As GoSquared celebrates its 9th birthday — James Gill, James Taylor and Geoff Wagstaff started the company when they were just 14 — the London-based ‘startup’ is launching its most ambitious product to date.
Best known for its real-time web analytics offering, which competes with Chartbeat, Google Analytics and other companies in the real-time analytics space, GoSquared’s newly released ‘People Analytics’ aims to tackle a potentially bigger problem: namely, consolidating all of the user data a typical SaaS company has stored in multiple and siloed software to help them get a much better understanding of customers.
Those silos typically span internally built tools, third-party billing systems, support desk software, web analytics, and “bulky” CRM systems, meaning that to solve a particular customer’s problem they each need to be interrogated separately. Not only is this time consuming but requires staff to have been trained to use each disparate piece of software.
Instead, People Analytics aims make all of this ‘user-level’ data accessible and searchable from a single and intuitive dashboard, with the ultimate goal to enable businesses to connect with users on a “personal” level.
“People Analytics is about bringing together all the data and information you have on your users – information that currently sits in a handful of different tools – into one place, where it can be searched, queried, and easily accessed by everyone on the team,” explains GoSquared co-founder and CEO James Gill.
“Other tools have been chipping away at this idea, and perhaps show you information about a user’s billing history, or their on-site activity, or their customer support history. People Analytics pieces all of these parts of the jigsaw together so you have one definitive place to look up information on your users.”
As for how this might be utilised in practice, Gill gives the example of customer support in the Software-as-a-Service space, specifically dealing with a customer who is having trouble upgrading, which, without People Analytics, might invariably require looking up information in multiple different tools, such as a billing system, an internal admin system, or third-party analytics tool.
“Just one search for the name, email address or User ID will give you back a full profile with all the info you need on a specific user, including the device they were on, any errors they triggered, and any pages they viewed before they sent their support ticket,” he explains.
Or another potential use-case, says Gill, is product management. “By filtering your entire user base, you can use People Analytics to answer questions such as ‘out of all our trial users, how many people activated feature X?'”.
This enables product managers to know what features are heavily used (or barely used at all) and, because People Analytics includes data on individual users, you can go beyond reporting and actually take action on that data, such as sending a bespoke email to a specific list of users.
Meanwhile, unlike when GoSquared celebrated its 5th birthday, Gill says the startup isn’t planning a party and instead will wait till it reaches 10. “Boy does time fly,” adds the 23-year-old.