How Cabal Uses Highlight to Ship Products
We have two main use cases for Highlight in the Cabal GTM team.
The first is addressing support tickets. Our first reaction when we receive a ticket is to understand what the user did, and so we’ll check Highlight to see what interaction they had with the product and where things went wrong. Highlight allows us to address customer support requests with precision.
The second way we use Highlight is to get self-serve feedback on new features from our users. Rather than having to set up a bunch of customer interviews, we’re able to go into Highlight and understand where people are clicking, where they’re getting held up, etc. We then make the necessary changes to the product and repeat the process.
Understanding user issues
“One of the beautiful things about Highlight is it gives you an illustration of what events took place over the course of a user’s session.”
At Cabal, we want to deeply understand the issues that our customers are facing. A lot of times, when customers reach out to us with an issue, we lack context on how the issue actualizes and what’s causing it. That’s where Highlight comes in.
When a customer reaches out to us on Intercom, we’ll drop their email into Highlight and Highlight immediately returns a prioritized list of the sessions for that specific user. We’ll then watch the most relevant sessions to get an understanding of what’s wrong. One of the beautiful things about Highlight is it gives you an illustration of what events took place over the course of a user’s session. This makes it easy to quickly understand where something went wrong, within 10 seconds or so.
New feature feedback
“With Highlight, we can understand how users actually feel about a particular feature by observing their behaviors. It makes it easy to understand things like where the friction points are, where users are getting frustrated, and whether users are using new features as we intended.”
Shipping features quickly is important to our team at Cabal. One of the challenges of shipping quickly is making sure you’re staying in touch with customer feedback and getting an understanding for how your features are being received by end-users. You can set up a bunch of customer interviews, but there are two main issues with that:
- They require a lot of overhead to coordinate and manage at scale
- The customer feedback may not exactly align with their behaviors in-product
With Highlight, we can understand how users actually feel about a particular feature by observing their behaviors. It makes it easy to understand things like where the friction points are, where users are getting frustrated, and whether users are using new features as we intended. Understanding user behavior through session replay is the best way to gauge the success of new features.
Why Highlight
“One of the beautiful things about getting Highlight set up was that I didn’t need to worry about it interrupting our sprints. After we decided to use Hex, getting it set up for our team took less than an hour.”
One of the things that stuck with me from the first time I demo’d Highlight was that, not only did it help the engineers with debugging, but it was easy enough for folks on the GTM team, like myself, to use and see how our users are using the product.
One of the beautiful things about getting Highlight set up was that I didn’t need to worry about it interrupting our sprints. After we decided to use Hex, getting it set up for our team took less than an hour.
When we were comparing Highlight to similar tools, we realized that we were able to get a bit more granular with what we were seeing in Highlight, as compared to other tools. It also made it easy to filter down to what we wanted to watch. Our engineering team also appreciated the engineer-first focus of the product and got really excited about the tool being suited for them.
