Hey there!<p>Over the past month I built a service that allows you to see your users browse your website / web app in real time. It's kinda like "session recording" offered by various services, but live, mainly to offer support.<p>To make it easier to market I built a Chrome extension that integrates it with Intercom and other live chat services, so that when someone chats you up you can see their screen live and troubleshoot problems a lot quicker. Some early users utilize it this way.<p>However, I personally like a lot more the idea of having a "monitor" with say 6 screens and being able to send a message to people you see struggling, to offer "proactive" support.
This comes from seeing way too many of my users on other apps make dumb mistakes and seeing myself losing money after they leave frustrated. I would <i>really</i> have paid to send them a message on screen saying "hey, let me know if you need help with this :)".<p>I'm not sure whether:
1. this "proactive support" is creepy;
2. it is scalable;
3. it only works in my mind;
4. companies would pay for it;
5. the ease of marketing something "for intercom/livechat/..." outweighs the coolness of the monitoring station.<p>What do you guys think? Would love your opinion!<p>Website is https://peekin.io/
1. If users are NOT aware of being tracked, it is HELL creepy
2. Scalability is now not an issue :) I think your concern should be to find the first customer.
3. not sure
4. I think they would, but you need to make sure users are not creeped out by it.
5. Unsure. You might want to try both ways. Start marketing a specific use-case and see what happens (if it works, etc..).
"Proactive" desktop support is very common in larger organizations where the time needed to personally dispatch a technician to each user in meatspace would be prohibitive. Usually such remote proactive support is initiated with the user's direct approval.<p>In my opinion the "consenting adults" principle applies here: it doesn't hurt to ask for a user's permission, and if they agree, it's not creepy. If they don't agree, no harm is done.<p>One last thing: you're right to worry about scalability. High-touch support is fundamentally not scalable (someone please prove me wrong!), which is why you see companies like Google providing automated "support" that makes customers feel alienated and not valued.
Woah! Take my money!<p>Though I really wish you would consider selling the software and allowing it to be self hosted for security reasons - I think this is great!<p>My users really aren't the brightest (that's not to put them down; computer savvy users just aren't my target demographic) - so it would be awesome to see what their struggling with.<p>That - and for months I've been having an incredibly hard time hunting down 1 specific bug - I've setup all kinds of traps, triggers - still nothing.<p>Maybe if I can actually see it happen, it'll shed some light on it.<p>1 problem - in an AngularJS 1.x app - this is throwing a lot of JS errors. The site is working fine with it in place - but the console has a lot of red in it pointing to your script with no specific error message.<p>Message me if you wanna see for yourself.
In most cases creepy, creepy enough to probably leave a site and never come back, especially if it is things like payment details or a service where I store data (so basically, nearly everything that is complex enough to make this service "useful")