Crafting the Ideal Customer Experience Toolbox for a B2B SaaS Product

Lately, I’ve been deep in thought about product tooling. This time it’s for UX Research Ops, but I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a lot of different tools at play in my 4 years at Sinch. I’ve personally introduced a few new tools to our product development teams and witnessed the impact of many others.

Of course, in this real world scenario, you’re tooling for the current state of play; whatever debt and commitments your org has become part of your requirements. That means a lot of great tools are not the right tool for your organization at that time. That’s why I wrote this wishlist. It’s a ‘what I’d do with a magic wand’ ramblings.

Living in an imaginary world with no limits (!) here’s how I’d outfit my dream product toolbox at a B2B SaaS company (based on both lived experience and well-researched window shopping).

Hands down, I’d pick Heap over Amplitude any day. I’ve heard that Amplitude can give you more, but from my experience, it has to be setup and maintained in the most mindful of fashions. Something that’s easy to fall by the wayside when it’s not a dedicated role.

Alternatively, Heap goes back in time. It’s magical. Yes, it requires some thoughtful setup. Yes, you’re going to have to make sure the instances of your UI components are uniquely named. Yes, you’re going to have to plan your metric tracking in advance. But, then, something magical happens. Once you say what you need, there’s a possibility to travel back in time. Easy enough to use, capable of quick implementation (if you know what you’re doing), and now with session replay.

We used Heap at SimpleTexting for a couple of years. When we started to track churn in a more dedicated way, it was like magic to see numbers going back in time to before we cared so much. This helped us take a closer took at which product changes impacted churn, leading to a more pointed direction of work.

Speaking of, session replay should be required for all product teams. What people say is guaranteed(!) to be different than what they do. But you’re thinking about these questions only after you’ve thought of a segment, an activity, or a problem. That’s why pairing it with Heap is brilliant.

I’ve used other session replay tools that live separate from the analytics base (Hotjar, Datadog, VWO, Fullstory) and find that division another friction point for product people. You’re never looking at replays without intent; having two separate places to search means doing the same search twice. We’s lazy.

Other contenders in the Session Replay list that I’ve loved are FullStory and Hotjar. Hotjar’s breadth has grown a lot over the past few years and it’s proving to be a good utility to have around. FullStory has great mobile coverage and robust search.

Convincing designers to perform user research can be a challenge. It’s a friction-filled process that often stretches out weeks. That’s where Sprig comes into play. It’s based on the interruption survey model, where you prompt users only after they’ve completed a task (or tried to). You get insights from your actual users, the interruption is hyper targeted, and you can get recorded videos of user thoughts and opinions. It’s the best tool I’ve seen for pushing Continuous Discovery practices.

Sure, if you want to run many concurrent surveys, you’ll need a conductor to ensure you’re not overwhelming users. However, you can make your inquiries so task-specific, that you’re less likely to annoy.

I’ve seen a number of Product Managers use AppCues in an attempt to recruit users for research studies. There’s friction. People need to schedule it – like a meeting. Sprig captures user feedback with on the spot user recording. This is the BeReal of the user research realm.

Sadly, I’ve only had the chance to see Sprig used minimally. We ran a couple of small studies for one of our SaaS messaging apps and I was blown away. The targeting addresses the bloat you see in alternative tools like AppCues and the videos feel like magic nuggets you got for free without the pain of recruiting.

For those deeper insights, Great Question the one I’m favoring for managing participant experiences and analyzing data post-interview. It seems to hit that sweet spot of broad enough without too much cruft. To train a team on continuous discovery, you need the lower the barrier of entry, making it easy to get access to users that want to jump on the phone for a longer discussion. GQ does a nice job of combining participant recruiting with traditional UX research methods.

Being sticky, in my experience, has 2 elements. 1: the actual embedded-ness into an organization’s ways of working. This embedded-ness rarely has much to do with the tool itself—its’ features and usability. So let’s skip to 2. The second element of making a product sticky is how you’re able to transform your users into experts and evangelists.

To do the second, you need to train your users to use the product deeply, resulting in our #1, becoming part of the way you work. This is especially true in the b2b space. There’s enough complexity required to extract value that you need to think of product education.

