Behavior-tracking software firm Amplitude Inc. today said it has completed the integration of the personalized user assistance and survey technology it acquired with Command AI last October.

Relaunched as Amplitude Guides and Surveys, the product allows marketing and product teams to deliver personalized messages and questions to users based on behavior. For example, it can deliver guidance to a user who appears to be struggling with a specific product function or ask for feedback immediately after a customer has executed a process.

Amplitude uses artificial intelligence-based targeting and what it calls “annoyance monitoring” to ensure that guides appear when users are most likely to interact with them. The interactive pop-ups can guide users through the steps needed to complete a task, share announcements and offers, issue alerts for critical updates and create personal action plans.

Those features were already part of Command AI, but they are now fully integrated with Amplitude said James Evans, Command AI’s founder and current head of AI at Amplitude.

“It wasn’t a total rewrite but we rebuilt a lot of our product inside of Amplitude,” he said. “It looks and feels as if Amplitude built a product from scratch for this purpose.”

Multi-app support

Guides and Surveys can integrate with nearly any application that is accessed through a browser. Support for mobile apps is coming in the second quarter.

Evans said the context-sensitive nature of in-application messaging addresses the problem of steadily declining survey response rates, but awareness is low. “People are comfortable with email testing but they’re far behind with in-product testing,” he said.

Conventional feedback mechanisms are so overused that people ignore them, leading to the current long-term decline in response rates, he said.

“Survey fatigue is massive,” Evans said. “People don’t fill out seven-question surveys anymore.” The rifle-shot approach targets guides and questions to people when they are most receptive to them. “When customers are in the product, you have their attention, and they’re already in the place to take action as opposed to email, which first has to drive you to the product,” he said.

Pioneer Works Inc. has used the Command AI/Guides and Surveys functionality for about a year to engage with small business owners through its Homebase application for employee payroll and benefits management.

“We primarily use Guides and Surveys to target specific customers at a specific point in their user journey,” said Rachel Strubhar, Homebase’s director of product growth. “For example, we can set it to trigger a guide about a new feature when users perform three specific events in a row.”

Amplitude integrates with customers’ data files to allow in-application messages to be targeted to individual users. Earlier this year it used regional targeting to issue guidance on break waivers, which are agreements that allow employees, contractors or organizations to bypass or modify standard break policies, to customers only in states that regulate them.

“We didn’t have to go out to all of our customers, because for some of them, waivers were not a feature they would use,” Strubhar said. Homebase quickly grew adoption of the break waiver feature by 50% “because we were able to be so targeted and specific about the message.”

Evans said in-application messaging can also be used for A/B testing, a technique that compares two versions of a message or experience to determine which performs better.

“With Amplitude, you literally click a button to create an AB or multivariate test and all the magic of bucketing and traffic routing happens automatically behind the scenes,” he said.

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