Lou Assist for Customer Experience: Features, Pricing, and Review
Looking for an effective customer experience tool and wondering if Lou Assist is the best option for your SaaS company?
With numerous Lou Assist alternatives, it can be challenging to make a final decision.
In this article, we’ll delve into precisely that – helping you determine whether Lou Assist is the ideal choice for your customer experience needs. We’ll explore its features, pricing, and offer a comprehensive review to aid in your decision-making process.
Let’s get started!
TL;DR
- Lou Assist is a good choice for customer experience and it comes with features such as user segmentation, Interactive user guides, in-app support, and self service support.
- Product Analytics: Lou Assist doesn’t have any product usage analytics capabilities. This means that its dashboards can only show you engagement metrics for content and experiences you’ve built within the Lou Assist platform rather than actual product analytics.
- International Users: Those with an international user base will be better served by other adoption platforms on the market. Lou Assist lacks any localization capabilities which makes creating in-app experiences for different languages a time-consuming hassle.
- Mobile Onboarding: Because Lou Assist is designed to be used on web apps rather than mobile apps, it has no compatibility with products developed for mobile platforms. If you’re developing a mobile app then consider alternatives like Appcues or Pendo.
- If you’re looking for a better option for customer experience, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to Lou Assist.
- Ready to see Userpilot in action? Schedule a demo today to explore its powerful customer experience capabilities firsthand.
Looking for a Better Alternative for Customer Experience? Try Userpilot
What is Lou Assist?
Lou Assist is a product adoption tool built by the customer success platform Totango. It lets product teams add in-app guidance in the form of modals, tooltips, hotspots, banners, and highlights that can be built without writing any code.
Additionally, Lou Assist helps product teams collect feedback from their users by adding surveys within in-app experiences or creating NPS surveys to measure loyalty/advocacy.
Those who upgrade to the paid version of Lou Assist can also utilize its integrations with 14 third-party tools.
Must have features of customer experience tools
Here’s what to look for before choosing your customer experience tool:
- UI patterns such as tooltips, driven action, and interactive walkthroughs to help you implement proactive support.
- Customer engagement tracking for collecting customer experience data.
- Microsurveys for collecting customer experience feedback or building user persona for product personalization.
- Advanced segmentation options such as need-based and behavioral segmentation to personalize your user’s experience based on their needs and goals.
- Analytics dashboard to collect customer experience insights — by tracking user data events, feature usage, survey statistics, etc.
Lou Assist features for customer experience
The customer experience (CX) is a combination of all the interactions a user has with your product and brand. Lou Assist helps you improve the customer experience through checklists and surveys but is held back by its lack of other key features as well as its limited integration access.
Here’s how you can use Lou Assist to improve the customer experience:
- Onboarding Checklists: Improve the first-time user experience (FTUE) and guide new customers toward core features. You can also create follow-up checklists with more advanced tasks (that are only visible to certain segments).
- Feedback Collection: Insert surveys within in-app experiences that can collect quantitative data (thumbs up/down or 0-10 scales) or open-ended feedback through the short answer option. You can also run NPS surveys and then view scores and responses on the dashboard.
- Limitations: Lou Assist lacks cornerstone features that are often used to improve the customer experience such as resource centers and content localization. The platform doesn’t even let you send data to third-party tools unless you upgrade to a paid plan that unlocks integrations.
Lou Assist’s user segmentation
User segmentation is incredibly important for sorting customers based on their goals or use cases and then personalizing the product experience accordingly.
Here are the types of user segmentation you can implement with Lou Assist:
- User Properties: Track user properties like pageviews, sessions, language, browser name/version, viewed/completed checklist, and viewed/completed/quit experiences.
- Turnkey Segments: Lou Assist comes pre-loaded with turnkey segments for new, returning, or power users — as well as a segment for all users that have visited since Lou Assist installation. You can also use this as a dashboard to quickly check the total number of users in a specific segment.
- Segment Builder: If Lou Assist’s turnkey segments are too broad for your use case then you can create custom segments. You’ll be able to build segments based on user properties and then add AND/OR logic rules to narrow down which customers you’d like to include. You can’t however segment based on feature usage or survey responses.
