Best Practices for Using Captain AI
Table of Contents
Captain AI is your product coach and performance insights co-pilot. It can help you understand the impact of your Appcues experiences and boost your user engagement skills. You can also use Captain AI to review, manage, and update information in your Appcues account.
Capabilities
Coaching Help
- Get general guidance on best practices for improving adoption, activation, and other key outcomes in your app
- Ask for feedback on existing Experiences you've built
- General support for Appcues features
Review Experiences and other account info
- Find and list experiences by name, type, creator, status, etc.
- View experience details including steps, content, and configuration
- List segments with their targeting conditions
- View goals and their completion criteria
- Browse events tracked in the account
- List all available user properties with types
- List all available group properties
- View sample values to understand data format
Targeting and Segmentation
Describe who should see experiences and when, and Captain AI will translate those instructions into experience settings for you.
- Create new segments with targeting conditions
- View segment membership counts
For each experience, configure:
- Audience: Which users should see it
- Page targeting (web): URL patterns and domain restrictions
- Screen targeting (mobile): Screen name patterns
- Version targeting (mobile): App version requirements
- Trigger events: Custom events that launch the experience
- Frequency: Show once or every time conditions
Analytics & Reporting
Captain AI can retrieve experience performance metrics and user lists.
.png)
Account Overview
- Monthly active users (MAU)
- Total messages sent
- Tracked users count
- Flow performance summary
Experience Metrics
For any experience, the agent can report:
- Users who saw the experience
- Users who completed it
- Users who skipped or dismissed it
- Daily breakdowns over a date range
Specialized Experience Analysis
| Experience Type | Additional Metrics |
|---|---|
| Launchpads | Opens, impressions, activity breakdown |
| NPS and Flow Surveys | NPS score, promoter/neutral/detractor counts, individual responses with feedback, and sentiment analysis |
| Checklists | Per-item started/completed counts |
Goal Tracking
- Goal completion counts (total or daily)
- List of users who reached a goal
Event Analytics
- Event trigger counts
- Unique users per event
- Users who triggered a specific event
Page & Screen Views
- Most viewed pages/screens
- View counts and unique visitors
- Individual view details with timestamps
Group/Account Analytics
- Group engagement metrics (DAU, stickiness)
- List groups with properties
Output Options
Analytics can be returned as:
- Formatted text for quick reading
- CSV for export and further analysis
User Profiles
- Look up profiles by user ID and other identifier properties
- View specific properties or all available data for a given user
- See user activity history (events and page views)
- Summarize user journeys through your app and general sentiment for that user
Experience Delivery Troubleshooting
Captain AI can help diagnose common issues:
Installation Status
- Check if the web SDK is installed
- Check if mobile SDKs are installed
- View configured domains
Experience Errors
- View recent errors for an experience
- See error messages, URLs, and timestamps
- Identify targeting or content issues
Experience Management
Publish and unpublish experiences directly from Captain AI. You can also run bulk operations across all your experiences based on different filtering rules.
Build Experiences
Currently mobile flows can be build and edited within Captain AI. Just describe the purpose and general content, and the flow will be automatically generated. You can then manually edit content yourself in the builder.
Using Captain AI to answer questions about the performance of your flows, experience, goals, events or users and accounts requires sending some end user data to OpenAI, which can include User IDs or PII based on the questions asked. Your data will not be used to train any AI models. At this time, Captain AI is unable to perform analytics queries for HIPAA customers.
If you want to opt out of these Captain AI features that send end user data to OpenAI you can email support@appcues.com or Appcues admins can opt out in your Appcues account settings. For more information about how Appcues uses AI and security see our trust center FAQ on AI.
Using Captain AI
To get started, click the Captain AI nav item and ask a question in the chat window.
You can also return to and continue previous sessions:
You can quickly look up and reference experiences in your account by typing @:
Best practices
To get the most out of Captain AI, keep these tips in mind:
- Be specific in your prompts. Instead of asking “how do I improve engagement,” try “how do I improve checklist completion for trial users in their first week.”
- Please let us know if the AI Assistant’s answers are good or bad by clicking the 👍 or 👎 icons next to the answers it provides.
- Treat Captain like a teammate. Push his limits, ask clarifying follow-ups, and refine your questions. The more you interact, the more helpful he’ll become.
- Set your business context. In your Appcues account settings, you can add details about your business (like product type, audience, or goals). Captain uses this info to provide more relevant coaching.
