand.

Caravel helps you analyze the quality of your Support and Success conversations so your teams can provide a great customer experience every time.

Specific use cases

Support and Success: You can see how your Support and Success teams are interacting with customers — What is their tone of voice? Did they solve a case and make a customer happy or are they leaving customers frustrated? Which team members are driving the best outcomes?

You can use this insight to provide training and adjust your processes where needed to improve customer experience across the board.

Not using Caravel yet? Book a demo.

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