In a world where it’s all about instant communication, Clerk Chat is on a mission to transform traditional business communication.
By integrating AI agents with existing business phone numbers, Clerk Chat enables seamless interaction via SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, and soon iMessage, facilitating a new era of conversational commerce.
Background
Clerk Chat has been at the forefront of leveraging AI to make every business conversational.
With a versatile platform that integrates effortlessly with leading CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, Clerk has streamlined customer interactions across the entire lifecycle—from marketing and sales to support.
From day one, Clerk prioritized the aggregation of product metrics, using Segment to funnel data from various internal systems into BigQuery.
Despite their efforts, the team quickly realized the limitations of existing tools in building insightful product analytics graphs, a challenge that led them to look for a new solution.
Challenge
As a company that thrives on being data-driven, Clerk Chat faced the daunting task of gaining visibility into product analytics.
The complexity of creating detailed analytics graphs to track feature adoption and user engagement using Metabase was a significant hurdle. This challenge was compounded by the need to integrate product usage data with the CRM, ensuring a unified and efficient workflow.
The pursuit of a solution that could offer deep insights into product usage analytics without the extensive time investment required by other tools became a critical mission for Clerk Chat's product team.
The Solution
Alexander Haque, Co-Founder & CEO of Clerk Chat stumbled upon June and decided to give it a shot, given that getting started would just require a couple of clicks.This ease of integration was a game-changer, allowing Clerk to instantly get metrics about the business without having to build charts from scratch.
June provided Clerk with the much-needed visibility into their product analytics, enabling the team to track feature adoption, analyze product usage, and identify key performance indicators such as active users, retention, and churn rates.
Tracking activation
Clerk Chat has a PLG motion, and for this reason it is really important to closely monitor how many people manage to go from signing up to really streamlining their communication.To do so, the team started using the Activation report which has been super helpful to identify which users were struggling at the beginning of the journey.
After users sign up for Clerk ideally they should:
- Get a new phone number or import an existing one from Microsoft Teams, Twilio, or another phone carrier
- Import contacts, typically with a csv file or connecting with one of the offered CRM integrations.
- Send or receive a first SMS
By sending over these milestones to the CRM, the team is now able to send targeted emails to the users that are not completing the right steps to get value from the product. Here’s more about how to do that
Apart from using this report in a reactive way, the product team closely monitors the activation percentage WoW to see whether the recent updates shipped are actually having an impact.
Improving Retention
Other than focusing on activation and engagement through HubSpot, the team keeps front and centered on weekly retention.This metric is crucial for the team, as it is the best proxy for long-term value.By looking at the cohort table top to bottom, the product team is able to understand whether the product is getting better or not. Ideally, looking at the same point in time (say week 2) the retention % should increase.
W2 is where the curve stabilizes for Clerk Chat (meaning that the number of users retained at W2 and W25 does not change much) so trying to push that number up over time has been crucial.
Outcome
June changed Clerk Chat’s approach to product management and user engagement.
By providing real-time data and insights, June helped Clerk’s product team understand how their text message service offers were being used, facilitating a deeper connection with their user base.
This transformation allowed Clerk to:
- Easily monitor product metrics: with June’s templated reports, Clerk was able to easily monitor active users, feature usage, and churn without spending days on setup.
- Improve User Activation: using a combination of the activation report + CRM integration the team was able to activate more users through both proactive support and product improvements.
- Improve User Retention: insights into retention enabled Clerk to implement targeted strategies to keep users engaged, reducing churn, and increasing user loyalty.
