One of the most cost-effective and efficient ways to build and grow your tech business is to provide exceptional support to your users.

Excellent technical support improves your conversion rate, keeps your current customers happy, gets your customers telling their friends nice things about you (word-of-mouth advertising), and provides a whole host of other benefits.

That said, improved technical support is easier wished for than achieved.

One of the best ways to improve your support process is to improve the data you have on the issues that your customers are experiencing.

For teams that support software applications, crash reporting can provide your organization with the data to take that 'next step' for improving support for your users.

What is Crash Reporting?

Crash reporting is the process of automatically cataloging each time an application crashes while in use.

A crash reporter is useful because it provides an easily accessible, accurate view of an application's stability. Better yet, it also collects data on each crash helping you understand the underlying issue behind the crash.

That can be a game-changer because, overnight, you can go from having little to no insight into user crashes to having a complete view of when your users are running into problems.

But how does this help you provide better support to your users?

1. Find and fix issues faster

Without crash reporting implemented, you’re hearing about problems in your software from your users—and users are generally terrible at reporting bugs (here's why).

That's a problem because it's a frustrating process for your users, provides your team with incomplete data on the issue, and takes too much time.

With a crash reporter monitoring for crashes you can find issues before they’re reported by your users, access complete data on the crash (data like crash time, environment, function name and line number, andmuch more), and quickly push a fix.

2. Effectively prioritize any issue's overall severity

No company has the bandwidth or energy to fix every single issue with their code, so that means that not every issue needs to be fixed—or, at least, not every issue should be perceived to have the same level of importance.

Teams with a system to evaluate, prioritize, and address the most critical of their defects in each release are going to have a more stable application and happier customers that require less support.

With crash reporting, you're able not just to see how frequently your application is crashing; you can also see which defects are causing the most crashes.

This allows you to do two critical things.

The first is that you're now able to prioritize your support efforts around fixing the handful of bugs that are causing your application to crash most frequently.

The second is that you'll be able to filter user reported issues through a lens that shows you the macro environment of your application's stability. You’ll no longer spend time fixing an issue that that only affects a small percentage of your userbase.

3. Provide a process for users to report their issues effectively.

Part of the frustration that users feel when they have to reach out about support issues is that it involves too many steps and doesn't allow them to share their problems fully.

With crash reporting, your users can write a description of what happened leading up to the crash event right in a dialog that pops up after the event has occurred.

Your users are then able to quickly describe the issue, leave their name and email address, and along a detailed crash reporting with the click of a button.

4. Shorten the time to find defects and deploy fixes.

Identifying your critical defects quickly enables your team to find and deploy fixes rapidly. Doing so improves your application's stability and decreases the number of overall issues you'll face from your users.

This also allows you to support a more easily scalable support workflow as it has the potential to decrease overall crashes by decreasing your crash rate as your user base grows.

5. Decrease the amount of team members needed for support.

Without the help of a crash reporting tool to keep track of your crash rate and to eliminate critical crashes from each new release, you may need to allot more of your team members' time to support your users. Or, you may need to hire more support staff as you grow than you necessarily need as you grow.

This support system only supports 1:1 or linear growth. To provide the same level of support to all of your users, you’ll need to grow the hours you spend overall to match the growth in total users.

With crash reporting, you can more easily support exponential growth in your userbase by improving overall stability and decreasing the amount of time it takes to fix bugs.

There you have it.

Crash reporting will help you get a handle crashes, allowing you to provide better, faster, cheaper, and more effective support to your users.

Better yet, BugSplat integrates seamlessly with your current support workflow, allowing you to insert crash data into your existing support process easily.

BugSplat allows you to create new defects in bug tracking tools like Jira, Github Issues, or Azure DevOps (see all here) directly from a crash report with a few clicks.

It can alert you to new bugs or increases in crashes rates through customizable alerts sent directly to your email or through a chat tool like Slack, Microsoft Team, or Discord ( see all here).

If you're interested in trying out this workflow, you can sign up for free and get a 14-day free trial to see the difference.