Customer Story: LanguaTalk

Launched in January 2021, LanguaTalk is a marketplace platform for online language tutoring. It’s a fast-growing U.S. startup with students and tutors across the world, and it currently offers six languages, with plans to cover all major languages by the end of the year.

We interviewed Alex Redfern, one of the founders, to find out how the company is using Help Scout to support its operations.

Why did LanguaTalk come to Help Scout?

I’m also the Founder of Lingoci.com, another site for language learning. Lingoci doesn’t have help center software, and my support team is always dealing with questions and issues via email. I wanted to see if LanguaTalk could have a superior customer support function by implementing help center software.

When LanguaTalk was in development, I searched for software that would 1.) be delightfully easy for users to navigate and 2.) allow me to build and structure a help site quickly, without any technical issues. I tried another software and it was a pain to use. When I started testing Help Scout’s Docs, I immediately saw how intuitive it was.

LanguaTalk’s help docs, which are carefully structured to make things easy to find.

Do you use any other Help Scout features?

Absolutely. While we came to Help Scout for the help docs, we quickly saw it could help us with so much more than that.

Firstly, we use Help Scout for both live chat and email. This means that all our communications are easily accessible in one tool, which wouldn’t be the case if we were using traditional email and a separate live chat tool.

When a user comes to us with an issue, in a few seconds we can use the search function to identify the relevant help article and send it to them. And for common emails we send or reply to, Help Scout enables us to insert saved replies into emails in a couple of clicks. These features save us a ton of time.

We also use Beacon, which helps users find answers directly on our website. When users write to us, Beacon also provides data on the device they’re using and the pages they’ve visited. This gives us vital context to help us address issues quickly.

For example, as we launched just this year, bugs sometimes crop up on the platform. We can check the specific flow the user has been through on the device or browser they’ve used and fix the bug faster.

One thing we love about Beacon is that we can highlight different answers based on the page the user is on. For example, take our French tutor listings page. Users visiting this page are typically considering booking a lesson for the first time, so we highlight answers that explain how things work and how to get started.

LanguaTalk’s Beacon, customized based on the URL the user is on.

We also use the Messages feature to send targeted messages at specific moments. For example, we offer students help if they’re on the tutor listings page for several minutes without booking a trial, and we give tutors guidance when they create an account.

Some tutors were forgetting to complete all of the required onboarding tasks and were thinking their profile was live when it was not; the below message has improved our onboarding success rate significantly.

Finally, while this isn’t a feature as such, I have to say how impressed I’ve been with Help Scout’s support team. Their docs are really clear, and they always get back to us at lightning speed with detailed and personalized answers (not the case with all SaaS companies). They provide a great example of how companies can support their users and help them flourish.

What impact has Help Scout had on the business?

Some days we don’t receive any questions or support requests. This frees up our time to focus on growing the business and enhancing the platform.

We know how much students and tutors value getting clear answers to solve their issues promptly. We can do this better than other platforms through our superior help docs and easy-to-use messaging system.

We’re also confident that the combination of targeted messages and accessible answers will boost our conversion rates, and ultimately our growth, for years to come.

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