Product education is a rich area. It involves humans (Support agents, CSMs!) and self-serve tooling. To be product-led, you want to alleviate the burden of Support and CSMs as much as possible, as you’re going for scale and want to make the most efficient use of their time.

Self-serve product education is often the realm of Support tools like Intercom (which is amazing, btw). However, I think there’s another key element that’s hard to achieve through modal-tours and help centers alone. It’s embedded in-app support, like 1:1 coaching, without requiring the tab-switching of a help center.

For this, I would use Bento. I think of Bento as part of a category of Product Activation tools. Growth hacking PMs love these things; they get to experiment with minimal development effort and quickly see the effects.

Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to implement this on a product I’ve cared for, but I can see so many upsides. Unlike traditional help center documentation, Bento embeds within your app’s page, joining how-to’s with training. They’ve been early to leverage AI for optimizations and are thoughtful about you, the user.

I’ve seen a Bento-competitor brought on to solve onboarding and dashboard activation for one of the products I care for. It was alright. Glitchier than we expected. it’s in those moments that you realize whomever you entrust with your onboarding will have a lot of expectations placed on them.

Continuous discovery is how you try to get ahead of the game. Support is where you fill in the cracks. But what about everything else you miss? What about review management, cancellations, or general themes? What about all the details hiding in a support ticket never read?

You can get this information by digging yourself or by talking to your colleagues in Marketing and Support about their observations. But there comes a time when the volume is too great for anyone to effectively keep the pulse without bias.

This is where a new category of tool is making an appearance. I think of these like a ‘spidey-sense’ for your customer experience paper cuts. It will help you spot gaps, siloes, and places where you’re not filling the gaps by stellar internal collaboration.

For this, I’m keen on two tools right now: Enterpret and Idiomatic. Of the tools in this niche, many are babies of the Gen AI era. Analyzing data at scale and spitting out human-readable summaries is one thing it does pretty naturally.

I haven’t fully seen the upside of this implemented at scale yet, but I’ve done it manually and know there’s value. Will the findings drastically change your roadmap? Honestly—you’d hope not. You’d hope your discoveries are confirmation of what you already know. But I do believe there’s value in running this kind of service throughout the life of the product to make sure you’re not blind to something key.

I’ve seen remote collaboration attempted during my 7 years of remote work. In the early days, it looked like Creative Suite, Dropbox, Omnigraffle, and way too many word docs. Thank the gods it’s better now.

Here’s what I like using these days.

Everyone in the company should have access to a digital whiteboard. Just like if you paid for office space, anyone, even your admin folks, could walk into a room and make a list with an expo marker. Many humans think visually and should be comfortable doing live collaborations in spaces like this. (Note: Figjam is pretty good, but I prefer this category democratized fully.)

I haven’t had the pleasure of using Linear with a team, but I have a hunch it’s worth a try. Anyone who cares that much about their products (and lives on them!) will build something of quality.

If I found linear too niche, I’d switch back to Notion. It’s great as a general purpose wiki, doc storage/repository, and I’m sure that as the search and permissions become more robust, we’ll see it become how larger businesses (more officially) operate.

No getting away from Figma as the replacement for all UX design work. I’m glad the prototyping has improved over time. I hope they put some effort into things like connected nodes (for building flows more naturally) and better file management.

I generally go for combining functions under one tool, so I’d go with Figma dev mode for a few folks that will be in the weeds of front-end builds. In the end, I think the Figma team will realize that they’ll fall out of the community’s good graces if they go too far down the adobe pricing rabbit hole.

Fully here to admit I’m not experienced as a Support leader. (But the ARE my fav collaborators and I fully believe that the quality of a business’ support director will make or break your brand.)

However! I think Intercom does a nice job at pairing support functionality (live chat engagement) with lifecycle marketing. If you make Intercom your source of truth for customer data, it becomes much easier to speak to the right people at the right time.

While I don’t think IC is a great tool for product education, I have seen it used really well for ongoing install-base communication.

So many of these great tools overlap. I swear, everyone does NPS. Everyone can pop a modal on a page or track a button click. While I don’t think you can go wrong by tooling up in a more arbitrary way, understanding how all the capabilities weave together to support your team helps to make more impact.

If you get it just right, you can support employees to grow in their craft, while improving the value you deliver to customers. That’s the dream.