Lou Assist’s Interactive user guides
Interactive user guides are a combination of in-app prompts that help users learn by doing and discover product functionality organically. Lou Assist’s no-code experience builder, floating checklists, and targeting capabilities all lend themselves to effective guide creation.
Here’s how you can use Lou Assist to build interactive guides:
- In-App Experiences: The in-app experience builder lets you create user guides with modals, tooltips, hotspots, banners, highlights, or surveys. Each of these steps can have its positioning adjusted, colors changed, or be supplemented by attached links, images, and videos.
- Floating Checklists: Lou Assist lets you build checklists that walk users through each step of a guide and track their progress. The targeting settings also provide the option of keeping the checklist visible on all (or specific) pages until all the tasks have been completed.
- Guide Targeting: Any guide built with Lou Assist can be set to target specific segments like new, returning, or power users. You can also target users who speak a certain language, use a particular browser, or have completed a previous experience (among other properties). However, you can’t target based on feature usage or survey responses.
Lou Assist’s in-app support
In-app support is incredibly important for keeping customers satisfied while minimizing the load on your CS representatives. Lou Assist does let you add tooltips or build tours for in-app support but it doesn’t let you create resource centers or integrate with popular support tools.
Here’s how you can use Lou Assist to reduce the support load on your team:
- Tooltips: Lou Assist lets you add tooltips to your products that explain what each feature is and how to use them. You can also use tooltips to proactively address frequently asked questions regarding specific features. You’ll even be able to adjust its positioning relative to the element.
- Tours: These multi-step tours can be used to welcome users, teach them how to use the product, and congratulate them at the end of the flow (if you insert a celebration step).
- Limitations: Lou Assist lacks key support features like an in-app resource center or content localization capabilities. It also lacks any integrations with support tools like Intercom, Zendesk, or Freshdesk (and integrations aren’t even available for users on the free plan anyway).
Lou Assist’s self service support
Self-service support is incredibly helpful for improving customer satisfaction while reducing the ticket volume for the representatives on your team. Lou Assist has features like tooltips that help you build self-service support elements proactively but is limited by its lack of a resource center.
Here’s how you can use Lou Assist to create a self-service customer experience:
- Tooltips: Lou Assist’s in-app experience builder lets you attach tooltips to features, buttons, or elements that explain how to use them. You can adjust the positioning, add microvideos, and link to external resources to help new users figure things out themselves.
- Limitations: Lou Assist doesn’t have a feature for building an in-app resource center. The platform doesn’t have third-party integrations for knowledge bases, live chats, or AI-powered chatbots either. Furthermore, even its analytics integrations are locked to the paid version.
What are the pros and cons of Lou Assist?
Lou Assist’s pros
There are plenty of benefits to using Lou Assist, but the most notable are its unlimited capacity freemium plan, diverse array of UI patterns, and advanced targeting settings:
- Unlimited MAUs: The free version of Lou Assist doesn’t cap the number of monthly active users (MAUs) you can have on your platform. This stands in contrast to competitors like Pendo, which force customers to upgrade to a paid plan once they hit the 500 MAUs limit.
- UI Patterns: There’s a wide variety of UI patterns to choose from when building in-app experiences with Lou Assist. You can add modals, tooltips, hotspots, banners, and highlights, then adjust their design or positioning as needed.
- Targeting Settings: Lou Assist can target based on which segment a user is in, what page they’re on, and whether or not they’ve already completed the experience before. You can also adjust launch priority and frequency settings to dictate which experiences should appear or how often.
Lou Assist’s cons
Of course, Lou Assist has its fair share of drawbacks as well — and some of these cons even hinder or negate the benefits the platform has to offer:
- Analytics Dashboards: While Lou Assist does have analytics dashboards that can show you how in-app experiences, checklists, or surveys are performing, it only measures the performance of content created within the platform. There are no product usage analytics dashboards.
