#segment.io

Yesterday, working on a marketing website for another client (MobileSpaces) I discovered a product called segment.io

  Segment.io provides single interface to 30+ analytics / tracking oriented apps. These are the kinds of apps that require a single piece of "tracker" code: 

Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Chartbeat, Customer.io, Optimizely, and many more integrations. 

The idea of segment.io is that your website tracks two kinds of things:

identities and events.

Events are actions like 

"User searched for a product x with category x"   or 

"User created a new forum post"

even something like "User scrolled"

All these things can be measured and reported with simple javascript.

Identities just associate someone we know (i.e. via login, registration, or email signup) with this series of events. They are tied together by a cookie, forming profiles of our user's behavior. 

So we'd program the website to tell segment.io about these actions. On the backend, segment passes on all the requisite data to the various services which you've enabled. The key thing is that, later, you can "turn on" more services. They all do 

Amazing customer service is your startup’s secret weapon against big competitors who just don’t care. A great way to delight your users is to send them a “surprise personal” email. But that means lots of responses in your inbox every morning, so how do keep doing that at scale? We’ve the perfect tool and a few tips to help.

Great advice and intro to Help Scout, a tool to help manage support emails and a great compliment to Awesomatic. 

Segment.io makes a great point —

That’s the trick to support: most support requests can be answered by anyone on our team; they’re low hanging fruit. Those are the requests that your support leader should bang out responses to in a couple minutes.