How Acrolinx achieved 14.8% increase in product and service quality with the right data

Acrolinx has been built by computational linguists, experts in natural language processing, who worked on intricate issues related to content creation and communication. As a spin-off of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, the company aids businesses in creating, analyzing and improving their content using a unique enterprise-ready AI platform.

Equipped with an advanced linguistic engine, Acrolinx is the only platform that “reads” content and helps authors optimize it.

What’s more, it assists writers during the entire process, ensuring that the final effect clients communicate is easy to understand, appealing, entertaining and easier to find with search engines.

Looking for product usage patterns and the right data protection

The Acrolinx dashboard offers a variety of analysis and configuration options. That allows users to set up company-specific words and phrases, as well as the tone of voice. All that supports evaluation and delivery of content. In practice, this means that writers can specify, for example, the correct spelling of product names, the level of language complexity and preferences for colloquial or formal speech.

In addition to the linguistic aspects of content creation and review, the dashboard enables definition of access rights for individuals and determination of specific settings for different departments or teams.

The dashboard is the primary focus of the Acrolinx platform

Since the product has numerous and diverse points of interaction with the user, it has been challenging for Acrolinx to continuously improve the platform’s functionality and deliver the best possible UX. That includes both dashboard optimization and the smooth use of single-page applications (SPAs). Data protection is crucial for Acrolinx. The company is committed to ensuring that users retain full privacy over their personal data.

All that poses several challenges for Acrolinx. Firstly, getting the basic statistics on the platform’s usage patterns to identify forgotten features, or spot the product’s potential vulnerabilities and address them on the spot.

Secondly, finding a way to track SPAs and employ this data to optimize them. Moreover, considering the ongoing changes continually emerging across the privacy landscape, Acrolinx must keep up with them and incorporate all possible safeguards for their customers’ information.

Piwik PRO Analytics Suite goes into action

Acrolinx quickly summarized the requirements for a suitable analytics platform, taking into account the challenges mentioned above. The company needed a solution that offers:

• Analytics to map user behavior and identify unused features
• A way to track single-page applications
• Powerful tag manager that enables specific events tracking
• Support for privacy protection, including existing functionalities

Acrolinx took advantage of Piwik PRO Analytics to gather comprehensive information on the platform’s overall use. What’s more, it was easier for them to observe and evaluate user behavior in multiple contexts. That revealed how people interact with the product, which paths they follow to achieve their goals and which features are rarely or never interacted with.

Furthermore, tags made it possible to track and categorize particular events to get more details on user actions. Tag Manager has allowed Acrolinx to achieve that without any adjustments to its own platform or reliance on the IT department.

Even complex use cases, such as whether and how often people employ a certain functionality in a very specific context, could be successfully discovered and tracked as an event. This also enabled Acrolinx to map the differences in user behavior between the internal and external versions of existing and newly developed products.

That was particularly visible on the product’s test versions showing completely distinct actions, not representative for users’ general behavior. Additionally, Acrolinx is now able to discern between versions of its own platform and thus validate whether changes in new versions have had the desired effect.

Tangible results and room for further enhancement

The data obtained on user actions across different product versions, both existing and beta, brings a broader overview of the platform’s usage. With flexible reporting options that allowed for a deeper analysis of numerous functionalities, it was possible to find out which ones are in fact utilized and to what extent.

But that’s not all. By taking advantage of the Piwik PRO Analytics Suite, Acrolinx quickly found out most highly used features of its software, and it became apparent what areas in particular had potential for optimization.

Regarding product development, the achieved analytics insights contributed to product enhancement in terms of both efficiency and simplicity. Product and service quality was improved by 14.8%. It was possible to further optimize the most frequently employed features and enhance or eliminate the unused ones accordingly.

By tracking user activities, particularly in complex contexts, Acrolinx now receives immediate feedback from consumers. That helps developers better adapt and continuously optimize the product to the specific needs of its users.

In the future, Acrolinx will continue to focus on improving usability and investigating how users can do their jobs faster and more efficiently. Finally, Acrolinx is able to provide strict privacy safeguards and benefit from the expertise of a reliable partner in the face of new, complex data protection regulations.