What Are Contextual Customer Experiences in SaaS: Examples and Steps
Offering contextual customer experiences is critical to achieving your business goals.
While it can be challenging to manage customer expectations, they are the soul of every business and deserve the best care.
This article discusses 8 practical examples of contextual experiences that craft relevant messaging in different contexts to appeal to their audiences. It also examines how contextual experiences can help you boost product engagement and drive adoption.
Let’s dive in!
TL;DR
- A contextual experience is a process that involves delivering the right content at the right time to the right user.
Here are 8 examples of contextual customer experiences in SaaS that can inspire you:
- Notion offers a branched onboarding experience based on user needs.
- Airfocus sends contextual welcome email sequences to users.
- Kommunicate uses interactive walkthroughs to drive feature adoption.
- Userpilot delivers timely help with contextual tooltips.
- Asana displays magical creatures when a customer hits a milestone.
- Userpilot personalizes the knowledge base content based on user needs.
- Loom encourages account expansion when users need it most.
- Asana customizes the offboarding flow according to churn survey answers.
- You can create contextual experiences for your customers with Userpilot by collecting customer data, segmenting users based on the data, and triggering in-app experiences for each segment. Book a demo today to get started!
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What is a contextual customer experience?
Contextual experience is a user-centered design process that involves guiding users through a product, providing the right message at the right time, and within the right context.
It can spark interest, motivate users to take action, help them derive value from the product, and eventually boost customer satisfaction.
8 Examples of contextual customer experiences in SaaS
As customers’ needs continue to evolve, businesses must continue to respond by connecting their messaging to their individual needs.
In this section, we’ve compiled a list of businesses that deliver contextual experiences that resonate with their customers and drive engagement.
Hopefully, these will inspire you to create your own contextual experiences.
1. Notion offers a branched onboarding experience based on user needs
Notion reduces users’ time to value with an onboarding experience centered around the needs of the user.
The platform uses a quick Jobs-To-Be-Done survey to understand user needs and segment them according to them.
Users can choose whether they need Notion for their team, personal use, or school. Once they make a choice, Notion uses in-app messaging that resonates with users and puts them on an onboarding path that’s aligned with their use case.
2. Airfocus sends contextual welcome email sequences to users
Airfocus shines when it comes to contextual email marketing.
Instead of deploying random and disruptive welcome email sequences, it actually employs behavior triggers to ensure each email is relevant and value-packed.
Airfocus sends these emails in response to in-app behavior using webhooks. For example, if a user is working on a checklist task, the email provides guidance on how to complete that specific action. This way, they can help users complete their workflow at the moment rather than send random information.
3. Kommunicate uses interactive walkthroughs to drive feature adoption
Kommunicate uses interactive walkthroughs to walk users through their customer journey, providing contextual instructions every step of the way.
The step-by-step guides are contextual because a user is only introduced to a new step after they have completed the previous one.
This ensures users aren’t overwhelmed with too much information at once and actually complete the guide and adopt the feature.
4. Userpilot delivers timely help with contextual tooltips
When a user hovers over a specific feature in Userpilot, a tooltip appears and provides context-specific information on the UI element.
Since the tooltips appear at the right moment and in the right context, they provide the guidance that customers need to maximize your product and make progress in the customer journey.
5. Asana displays magical creatures when a customer hits a milestone
Asana adds an element of fun and gamification to the customer experience with animations that appear as users complete certain tasks.
Magical creatures appear for different tasks, leaving users wondering what creature will show up when they complete the next task.
Celebrating users’ success with magical displays reinforces positive behavior and encourages users to keep engaging with the platform.
6. Userpilot personalizes the knowledge base content based on user needs
To make self-help content easier to consume, Userpilot allows customer success teams to hide or show knowledge base modules based on a user segment or product page.
Offering contextual help is important because instead of scrolling through a packed help center for hours, users only see resources relevant to a specific point in their journey.
This will enable them to find answers to their queries faster and improve the user experience.
7. Loom encourages account expansion when users need it most
Upselling is an art of communication, where wording and timing are everything!
Asking users to upgrade their accounts randomly won’t yield the same results as triggering the message in the right context – when users need the upgrade.
Once a user reaches the usage limit of a feature, Loom sends a modal explaining how the user can upgrade to a plan that is more suitable to their needs.
8. Asana customizes the offboarding flow according to churn survey answers
Contextual customer experiences can not only lead to positive emotions at some touchpoints, but they can also significantly prevent and reduce churn.
That’s exactly what Asana does – it applies the principles of contextual experiences into its cancellation flow to retain users.
When a user clicks the “cancel” button, a churn survey is triggered, presenting multiple options to understand the reason behind the user’s decision.
Based on the user’s response, Asana offers a compelling alternative to win them back.
For instance, if users indicate that Asana is too expensive, they are offered a downgrade option.
As shown in the image below, Asana explains why a 2-person plan instead of a more expensive 5-person plan may better serve the user’s needs.
Figuring out the cause of your users’ frustration and offering contextual help brings them one step closer to retention.
How to create contextual experiences with Userpilot
Userpilot can help you create powerful contextual experiences in the following ways:
Collect behavioral customer data
With Userpilot, you can collect customer behavior data by tracking different types of in-app events.
For example, you can use feature tagging to monitor how users interact with certain items on your interface.
Then based on this data, you can help guide your customers toward the next best action in their journey.
Segment users based on the collected data
Userpilot lets you group users into segments with multiple criteria based on product usage.
For example, you can segment users based on previous feedback, in-app messages they interacted with, checklists they completed, or any other types of events that occurred for them.
With behavioral segmentation, you can create and deliver flows that address the challenges of each specific segment.
For example, you can identify disengaged users, group them, and then trigger a re-engagement flow to activate them.
Trigger in-app experiences relevant to each user segment
With UI patterns like tooltips, modals, banners, and slideouts, you can craft engaging experiences for your users.
You can customize patterns to match your brand colors, choose your preferred fonts, and add rich media, such as images or videos, to your in-app messages to make them even more appealing.
And the best part is you don’t have to write a single line of code!
Userpilot then lets you choose a target audience for the flows you’ve crafted. You can assign these flows to an event so that once the event occurs, the flow is triggered too.
You can also choose the page, domain, segment, and environment that trigger the flow.
Conclusion
Relevant and personalized messaging delivered in the right context eliminates the huge barrier between a business and its target customers.
Ultimately, it will also drive repeated business to your brand and result in greater customer lifetime value.
Userpilot can help you deliver contextual experiences that delight customers and improve their experience. Book a demo today to see how!
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