Pendo Listen is a continuous discovery, validation, and planning platform designed to help you build what matters most to your customers. It offers an integrated set of tools to give you confidence in the data that informs your product decisions.
Visit the Pendo Academy for video tutorials about using Pendo Listen.
Functionality
Pendo Listen brings together a combination of tools to deliver feedback, validation, and roadmapping functionality, with additional insights powered by AI. This functionality includes the following.
- Feedback capture. Pendo Listen offers a central location for collecting and acknowledging customer feedback. Create saved views of feedback data to return to later.
- Feedback insight. Look at customer feedback in the context of other data in Pendo to identify patterns and uncover points of friction. View feedback data trends, insights, and categorized feedback data, created based on a combination of AI and your own rules.
- Idea curation. Alongside customer feedback, Pendo Listen offers a central location for creating and managing product ideas and the ability to link feedback data to these ideas, giving you a sense of what's most important to customers.
- Idea validation. Test and prioritize ideas so that you can give your customers what they want and need. Distribute idea tests and create an ideas portal to showcase more ideas.
- Roadmapping. Promote ideas to features in Roadmaps that you can then use to communicate with stakeholders.
The Listen platform is fully connected with other Pendo data and features, such as segments, NPS, and Session Replay. Pendo Listen also works with other SaaS tools and with Salesforce custom reporting, allowing you to highlight revenue that’s blocked by product gaps.
The product life cycle
Pendo Listen is designed to help you along your product management lifecycle. In early stages, Listen helps you to capture and manage feedback and to generate and test ideas. In later stages, Listen helps you progress and communicate your product development and launch, and to evaluate and iterate, feeding back into discovery.
The natural progression through the main features of Listen (Feedback, Ideas, and Roadmaps) is to go from many feedback items, to some ideas, to few roadmap initiatives and features. The process comes full circle when your visitors provide further feedback on the features you add or change in your product based on your roadmap. Specifically, the general process is as follows:
- Explore problem spaces and solutions. Capture customer feedback and generate ideas. Pendo Listen provides a centralized location for managing artifacts.
- Create and validate solutions. Promote customer feedback to ideas and then test these ideas in-app to prioritize what to build next.
- Plan and build. Promote ideas to your roadmap and share this with your stakeholders. Communicate requirements to your engineers to start development.
- Launch. Co-design with customers and then communicate with them after a requested feature has been released using guides and emails.
- Iterate and evaluate. Capture more customer feedback and use this to feed into future discovery and validation.
Use customer feedback captured in Pendo Listen (1), alongside replay and analytics data, to inform and test ideas with idea tests and an ideas portal (2). Use this data, alongside AI-generated insights about your customer feedback, to discover customer needs and to prioritize development work. Promote ideas to features in Roadmaps that you can share with stakeholders and then hand off to engineers for development (3).
Deliver guides to your customers from within a feature on your roadmap to engage with them. Let them know what’s being built and what’s been delivered in the context of their feedback requests (4). Use the feedback you receive to evaluate and iterate on your product and its features (5), looping back into the discovery phase for continuous product development.
Listen workflow
Listen is organized around customer feedback, idea creation and validation, and roadmapping initiatives and features. You can navigate through Listen to find specific feedback items, ideas, and roadmaps. Beyond this, Listen offers ways of connecting feedback items to ideas, and promoting ideas to features and initiatives on your roadmaps.
Centralize insights
First, you gather customer feedback to create a library of qualitative data that you can explore to get a comprehensive view of wants and needs. You can add customer feedback through the feedback form and by connecting various feedback sources, including guide polls and Salesforce.
Gather evidence
As you evaluate the feedback that comes in, your product team can start creating ideas and linking these ideas back to feedback you've received. For information, see Link feedback items to ideas. You can also add workarounds to ideas, presenting an alternative solution to an idea. For more information, see Add workarounds to ideas.
Your ideas can also be tested. Idea tests are in-app polls used to collect votes on up to three of your ideas at a time to help you decide what to build next. For more information, see Create and test ideas.