- Freemium Limitations: Despite the uncapped MAUs, the free version of Lou Assist has quite a few limitations. You’ll only be able to publish one tour, checklist, and survey at a time. You’ll also be limited to two announcements and won’t be able to create custom themes.
- Segment Caps: Lou Assist’s advanced targeting is hindered by the segmentation limits imposed by its pricing structure. Users on the free version can only create one custom segment, while those on the entry-level Startup plan can only create three.
Note: You can create unlimited segments if you subscribe to the Growth plan or higher but that tier starts at $239/month.
What do users say about Lou Assist?
Lou Assist users praised the flexibility that its various UI patterns provide, as well as the customizability that each in-app experience offers:
“It allows you to create different types of onboarding experiences for any kind of SaaS product, it feels well-categorized and provides a nice degree of customization.”
Some customers were disappointed by the lack of personalization and localization offered on Lou Assist, along with the inconsistent product experience caused by numerous bugs:
“Personalization is not deep enough, I encounter many many many bugs when editing modals. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and it is very frustrating. Language is not supported so I have to make different modals for all my international users.”
Lou Assist’s pricing
Lou Assist has a free version that supports unlimited MAUs as well as three paid plans that can accommodate 2,500 to 10,000+ MAUs. The paid subscriptions range from $79/month on the entry-level Startup plan (with the annual discount) to $239/month for the Growth plan.
Here’s a closer look at each Lou Assist plan:
- Free: The Free plan doesn’t limit the number of monthly active users but does cap the number of tours, checklists, surveys, and announcements you publish. You won’t be able to use third-party integrations or create custom themes either.
- Startup: Starting at $79/month, it offers three team sets and can accommodate up to 2,500 MAUs. You’ll be able to publish unlimited tours/announcements but only one checklist and three surveys at a time.
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $239/month (or $199/month if you pay annually) and increases your subscription’s capacity to 10,000 MAUs. You’ll also get 10 team sets and be able to publish an unlimited number of tours, checklists, surveys, and announcements.
- Enterprise: Lou Assist’s Enterprise tier operates on a quote-based pricing system but offers flexible MAU limits and unlimited team seats. You’ll also get a custom service-level agreement (SLA). Enterprise subscriptions have no monthly payment option, so you’ll need to pay annually.
3 Reasons why you might need a Lou Assist alternative
Lou Assist is an attractive product adoption platform with versatile in-app experiences and a freemium option to boot, yet its limitations in certain use cases may prompt you to look elsewhere:
- Product Analytics: Lou Assist doesn’t have any product usage analytics capabilities. This means that its dashboards can only show you engagement metrics for content and experiences you’ve built within the Lou Assist platform rather than actual product analytics.
- International Users: Those with an international user base will be better served by other adoption platforms on the market. Lou Assist lacks any localization capabilities which makes creating in-app experiences for different languages a time-consuming hassle.
- Mobile Onboarding: Because Lou Assist is designed to be used on web apps rather than mobile apps, it has no compatibility with products developed for mobile platforms. If you’re developing a mobile app then consider alternatives like Appcues or Pendo.
Note: Lou Assist is able to adjust screen sizes when your web app is viewed on mobile devices.
Userpilot – A better alternative for customer experience
Userpilot gives you an eagle-eye view of the customer experience through user analytics, trend/funnel reports, and feedback collection through different types of surveys.
Here’s how you can use Userpilot to track and analyze customer experience insights:
- User analytics: The users dashboard gives you an overview of all your users while letting you sort by segment, company, or when they were last seen. You can also export user data in bulk as a CSV or click on the Insights tab to see segment-specific insights for a given time period.
- Trends and funnels: Userpilot’s trends and funnels reports let you track certain events like a specific feature’s usage, add filters to narrow down the data, and then create a breakdown based on segmentation data or user attributes — offering quick and actionable CX reports.
- Satisfaction benchmarking: Userpilot has a built-in NPS dashboard that tracks customer loyalty over time. In addition to the NPS dashboard, you can also use Userpilot’s survey templates to run CSAT or CES surveys and gather additional quantitative and qualitative insights on the customer experience.
