You’re the CMO of a major brand, with an app at the center of it all. It’s 8:57 AM, Monday - you’ve not had your coffee yet.

The Growth manager appears out of nowhere, ‘Good news, there’s been a 13% uplift in installs over the weekend.’

Great, now, there’s just the small question of how to monetize them.

Meeting plugged in, 9:30 AM.

The Product Manager appears out of nowhere, ‘Any more thoughts on how to “delight” our users in-app? 

Looks like another meeting... 10:30 AM.

Two challenges, presented as separate issues, separate problems, separate meetings. How to monetize customers and how to ensure the user experience is up to scratch? But these two hurdles – they aren't mutually exclusive.

There are, in fact, a lot of crossovers. With the right approach, we can build an app experience that will genuinely delight users, even as it drives sales. By opening the discussion for CRM tools, we can create conversations that lead to speeded-up process development.

Fast-track upgrades for Trainline 

Chances are you’ve heard of Trainline. It’s an aggregator app, bringing together over 270 rail and coach operators and creating one place for people to buy any ticket. It’s hugely successful, with 30m+ downloads and an App Store rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars, from more than 200,000 reviews. 

The team at Trainline knew that a lot of app users were logging in to check live updates. It was clear that people wanted real-time journey information. So, they came to us with an idea.  

They wanted to create a feature that would pull in data from all the different train operators and push it out in a timely manner. Thus, passengers could know, an hour before they travelled, whether their train was running on time and which platform it was going to be on.  

We felt that there was an effective way to do this – and do it fast. Instead of going through the rigorous development process for a new feature within the app, that same feature was added by making the best use of the resources that were already available. In this case, that resource was Braze. 

Improving the customer experience with Braze

We knew that these kinds of notifications were exactly what Braze handles with ease. It was then apparent that the answer to our initial conundrum was integrating the product team's work with the CRM workflow.

By maximizing Braze’s capabilities, we could improve users’ experience of the app. Combining a good understanding of the product team’s requirements with our technical knowledge, we produced push notifications and a strong deep-linking for each specific journey. 

Initially, we had a hunch it could positively impact the user but, in the end, the real value came from the development time it took to build and test the product feature. We made it a big priority, and while this would usually take 4-6 weeks, we built those requirements and went live within just 1 week. If developed in the app product, a whole new feature like this could have taken months.

Solidifying modernized ticket buying means moving away from ticket machines. Now, passengers are kept up to date on any delays or platform changes, often before the information is displayed on the screens at the train stations. This gives passengers a lot more confidence in their journey – and in the app. It also makes Trainline more encompassing than its dominant competitor in the UK, ticket machines.

Innovative cross-team capabilities 

The success of this project showed just how valuable it can be to channel one team’s experience into another’s and use familiar systems in new ways.

Many businesses keep the product, CRM, and data products teams in silos. But when all teams have access to a central set-up, built around a complete Martech stack, it can deliver powerful insights across the organization.  

It brings teams together, creates efficiencies and saves time and money by finding wider uses for existing resources. With this method, talking monetization and user experience could be one combined meeting! As a result, it delivers a dynamic, timely user experience for your customers. 

Changing the conversation around CRM 

My hope for the future is to have more product people open that dialogue with their CRM teams. There's a massive stigma surrounding what CRM is. CRM teams are seen as the people who send the emails and push messages that tell you there's a 5% discount, or $5 off your next tip on a lottery game. It can feel as though the only focus is trying to take something from customers.  

But they can do so much more; save time, improve customer experiences and even use the responses from customers to give you actionable business insights.

Our position as an agile agency, with knowledge and experience across multiple areas, means we like to think laterally. By focusing on operational excellence, we can provide holistic solutions that address core issues, rather than their consequences. We can go way beyond using CRM to sell deals and tickets.

Four key takeaways

CRM, when optimized, can truly enhance an app user’s experience. It’s about thinking differently and giving the user what they need before they have to dig around for it. CRMs like Braze can help with this in a multitude of ways. There are four key ways you can utilize CRM to optimize user experience:

1. Low-risk testing 

As your app evolves, you’ll want to add new components. Sometimes, you may not be sure that your users will enjoy a new feature or that it will benefit the business.

With Braze, you can test new ideas with a small cohort of users. If they work, you can make them bigger. So, by the time the component gets built into the app, you already know your users will love it. Like this, you can improve the app through rapid testing. 

2. Quicker time to market 

Product teams are generally quite large. Often, this means multiple ideas and subsequent building, development, and approvals – a chain of events that takes time.  

Tools like Braze allow you to create an analysis engine and just enter the HTML. You're presenting it straight to the user, using a push message and deep linking it right into aspects of the product that already exist.

As a result, you can create connections for users, without having to worry about the other components and a multitude of roadblocks. Altogether, this means that you’re able to drop the time it takes to get to market from a number of months to just a few short weeks.  

3. Greater discretion  

Users may not want apps to send them emails that will be seen by others. So, the ability for these to exist within the product could give users a richer experience and be, potentially, game-changing.

In place of silence, you can direct users to where they need to be. Having a single notification on the app’s icon entices users in, by telling them there’s something there. Once they’re in, they can do whatever they want from there. Instead, you could direct them to where you need them to go.

4. Actionable business insights 

Trainline used to send only delay notifications, so users would know the number of delayed trains, but not contextualized with the number of trains arriving on time or on their expected platforms. Since then, they have changed their notifications to now providing much greater detail about a user’s journey.

It is thus apparent that one of the most important things a CRM team can deliver, in terms of the business, is much deeper insights. For instance, you might know that there are several thousand delayed trains, but adding that 25 million trains are arriving on time and in the right place paints a different picture and offers new value for users.

Making the most of your resources

CRM teams might be able to offer more value than you initially thought. Using engagement platforms they can really cut down on production time, improve user experience, and benefit an app’s monetization.

Martina, as the Head of MarTech Services at ConsultMyApp, is at the forefront of the company's mission to attain sustainable growth through the strategic integration of cutting-edge MarTech solutions.

Leveraging her expertise in user acquisition and engagement, and her experience working with prestigious clients like O2, General Motors, and Holland and Barrett, she champions the pivotal role that modern MarTech tools play in effective digital marketing strategies.

If you have any questions about what we do, feel free to reach out to hello@consultmyapp.com