Align at scale
When you decide what to build, you can promote your ideas to a roadmap, showing broad themes of work that you plan on delivering. For more information, see Promote ideas to your roadmaps.
Within a roadmap, you can add initiatives and features. Typically, initiatives are large projects that are aligned with a business strategy, and features are smaller pieces of work planned for exploration or delivery. For more information, see Create and edit roadmaps.
Take a tour
This section summarizes key pages and tabs in the Listen UI:
- Explore. Listen Explore uses generative AI to help you extract insights from your feedback data in the form of reports, enabling you to analyze your feedback at scale. Use a combination of filters and natural language prompts to tailor your query.
- Feedback. View all feedback items and create custom feedback views in the Feedback page. This page is designed specifically to fit into the product management life cycle as part of the Listen platform. It also offers AI-powered insights and high-level trends into customer feedback.
- Ideas. The next step in the Listen process is to turn your customer feedback requests into ideas and test them. This allows you to prioritize what to build.
- Portals. Create and share ideas in an ideas portal and gather additional feedback to analyze alongside other feedback sources in Listen. Validate ideas by encouraging users to vote and comment on the ideas that you present in your ideas portal.
- Roadmaps. Roadmaps exist outside of the Listen navigation. They help you plan and communicate your releases. This is a more complete feature that builds on Feedback Roadmap but is specific to Listen.
- Settings. Configure Pendo Listen settings in a centralized location. Manage your feedback sources, email templates, automation rules, status customization, and Jira integration through this page.
Listen Explore
Listen Explore is a set of AI-powered features that help you analyze feedback at scale. You can use a combination of natural language queries and filters to uncover themes, trends, and user sentiment across your feedback. You can save report results as feedback views to return to later. Explore also powers AI-assisted integrations with external tools, including Gong, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.
To open Explore, go to Listen > Explore from the left-side menu.
Report results include an overview of key metrics, a table of feedback items, and AI-generated topics. You can take actions on results, such as linking feedback to ideas or saving the view for reuse.
To set up Explore, see Enable Listen Explore. For instructions on generating reports and working with results, see Explore feedback with AI in Listen.
Feedback views
Feedback items are managed in table views that you can create and save to return to later or to share with others. For information on how to create a custom view of your customer feedback, see Manage feedback in Listen.
To open the Feedback views page, go to Listen > Feedback. The Feedback views page lists all the saved custom views of customer feedback. Custom views are created based on filters and columns that you apply to the table of customer feedback. For instructions on creating and saving a custom view, see Save custom views of feedback.
By default, all feedback is available at the top of the page as its own view. If you favorite a view, it will also appear at the top of the Feedback views page. Use the search bar to quickly find a particular view, or filter by creator.
When you open a feedback view, there are two tabs for subscriptions that don't have Listen Explore enabled: Overview and Feedback items.
For subscriptions that have Listen Explore enabled, three tabs are visible: Overview, Feedback items, and Topics.
Overview tab
To get the most out of your feedback, we recommend turning on Feedback summaries in your subscription settings. This powers an AI-generated summary of all the feedback items in your feedback view. The Overview tab also offers visualizations for feedback volume over time, feedback by Product Area, and feedback by status. It also lists the top feedback submitters. For more information, see View feedback insights.
Feedback items tab
The Feedback items tab lists all the feedback that belongs to the feedback view you've selected. For information on how to edit this view, and find and filter feedback in the view, see Manage feedback in Listen.
Topics tab
For subscriptions that have Listen Explore enabled, you can access a third tab in your feedback view called Topics. Topics are themes that have been extracted from the selected feedback view using AI. Within the Topics tab, you can see the top five topics that occur in your feedback, view how topic trends have changed over time, and view a list of topics ordered by highlights. Highlights are snippets of feedback that have been identified by AI. A feedback item can contain multiple highlights, which can map to different topics.
Ideas
You can create ideas to test and link these ideas to feedback items. Go to Listen > Ideas from the left-side menu to open the Validate page. Validate consists of four tabs.