- Self-service support: Userpilot lets you build in-app resource centers, which can include feedback widgets to collect feedback passively, checklists to walk users through specific processes, or integrations with knowledge bases to leverage existing documentation.
- In-app flows: Userpilot’s no-code flow builder helps you create product experiences that can help you optimize the customer experience by educating customers and reducing their time-to-value (TTV). All UI patterns are available on every Userpilot plan from Starter to Enterprise.
Userpilot’s user segmentation
User segmentation is essential for creating a personalized and contextual onboarding experience. Userpilot can segment users based on demographics, product usage data, NPS scores, and more. You can then trigger flows or filter analytics based on segments.
Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s customer segmentation capabilities:
- Segment conditions: Userpilot lets you form segments by adding different conditions like user data, company data, features and events, etc. You can then use these segments as analytics filters or flow triggers later on.
- Analytics filters: Userpilot’s product analytics and user insights dashboards can be filtered to only display data from specific segments (or companies). This will help you extract insights from certain cohorts and compare how adoption or activation varies from one segment to the next.
- Flow triggers: Userpilot’s audience settings let you trigger flows for specific segments or target users that meet certain conditions. You can combine this with page-specific or event-occurrence triggers to show relevant flows to the right users at the most contextual moments.
- External data: Userpilot integrates with tools like Amplitude, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Segment using a one-way integration. This means you can use the data inside Userpilot to build advanced segmentation and trigger contextual experiences. For more advanced use cases, the two-way integration with Hubspot lets you send and receive data, unlocking a full set of use cases.
Userpilot’s Interactive user guides
Interactive user guides can help users figure out how to use your product and get them towards activation faster. Here are the Userpilot features you can use for creating interactive guides:
- No-code builder: Userpilot lets you build in-app guides using modals, slideouts, banners, etc., without writing any code. You can also tinker with audience settings to target specific segments or exclude users who meet certain conditions from seeing a particular flow.
- Spotlight elements: The spotlight feature lets you add standalone UI elements like tooltips, hotspots, and driven actions that aren’t part of a multi-step flow. This makes it possible to display contextual guidance when users hover over a feature they’re interested in.
- Funnel reports: Userpilot’s advanced analytics capabilities include funnel reports that show you which pages or actions most users get stuck on. This can help you identify confusing or high-friction areas that can be removed through contextual interactive user guides.
Userpilot’s in-app support
In-app support can increase customer satisfaction and retention rates. Userpilot has native in-app support features like resource centers and native tooltips as well as third-party integrations with popular support tools like Intercom to help you cover all your bases.
Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s in-app support capabilities:
- Resource center: Userpilot in-app resource centers let you add flows, checklists, external links, tutorial videos, external knowledge bases, and chatbots. You’ll also be able to view resource center analytics so you can check its performance.
- Native tooltips: In-app support must be proactive — which is why you should insert tooltips that guide users before they even think to open the resource center. Userpilot lets you add native tooltips that appear whenever users hover over an element or click on the info badge.
This a native tooltip example built with Userpilot, not an actual tooltip from Calendar by Google.
- Contextual flows: Userpilot’s trigger settings let you create contextual flows that automatically appear when a user reaches a certain page or performs a specific action. This can be used to offer in-app guidance and support whenever users try out a feature for the first time.
- Intercom integration: While Intercom is famous for its live chat embeds, you can do more than that by integrating it with Userpilot. You’ll see which events a user has done within Userpilot and whether or not they’ve completed onboarding to personalize support accordingly.
Userpilot’s self service support
Self-service support helps users solve problems themselves instead of having to reach out to a representative. Userpilot’s no-code resource center makes onboarding guides and product documentation easily accessible to users from within your product.
Here’s how you can use Userpilot to create a self-service customer experience:
- No-code builder: Userpilot’s no-code resource center lets you add modules without writing a single line of code. Module options include links, videos, flows, custom JavaScript functions, and checklists. You can also group modules into sections to help users navigate the resource center.
- Module segmentation: Userpilot’s segmentation settings let you hide or show specific modules within your resource center based on audience settings. This makes it possible to create modules for different user segments and hide resources that aren’t relevant to other users.
