PlanetHS Deflected 190,000+ Support Tickets With In-App Guidance & Real-Time Support With Whatfix

The PlanetHS Story

Transforming How Schools Manage Sports & Student Athletes With an Integrated Athletic Management SaaS Platform

PlanetHS (now known as BigTeams) is a US-based athletics management and registration SaaS platform. Its platform is cloud-based software used by 1M+ users – from student athletes, parents, teachers, school administrators, and athletic directors to manage and streamline the athlete registration and eligibility process in high schools and middle schools, as well as manage student teams more efficiently through a one-stop web app portal.

The Challenge

Outdated Training & Support Methods Led to High Costs, Stunted Growth, and Poor User Support

PlanetHS is used by high-school athletic directors, school administrators, student-athletes, and parents to register for teams, communicate announcements and updates, manage schedules, and provide statistics.

PlanetHS’s onboarding and training for new athletic directors was conducted through 1:1 calls that lasted 45+ minutes. This was time-consuming, costly, and ineffective, as users left these calls confused and led to end-users struggling to fill out PlanetHS forms correctly – resulting in a high number of support tickets. It also wasn’t a scalable training method, as the SaaS platform was being used across 13 states and 60,000 users – and growing.

With Whatfix, PlanetHS found a scalable way to use in-app guidance to onboard, train, and keep users updated on new product features, as well as leveraged real-time support with Self Help to deflect common support issues and overcome areas of end-user friction.

PlanetHS’s core challenges were:

The Solution

Whatfix’s DAP Enabled a Better User Experience Through Contextual Onboarding, Real-Time Support, and User Feedback

With Whatfix’s digital adoption platform, PlanetHS was able to transform its user onboarding, training, support, product launches, and user feedback, all with a no-code platform that empowered non-technical team members to analyze user behavior, create in-app guided experiences, and engage end-users with contextual content.

With Whatfix, PlanetHS was able to:

Enable PlanetHS end-users with contextual, guided onboarding and continuous learning experiences

PlanetHS created 41 walkthroughs (we call them Flows at Whatfix) to provide product-led onboarding to users. Different types of users are shown contextual task lists and onboarding flows, providing personalized experiences for athletic directors, school admins, student-athletes, and parents.

This real-time, in-app guided onboarding and training experience(s) replaced its traditional 1:1 phone call-based onboarding and training, enabling athletic directors to devote more time to helping students with enrollment and coaching.

Autogenerate training content

With Whatfix, admins and end-users can access training and tutorial content in their preferred formats (videos, slideshows, PDFs, etc.), making training more engaging. This content is generated and updated automatically, eliminating content creation time, all based on the original Flow built by Whatfix admins at PlanetHS.

Provide self-help customer support to eliminate support tickets and user friction

With Whatfix Self Help, PlanetHS was able to anticipated users’ support needs and deflect help desk tickets with a self-service help catalog.

PlanetHS’s Self Help overlays on its application and shows contextual help and support content based on a user’s role and where they are at in the application.

With Whatfix Self Help, PlanetHS was able to anticipated users’ support needs and deflect help desk tickets with a self-service help catalog.

PlanetHS’s Self Help overlays on its application and shows contextual help and support content based on a user’s role and where they are at in the application.

Improve end-user registration success rate with Smart Tips and Field Validation

PlanetHS recognized that its end-user sign-up process (ie. the process of student-athletes and parents creating and signing in to their PlanetHS accounts), was complex and non-intuitive, leading to duplicate accounts, failed registration, and incorrectly created new accounts.

PlanetHS created in-app Smart Tips to remind users that they should only create a new account if they have never logged into the portal – helping to discourage duplicate accounts and removing the headache for athletic directors of identifying, deleting, and merging duplicate accounts.

PlanetHS also enabled Field Validation on its new user sign-up and sport registration forms. This provided in-app alerts and error messages to end-users when they entered data in the wrong format or left a field blank. This drove new user registration success rates and led to more complete profiles and empowered school administrators with more accurate data.

Collect user feedback with in-app surveys

As a customer-centric company, PlanetHS tried to gather quarterly user feedback by emailing surveys to end-users (students and parents) and admins (athletic directions and staff.) These surveys had extremely low engagement and response rates, even after multiple email followups.

With Whatfix, PlanetHS now prompts users with in-app surveys, helping the company target different types of users, collect contextual feedback, identify areas of user friction, and drive higher response rates.

The Results

PlanetHS Eliminated 190K+ Support Tickets & Enabled End-Users With More Intuitive, Guided App Experiences

With Whatfix, PlanetHS transformed its 1:1 training with in-application walkthroughs and experiences, as well as microlearning plans that trained users in real-time, without disrupting their flow of work.

Contextual self-service help is available at the moment of need and is contextual based on end-users’ roles and location inside the application. By leveraging Whatfix’s various features and widgets, PlanetHS has been able to:

• Eliminate 190,000+ end-user support tickets with Self Help.
• Communicate product tutorials, new features, and app updates to customers and end-users through Pop-Ups and Beacons that have been displayed over 820,000 times.
• Nudge users with helpful, contextual Smart Tips for guided navigation and gentle reminders that have been engaged with over 9,000,000 times.
• Guide users through complex processes and tasks with in-app Flows that have been engaged with over 320,000 times.
• Accelerate and scale its new customer onboarding and training with product-led onboarding.
• Reduce the number of duplicate student accounts and improve profile completion rates with Smart Tips and Field Validation.
• Collect better, more contextual user feedback with in-app surveys that vastly improved feedback response rate and its user satisfaction score to 5/5.

“With Whatfix, end-users are using our platform independently faster. Whatfix has given a broad reach to our training. The number of support calls and emails on basic navigational questions has become virtually zero,” said Bergen.