How Halp used Twilio Segment to improve user activation and engagement with a new onboarding flow

Results

The big win

Halp needed to increase technology activation rates and engage customers more effectively. The company also needed to test marketing automation tools, knowing that choosing the wrong tool would waste thousands of dollars. But like many startups, Halp did not have the time or resources.

Halp onboarded Twilio Segment to reduce time writing event queries. This also allowed marketing and ops teams to test apps without costing valuable development time. Upon implementing this new onboarding system, Halp went from 14% activated sign ups to 58%. With Twilio Segment, the marketing team can make quick updates to their entire onboarding flow, speeding up iteration cycles by eliminating the need for back and forth between engineering and marketing.

Halp is a new, conversational ticketing solution for support teams to assign, prioritize and answer requests from Slack in a message-based interface. Companies using Halp get faster response times, more productive support teams and happier employees. Halp is used by the IT, HR, Operations and Customer Support teams at Strava, Home Depot, Adobe and hundreds of other companies.

Halp was founded in 2017 by Fletcher Richman, Komran Rashidov and Tristan Rubadeau in Boulder, Colorado. To date, Halp has raised $2.6M in seed funding and currently employees 13 people.

Increasing activation rates with limited resources

Halp needed to increase activation rates of their technology and engage customers more effectively once they were using Halp. Fletcher’s team wanted to devise a way to reach out to customers at pivotal moments in their journey not only through email but also through Slack. Halp needed to test marketing automation tools, knowing that choosing the wrong tool would waste thousands of dollars. Like many startups, Halp did not have a lot of time or resources to dedicate to this problem. Halp could only afford to have developers write event queries once.

The first time Halp tried building a solution, they didn't have Twilio Segment. Creating marketing automation code took a full month of engineering time to develop and in the end, they had to store all of it in code, meaning their marketers couldn’t read or edit it. Halp needed some help!

Building a sophisticated, multi-touch and multi-channel customer experience with Twilio Segment

CEO and co-founder of Halp, Fletcher Richman, had successfully used Twilio Segment at two previous companies and thought it was a “no-brainer” to implement Twilio Segment immediately at Halp to reduce time writing event queries. Richman noted, “Only having to write event queries once was a huge time saver.” This also allowed marketing or operations team members to test whatever they wanted without costing valuable dev time.

Richman estimated they saved about a week’s worth of development time when testing marketing automation tools and saved thousands of dollars avoiding their original first choice based on iterative testing made possible by Twilio Segment’s integration. Using Twilio Segment “you save a combination of time and money,” said Richman.

Halp was also able to implement an onboarding flow using Twilio Segment where customers would get dynamic emails as well as direct messages in Slack from the Halp Slack App.

Here’s an example of one of the messages that gets sent dynamically using this flow:

Increasing user activation with faster and more effective onboarding

Upon implementing this new onboarding system, Halp went from 14% activated sign ups to 58% —that’s over a 4x improvement! Fletcher notes, “I massively underestimated the power of the Segment Slack Destination.” They now have faster and more effective onboarding, plus they saved almost a month of engineering resources in developing the platform. Their marketing team can also make quick edits and updates to their entire onboarding flow, speeding up iteration cycles by eliminating the need for back and forth between engineering and marketing.