Crisp Incentivized Setup

✋ What is it?

This is a solution found in Crisp chat. When customers finish signing-up for an account, they land in a 'setup screen' that incentivizes them to do extra setup actions like connecting other services (e.g Slack) and downloading the official mobile apps. If users complete any of these setup steps, they get extra trial days in their accounts.

🤲 How does this interaction or solution work?

Crisp is a customer support chat (similar to Intercom and Drift) that allows companies to have a bi-directional conversation with their website visitors.

These live customer support chats can be very useful for businesses that want to connect with potential clients or that want to provide smooth communication to their existing client base.

However, to extract the most significant amount of value out of these chats, companies have to set up not only the chat code itself, but they also have to connect their existing workflow tools like internal chat tools and CRMs.

Crisp incentivizes these setup actions by landing freshly registered users in a setup screen that prompts them to finalize those setup steps to get more free trial days.

For example, just installing the client code on a website gives customers an extra six trial days. Other workflow actions like setting up Slack gives customers three additional trial days and even small actions like configuring automated responses can provide customers with an extra trial day.

🙌 How does this interaction or solution work?

Engagement

Initial churn (the churn that happens after a customer register) is a quite common problem that is hard to solve. This solution offers the right balance between customer goals and business goals.

On the one hand, customers who sign up for Crisp have already an intention to get a customer support solution, but they may not be fully engaged when it comes to complete the actions that allow them to use the solution. By providing an incentivized program that tethers the setup with the trial period, Crisp can increase the chances of freshly registered users to experience their full-service experience. Customers benefit from this because it gives them more days to try the service at its full extent.

This solution, however, may have a gray side which is the lockdown that comes from setting up multiple interfacing services with Crisp (once you setup with Crisp, you don't want to do it again with another service like Intercom, since it's a time-consuming process). Although this is not necessarily bad, it's optimized to increase the chances of converting free customers into paid customers.

Anecdote Time: This solution was used by Dropbox in its early days to create stickiness and generate viral momentum. Dropbox would give users extra storage GB for setting up their Dropbox in different devices and by referring friends.