- Resource center analytics dashboard: The dedicated analytics dashboard helps you see how many unique visitors your resource center gets, how many modules have been clicked, and the overall click rate across your user base. This will make it easier to gauge resource center performance.
What are the pros and cons of Userpilot?
Userpilot pros
As a full-suite digital adoption platform, Userpilot has all the features you need to onboard users, track analytics, and gather feedback from customers without writing a single line of code. Here are a few pros of using Userpilot as your product growth solution:
- No-code builder: Userpilot’s Chrome extension lets you build flows, add UI elements, and tag features without writing a single line of code.
- UI patterns: There are plenty of UI patterns to choose from when using Userpilot, such as hotspots, tooltips, banners, slideouts, modals, and more!
- Startup-friendly: Userpilot’s entry-level plan gives you access to all available UI patterns so you can hit the ground running.
- Walkthroughs and flows: Build engaging interactive walkthroughs and personalized onboarding flows that target specific segments of your user base.
- Self-service support: Build an in-app resource center to help users solve problems, customize its appearance to align it with your brand, and insert various types of content (videos, flows, or chatbots) to keep your customers satisfied.
- A/B testing: Userpilot’s built-in A/B testing capabilities will help you split-test flows, iterate on the best-performing variants, and continually optimize based on user behavior.
- Feedback collection: Userpilot has built-in NPS surveys with its own unified analytics dashboard and response tagging to help you retarget users. There are other survey types to choose from and you can even create your own custom survey.
- Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from so you can gather feedback on specific features or run customer satisfaction benchmarking surveys like CSAT and CES.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot lets you analyze product usage data, monitor engagement on all in-app flows, and use the data to create user segments that are based on behaviors instead of demographics.
- Event tracking: Userpilot’s no-code event tracking lets you tag UI interactions (hovers, clicks, or form fills) and group them into a custom event that reflects feature usage.
- Third-party integrations: Userpilot has built-in integrations with tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Segment, Heap, HubSpot, Intercom, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager so you can share data between all the solutions in your tech stack.
Userpilot’s cons
Of course, no tool is perfect and there are a few cons to consider before choosing Userpilot as your user onboarding or product growth solution:
- Employee onboarding: Currently, Userpilot only supports in-app customer onboarding.
- Mobile apps: Userpilot doesn’t have any mobile compatibility which could make it difficult for developers with cross-platform applications to create a consistent user experience for both versions of their product.
- Freemium plan: There’s no freemium Userpilot plan so those bootstrapping their startup and need sub-$100 solutions should consider more affordable onboarding platforms like UserGuiding or Product Fruits.
What do users say about Userpilot?
Most users laud Userpilot for its versatile feature set, ease of use, and responsive support team:
I recently had the pleasure of using Userpilot, and I must say it exceeded all my expectations. As a product manager, I’m always on the lookout for tools that can enhance user onboarding and improve overall user experience. Userpilot not only delivered on these fronts but also went above and beyond with its impressive new features, unparalleled ease of use, and truly exceptional customer support.
What truly sets Userpilot apart is its outstanding customer support. Throughout my journey with Userpilot, the support team has been responsive, knowledgeable, and genuinely dedicated to helping me succeed. Whenever I had a question or encountered an issue, their support team was always there to assist promptly, going above and beyond to ensure my concerns were addressed effectively.
Source: G2.
Of course, other users are also kind enough to share constructive criticism regarding specific features like event tracking filters:
“The filtration while analyzing specific events is a little confusing. Understanding of custom properties and data management configuration could have been more organised.”
Source: G2.
Userpilot’s pricing
Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.
Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.
Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:
- Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
- Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).
Conclusion
There you have it.
It should be easier now to make an informed decision whether Lou Assist is your go-to option for customer experience. Ultimately, the best choice will depend on your product and current needs.
If you’re looking for a better alternative to Lou Assist for customer experience, book a Userpilot demo today to experience firsthand how it can enhance your user experience and drive product growth!
Looking for a Better Alternative for Customer Experience? Try Userpilot
