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What’s up with #GoSquared, a User Review?

Whilst visiting Hector Kolonas’ latest creation Co-Working Jobs, I noticed that he was using GoSquared for Chatting with web visitors. As I love trialling different chat services, thought of switching from Tawk to GoSquared.

Turning Off Tawk

This is easy, you just disable the widget from WordPress Admin panel.

Installing GoSquared

These days, its mandatory to have a Segment integration before I trial any service such as GoSquared.

  • Create a GoSquared account.
  • Make sure you have Segment installed in WordPress (which I had to).
  • During the setup, click on Segment integration from GoSquared, select the applicable Workspace from Segment and follow the instructions to sync.

The Problem with GoSquared

It’s very clear from GoSquared that it does not want to remain simply as a good web analytics software. Whilst Woopra, which I still think one of the best in the market for web analytics, has got itself out of Chat, GoSquared has taken a deep dive into wanting to compete head on with Intercom.

GoSquared

In addition to building your brand, a website’s role has changed over the years to multi-purpose. Companies of all sizes and industries are using their websites to attempt visitors to become customers. In this struggle, they inject various services onto their websites to first identify and then nurture those visitors into customers. Among the tools use, Chat provides an efficient way to engage and build trust. With automation creeping in, you can even run Chat without human intervention.

But let’s take a quick look at the aspirations of GoSqaured. This is more clearer than anywhere in the first email you receive from them after signing up for an account.

GoSquared all in one service
That’s no different to the market leader, Intercom and plethora of others trying to compete with them. Lets take a quick look at Intercom. Words might be different, but its exactly the same intentions.

Intercom.io

As a tech startup, you have two options:

  • You either become the market leader by just doing what you do and nothing else. In this regard, you make your product as best as it can be, both in terms of functionality, design and usability and robustness. You then wrap a great customer service around it. Woopra seems to be falling into this category at present, where they scaled back from offering Chat services.
  • Expand the services you offer and attempt to capture a wider market, which is where GoSquared is today.

It is hard to say, which strategy will win. The world is big enough to have a large number of players, as more and more companies enter into this market segment. Just like the CRM market, visitor analytics and chat services have started to lure ever increasing number of tech entrepreneurs. As the market has been built, prospects are continually searching for the service that meets their exact needs, just like what I am doing here. So once you entered the market, all you have to do is build brand awareness. You have a higher chance of winning if your approach to solving the same problem is different. This could be via an amazing new User Interface, e.g. Pipedrive with Sales Pipeline View when they entered CRM market.

All tech startups, especially those who are venture-backed are driven with an eventual exit in mind. Many will reject in public, but trust me, they all are. There is also another factor which influences the strategy of a startup like GoSquared, which has been operating for longer than 5 years (in fact, 11 years), i.e. how can they generate more revenues per customer?

As we all know, customer acquisition is not easy. Any opportunity to upsell should not be ignored. 11 years of operations would no doubt has given James Gill and his team, investors and advisors the experience to follow the direction they are going today.

So What’s Wrong with GoSquared?

Nothing major, but found few niggling issues.

GoSquared in action

The User Interface is arranged into:

  • Now – who is on your website right right now? Whilst its difficult to exactly pinpoint what I don’t like about it, it would have been better to allow the user to configure the layout and bring above the folder what matters to you. If I recall from my last trial few years ago, the amount of functionality previously available has been scaled down.
  • Trends – I was expecting to be able to click on the results to expand, but soon found out that I cannot get any further details than it presents, which started to annoy me!
  • ECommerce – not applicable to me.
  • People – I have been wanting to have a Visitor Analytics app on UnifiedVU Platform for provision of 360º customer view, so I intend to pick a conversation with James, which I started many years ago. This UI has lot of intelligence. It takes a while to figure out how you can get to Chat transcripts, but it works. The UI is pale and not exciting like the UI for Chat.
  • Inbox aka Chat – This is great, but it lacks sufficient options for notifications. I like the functionality provided by Tawk.
  • Broadcasts – A new service piloted by GoSquared, which is clearly in the Intercom market.

Now that I’ve written above, James and his team are trying to provide one stop shop for every need a company has when prospects and customers engage with you through your No. 1 digital asset, your website.

What’s next with us?

I will run the trial till we get to the end in 14-days. At this stage of the development of UnifiedVU, I would not be looking to pay for any of the services provided by GoSquared as I can get the same free by using a number of services. Secondly, whilst I have settled for one CRM, I have never ever settled for one service which provides the functionality of GoSquared. This will change when we grow and the responsibility shift from me to team members. Thirdly, I love trialling new services, which constantly give me ideas for UnifiedVU.

I look forward to catching up with James to explore how we could have one or more GoSquared Apps on UnifiedVU Platform. Who knows it could be the 24th service we unify.

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