Outseta Company Update - December 2021

As we close our 2021, it's time to share our final product update of the year. Here's what's new in Outseta!

New Feature! Outseta Reporting

One of the features that we scoped into our product strategy from day one was metrics and reporting specifically for subscription businesses. Of the major categories of software that Outseta covers, we've given this one the least attention since we started for a simple reason—the need for more advanced reporting features typically comes well into a start-up's lifecycle.

While that's the case, 2021 saw many of our customers' businesses grow significantly—so much so that the call for more robust reporting features was heard loud and clear. You'll now see a "Reporting" tab in Outseta's primary navigation that includes both user engagement and financial reporting.

The user engagement reports are dependent on you—you need to setup custom activities that represent the user engagement actions that you want to track either within your SaaS product or on your website. It's worth noting that you can configure these either with or without code.

As far as financial reporting goes, Outseta reports now includes:

• Subscribers
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• Invoiced vs. Collected Revenue
• Revenue Churn
• Customer Churn
• Total Discounts Redeemed
• Discounts Redeemed by Discount Code
• Tax Collected

Importantly, you can filter these reports by time period (month, quarter, or year) as well as by any of your subscription plans. The financial reports are all available out-of-the-box without any setup required.

New Feature! Chat for calm companies

I have long been an outspoken critic of live chat tools. While it's a nice communication channel, I've simply never had a good experience chatting with a bot and I see live chat tools creating lousy user experiences far more often than I see them delivering a great experience. I think this is particularly true in the context of founders or small teams—our own experience included!

Over the course of the last two years the number of incoming chat conversations we needed to field grew dramatically. As a small team, we simply weren't always available to chat. Beyond that, there were times where we needed to prioritize deep work and didn't want to leave users on our site hanging.

While we've always supported auto-responder messages, that still created a scenario where someone would start a conversation with us only to get an automated response—not the type of experience we wanted to deliver. So we built a fairly opinionated chat feature for other founders and small teams like us that allows you to toggle chat "Offline" in a single click. Visitors on your site will instead be prompted to submit a support ticket should they need help.

As part of this update to our chat tools, we also added the ability to choose whether you want auditory alerts or browser notifications to alert you of new incoming chats.

New Feature! Login to multiple products at once with OpenID Connect authentication

The vast majority of Outseta customers use our "login embed" to log users into their website, community, or SaaS product. We've also built Single Sign On (SSO) integrations with other products like Circle and Tribe but a growing number of our customers came to us with the same request:

"Hey, I was wondering if there's a way to log someone into my Webflow website, my Circle community, and the LMS I use to deliver my online course all at the same time?"

This setup is pretty common—you may have protected members only content on your website, an online community, and a course that you sell to people within your community. Requiring users to maintain separate login credential across multiple platforms can get a bit messy and confusing.

We're excited to now support authentication via OpenID Connect, which allows users to authenticate into multiple products with a single login. Any product that accepts login credentials from another OpenID Connect provider is fair game. Here's how to set it up.

New Feature! No-code user engagement tracking

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In my opinion this is one of the coolest features we've ever released, albeit one that's easy to fly under the radar. Outseta has offered user engagement tracking features for a few years now, which allow you to track the actions that users are taking within your SaaS product or on your website. But this has always been a fairly technical feature to set up—pretty much only developers working on SaaS products were able to leverage this feature. So we set out to "no-code" it.

You can now easily track what users actions are taking on your website, 100% without code. All you need to do is select and element on a page and tag it with a custom attribute—this is ridiculously easy and helpful for our customers building on Webflow in particular!

Say you want to know who has completed a lesson on your website? No sweat. You can now see this data in aggregate in our engagement reporting or on each individual user's CRM record. Here's how to set up no-code user engagement tracking.

New Feature! Support ticket form embeds

All Outseta customers set up an email address that creates a support ticket when an email is received—we also give users the ability to submit a support ticket directly from our knowledge base. While that's the case, we've now given users the ability to add a support ticket form anywhere they like—it can be embedded directly in a page or can open as a pop-up. This is a really nice way to give your customers a direct way to request help from various points within your product or website.

Go to HELP DESK > SETTINGS > GENERAL to grab your support ticket form code.

A few more quick hits...

Here's a few additional updates that we made that are smaller, but still helpful.

Require a profile image or headshot on your sign up forms

You can now easily request a profile image or headshot directly on Outseta's sign up forms. This is really nice for any site that's building a directory or pages specific to each member. Just go to AUTH > SIGN UP AND LOGIN and add the Profile Image field to your sign up form.

Integrate Webflow forms with Outseta email lists

We've also made it easy for Webflow users to use native Webflow forms, but subscribe people who submit the form to email lists in Outseta. Here's a tutorial.

Cancel add-on products from a customer's account record

You can now cancel add-on products or subscriptions directly from a customer's account record. Simply click the name of the customer's subscription plan from the "Subscription History" section—this will open a modal that allows you to add or cancel add-on subscriptions.

Delete all people in a segment

Finally, you can now delete all of the people in any of your segments. Please tread lightly...

That's all for our final product update of 2021! We've now been building Outseta for over five years—can you believe it? We'll be back with some five year updates in January.

Wishing you and yours a healthy and happy holiday season!

-Geoff, Dimitris, Dave, James, & Bernard