Live chat stops lies that kill startups.

Last updated on June 13th, 2023

Pardeep Kullar
Pardeep Kullar

We constantly hear that experienced entrepreneurs are obsessed with customer feedback and while I personally was like “Ok, sounds good”, the message took time to fully get through. We’ve come to understand that live chat is a feedback super weapon. Talking regularly to users helps correct dumb and dangerous assumptions and here are a few.

Lie 1: “Our software is simple to understand”

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When live chatting we’ll sometimes use a term we think is universal and it turns out that half the people don’t really understand it. This includes even very common words like ‘domain’. Yep, domain. We still use ‘domain’ sometimes but try and say ‘website’.

Lie 2: “Trust me, everyone will love this new idea”

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When someone says an idea is interesting it’s code for ‘I would never buy this and I barely understand what you’re saying’. The reaction we really want is ‘Hell Yes!’.

We’ve tested and even built new feature ideas we thought people needed, talked to them about it on live chat and nobody needed it. They were mostly using an existing tool that was much better for that task and they were never going to adopt ours. When we analysed the 100s of casual conversations in which they mentioned those other tools it became obvious they needed an integration option and not our feature.

Lie 3: “Lets hold off on the marketing, we already know they’ll complain that we haven’t got [insert feature you think is missing] so lets fix that first”

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Sometimes we don’t launch something new because getting abuse and criticism sucks. However, it also turns out that they don’t care about the missing features and they’re mostly complaining about the one core feature. That’s something we learn by getting faster feedback and it’s always an eye opener.

Some more lies that live chat exposed for us

“Of course they know they can cancel at any time.”
“We’ve fixed all the main bugs.”
“They understand what API means.”
“Most of them probably don’t research our competitors so why add a comparison page.”

SEEING users use your site is a revelation

Live chat taught us a lot. What did Upscope co-browsing teach us? Seeing people’s screens during a chat as they used the website told us we were wrong about a most of our interface assumptions.

  1. The free trial link is not obvious.
  2. They don’t know how to fill in the “world’s simplest form”.
  3. People don’t read. They really really don’t read. Keep text simple.

and a lot more…

Upscope has a free trial and it feels like magic seeing it the first time.

Pardeep Kullar
Pardeep Kullar

Pardeep overlooks growth at Upscope and loves writing about SaaS companies, customer success and customer experience.