Betterment Customer Experience

Betterment, a leading digital investment advisor, faced the challenge of building a data-centric culture where employees could self-serve insights and analysis. They needed better visibility into user experience pain points, customer lifecycle patterns, and event history to optimize their product and customer journey. The company required tools that would bridge the gap between their product, design, engineering, and analytics teams while providing real-time insights without the latency of traditional data warehouses.

Betterment implemented a solution combining Mixpanel for product analytics with Hightouch for data orchestration. They used Mixpanel in four key ways: creating Insight Reports to monitor user actions and optimize funnel performance, tracking the impact of frequent product deployments on conversion rates, debugging individual customer experiences through event history analysis, and building funnels to identify drop-off points. Hightouch enabled them to enrich Mixpanel with customer segmentation data from their Redshift data warehouse, adding context like age, signup date, and assets under management to their analytics.

The results included improved user journey understanding, better monitoring of deployment impacts, and enhanced customer experience through identification and remediation of friction points in signup and onboarding flows. Key takeaways for product managers include the importance of democratizing data access across teams, combining real-time analytics with enriched customer context for deeper insights, and using analytics tools to monitor the impact of frequent product changes. The case demonstrates how modern data stacks can support rapid iteration while maintaining visibility into customer experience metrics.