How Aryeo uses Canny to reduce support queries by 20%

The best business ideas are born from people fixing issues they’ve experienced for themselves. This is how Aryeo came to be—the founders were real estate photographers who realized there was no convenient way to deliver their work to their customers, usually agents and brokerages.

So, they created a solution for real estate photographers to upload, create, and deliver listing media content to agents. Today, Aryeo hosts 1% of the US’ real estate media content.

Chelsea Darby is the Customer Success Lead at Aryeo. She joined last year, and took over all of Aryeo’s customer-facing efforts, from support to onboarding to reducing churn.

User feedback is extremely important and valued by the whole team, including when it comes to product planning.

“We work hard to ensure that the needs of our customers are being heard at the time that we’re developing the next product cycle.”

Challenge

Before Canny, Aryeo gathered feedback mostly through Intercom. From there, it was documented elsewhere as a separate list of requests and issues.

When companies start recording feedback, this is a common first strategy. However, it starts to break down at scale—especially for a business with a fairly vocal user base.

“It started getting to the point where feedback was falling on deaf ears.”

It was also difficult to keep track of multiple people asking for the same thing, which made it hard to communicate the impact of different requests to the team.

And, for a company that cares deeply about their customers, letting them down was not an option.

“I can’t explain how awful it feels to be on the receiving end of all those customer requests, and all you can say is: ‘I’ve shared it with the team.’”

Besides messy documentation that was hard to share internally, recording feedback manually was also taking a toll on the support team.

“My inbox was clogged with feature requests, and I found it hard to focus, because I had to constantly be logging feedback separately.”

Since Chelsea had recently joined Aryeo and had to focus on setting up the entire customer success journey and experience, she decided it was time to look for a better solution.

Solution

Another member of Aryeo’s team had used Canny at a different company to solve a similar problem, so he suggested they check it out.

“I looked at it, and immediately said: ‘This is exactly what we need ’”

Besides being just the right solution for the issues they were facing, Canny was also easy to set up without external help.

“I’ve set up multiple software systems before—this was by far the easiest one.”

Chelsea was impressed with the fact that she was able to set Canny up on her own, without extensive technical skills.

Now, Canny is being used daily—not just by Chelsea to manage feedback, but also the technical co-founder at Aryeo.

He’s directly seeing all of the feedback and requests. Since he’s the one driving a lot of product decisions, the visibility into what is really needed is crucial.

Results

One of the main benefits has been that the users finally feel like they’re being involved in the process.

Canny has provided an interactive space where the users really feel like they have a voice, and that they’re being listened to.

“It creates that long term relationship and loyalty that we’re striving for.”

Besides effective communication, Canny has also helped identify things that could be going better.

Feedback gives the team a constant pulse on how they’re doing, and what they could improve on.

“For example, if we’re losing customers, there’s a story there with data about why that could be.”

Canny has also saved the support team a fair amount of time.

“It has reduced the number of inbounds in our support inbox by 20%, which is a big deal.”

This means less time handling feature requests manually and more time on improving the customer experience on a deeper level.