One of the cheapest, most effective ways to grow a tech business is to be genuinely good at supporting the people who use your product.

Good support lifts your conversion rate, keeps your current customers around, and gets them telling their friends nice things about you. It pays for itself several times over. The catch is that "get better at support" is easy to say and hard to actually do.

Here's one of the most reliable ways to do it: improve the data you have on what's actually going wrong for your users. For anyone supporting a software application, that's exactly what crash reporting gives you.

What is crash reporting?

Crash reporting is the automatic cataloging of every time your application crashes in the wild. It gives you an accurate, always-current view of how stable your app really is, and it collects the data behind each crash so you understand the underlying defect, not just the symptom.

That's a bigger shift than it sounds. Practically overnight, you go from having little to no idea when users are hitting problems to having a complete picture of it. Here's what that does for your support.

1. You fix the right things, faster

Without crash reporting, you find out about problems from your users. And users are famously bad at reporting bugs (here's why). It's a slow, frustrating process for them, and it leaves your team working from incomplete information.

A crash reporter flips that. You catch issues before a user ever files a ticket, and you get the full picture of each one: crash time, environment, function name, line number, and more. No guessing, no waiting.

It also tells you which issues to chase. No team has the bandwidth to fix every defect, and not every defect deserves equal weight. Crash reporting shows you not just how often your app is crashing, but which defects are causing the most crashes. So you spend your time on the handful of bugs hurting the most users, and you stop pouring hours into an issue that only affects a sliver of your base. Fix faster, and fix the things that actually move your stability.

2. You give users a better way to report

A lot of the frustration around support comes from the reporting process itself. Too many steps, and no good way for the user to actually describe what went wrong.

Crash reporting closes that gap. When the app crashes, a dialog can pop up right there and let the user describe what they were doing in the moment it happened. They write a quick note, leave their name and email if they want, and send a detailed crash report with one click. Less friction for them, far better data for you.

3. Your support scales without your headcount scaling with it

Here's the one that matters most as you grow. Without a way to track your crash rate and knock out critical crashes each release, support cost rises in lockstep with your user base. Twice the users, roughly twice the support hours, which eventually means hiring more support staff just to stand still. That's linear growth, and it's expensive.

Crash reporting breaks that link. By driving your overall crash rate down and shrinking the time it takes to fix what's left, you can grow your user base without growing your support team at the same pace. The fixes you ship keep paying off as you scale, instead of every new user adding the same support load.

Putting it into your existing workflow

That's the case for crash data: better, faster, cheaper support for your users.

And BugSplat is built to slot into the support process you already run. You can create defects in bug trackers like Jira, GitHub Issues, or Azure DevOps (see all) directly from a crash report in a few clicks. You can get alerted to new bugs or spikes in your crash rate through your email or a chat tool like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord (see all).

Want to see it on your own crashes? You can sign up for free and run a 14-day trial to see the difference: https://app.bugsplat.com/v2/sign-up