Ideas tab
Ideas are created, listed, and managed in the Ideas tab in Validate. You can link these ideas to feedback items and can test them using idea tests. For instructions on how to create ideas, see Create and manage ideas in Validate.
The Ideas tab is open by default when you go to Validate. You can modify the ideas list using the filters at the top of the page.
Idea tests tab
After you’ve created ideas, you can collect votes and comments on those ideas to help you decide what to build next. Create and manage idea tests from the second tab in Validate, Idea Tests. For instructions on how to create an idea test, see Test ideas with Validate.
Analysis tab
The Analysis tab offers visualizations for comparing and prioritizing ideas that have been validated in idea tests to help you make product decisions based on an aggregate of ideas. For more information, see Compare and prioritize ideas in the Analysis tab.
ROI tab
The ROI tab shows you key metrics relevant to your return on investment as a result of using Validate to test your ideas. This metric helps you to evaluate how effective Validate is. For more information, see View return on investment (ROI) for Validate.
Portals
Create and share one or more custom-branded ideas portals to centralize ideas for your visitors to review and interact with. Communicate what you're exploring and building next, and encourage visitors to submit new feedback to inform more ideas. To start creating a portal, go to Listen > Portals and follow the instructions in Engage users through an ideas portal and Customize your ideas portal.
Roadmaps
Promote ideas to features that you can add to roadmaps in Listen. To open the Roadmaps page, select Roadmaps from the left-side menu. The Roadmaps page lists all of the existing roadmaps created by you and colleagues who've set their own roadmaps to be visible to team members.
Create and use roadmaps to plan your product delivery and map features and initiatives that you can share with your colleagues. For more information, see the Roadmaps documentation.
Settings
Go to Listen > Listen settings to manage the configuration settings specific to Listen. For example, create and update email templates used for idea/feedback updates sent to visitors. For more information, see Listen settings.
Keyword search
Whenever you're on the Explore, Feedback, or Ideas pages of Listen, there's a keyword search bar at the top of the page labeled Search Listen.
This is different from the search bar that appears next to the filters in a saved view of feedback items, the ideas table in Listen, the Analysis tab of the Validate page, or the Roadmaps list. The keyword search bar at the top of the page searches all Listen feedback items, ideas, and highlights.
Selecting Search Listen opens a window where you can choose to search for feedback items, ideas, or highlights. You can restrict your search using the Feedback, Highlight, and Ideas buttons directly below the search box.
The search results have no impact on the page you're currently on unless you either select View all ideas or View all feedback, which loads a new table of the ideas or feedback that are surfaced by the search. Highlights are included in the feedback list as they're snippets of larger feedback items on a particular topic. If you select View all feedback, you can save the results as a custom view to come back to later. For more information, see Save custom views of feedback.
AI features in Listen
There are three main AI features in Listen, which you can turn on in Settings > Subscription settings > AI access. For a full list of AI settings in Pendo and what they do, see Subscription settings.
Feedback summaries
When you enable feedback summaries, you allow Pendo to:
- Create summaries of your feedback views. Our AI assistant creates an automatic summary of key themes emerging from customer feedback within a specific feedback view in Listen. You can edit this summary to suit your needs. For more information about this feature and instructions for using it, see View feedback insights.
- Create titles for guide responses sent to Listen as feedback items. Regardless of whether you manually send guide responses to Listen or import responses in bulk, Pendo automatically creates titles based on the response description for each feedback item created. For more information about this feature and instructions for using it, see Send guide poll responses to Listen.
Listen Explore
Explore uses generative AI to analyze feedback at scale, uncovering themes, trends, and user sentiment from your feedback data. Explore also powers AI-assisted integrations with external tools, analyzing imported data for product feedback and categorizing it automatically. For an overview, see Listen Explore in this article. For more information about the different capabilities of Explore, see Explore feedback with AI in Listen and Use AI-assisted integrations to collect product feedback.
Suggested ideas
When you enable suggested ideas, our AI assistant suggests ideas that you might want to link to feedback items in Listen. You can accept or reject linking suggestions. For more information about this feature and instructions for using it, see Link feedback items to ideas.