Pendo for customer success

Last updated: July 09, 2024 17:40

Pendo offers a suite of features designed to help drive customer success. From monitoring account health to implementing proactive outreach strategies, Pendo equips customer success teams with the tools needed to enhance customer satisfaction, optimize renewal conversations, and reduce churn.

This article explores how to leverage Pendo's capabilities to optimize customer success efforts.

Tip: To learn more about how to use Pendo as a customer success professional, see our Improve customer health and retention article and Pendo for Customer Success Academy course.

Assess account health

Understanding the health of your accounts is crucial for effective customer success. In Pendo, we offer various methods to gauge account health, ensuring proactive and tailored strategies to support your customers.

Here are some key methods to gauge account health:

Product Engagement Score (PES) is an important metric for account health, as it represents the combined impact of feature adoption, return user stickiness, and new user growth. At Pendo, we've seen PES correlated with customer retention, churn, and expansions.
Breadth, depth, and frequency are common indicators and recommended metric categories that you can develop into a customer health score.
With in-app guides and surveys, you can offer help to customers as a checkpoint to give customers a feeling of support and engagement. This allows you the opportunity to follow up with customers based on their feedback collected in the Pendo survey guide.

Monitor account usage and at-risk behavior

In the realm of Customer Success, using Pendo involves actively tracking account usage and spotting signs of at-risk behavior. This proactive approach ensures strong and enduring customer relationships.

After assessing overall account health, you can leverage additional Pendo features to monitor account usage and at-risk behavior. By leveraging product usage data, teams can develop personalized strategies to support customers and prevent churn.

Create customer segments

Segments allow you to monitor user activity, identify accounts and visitors that require attention, and measure customer health. By creating segments, you can differentiate active accounts from those at risk of churning, then analyze the usage data associated with top-performing customers to identify satisfaction-driving features.

To segment based on account health, navigate to People > Segments, then create the following segments:

At-risk customers. Number of Days Active = less or equal to 2 within last 30 days AND Time on site = less or equal to 10 (minutes) within last 30 days.
Healthy customers. Number of Days Active = greater or equal to 16 within last 30 days.

To segment based on account type, create the following segments:

Enterprise customers. Plan level = Enterprise (or whatever equivalent plan you have for your customers).
Small-and-medium sized business (SBM) customers. ARR = less or equal to $15,000.

To segment based on usage of a specific Feature, create the following segments:

Never-used Features. Feature X number of clicks = less or equal to 1 within last 30 days.
Active Feature usage. Feature X used = at least 10 times.

For detailed guidelines on creating segments and understanding segment rules, see Segments and Manage segments.

Perform proactive outreach to at-risk accounts

Pendo guides allow you to deliver in-app messages and guided walkthroughs that enhance engagement, increase understanding, and drive desired user behavior. You can also use guides to deliver polls and surveys to your customer base.

With Pendo Guides, Customer Success teams can scale engagement (1:many) and achieve greater scalability without compromising the quality of customer interactions.

Rather than waiting for customers to voice concerns, you can use Pendo to take a proactive approach by reaching out to at-risk customers. After you've identified at-risk customer through data-driven analysis, you can implement automation based off of user behavior.

Here are a few things to consider with proactive outreach:

Develop and streamline a customer playbook so that outreach efforts are communicated more efficiently with fewer emails and help free up your team's bandwidth.
Tailor messaging with Pendo lightbox guides to cater to specific user needs and preferences, fostering a meaningful engagement.
Create a segment for users that have decreased or under-adopted product usage.
If possible, add a calendar link (or embed your calendar) for easy scheduling, or create a poll asking users if they’d like a call or need a pre-recorded training.

For detailed guidelines on creating in-app messages with Pendo Guides, see Create a guide.

Build a dashboard to monitor account health

Leverage customer health dashboards to look at your overall book of business and get the details into one specific account by applying a dashboard-level segment filter.

We recommend adding the following widgets to your dashboard:

Accounts Overview
Visitors Overview
Total Time on App Per Week
Feature Usage by Visitor
Product Engagement Score (PES)
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Poll Results
Time to First Use

For detailed guidelines on how to build this dashboard and use Pendo's behavioral reports to identify at-risk accounts, power users, and inactive visitors, register for our live learning experience Pendo hands on: Analytics for Customer Success teams. This training provides practical insights into reviewing usage and key feature adoption specific to your book of business, enabling informed decision-making based on your customer data.

Scale customer outreach

Expanding your customer outreach efforts is crucial as your user base grows. With Pendo's automation capabilities, you can proactively engage with customers to drive value realization and ensure renewal.

Lead new users with product-led onboarding

Implementing product-led user onboarding facilitates on-demand enablement and accelerates proficiency. On average, product-led approaches reduce churn by 5% and increase Net Revenue Retention (NRR) by 15%.

As your user base grows, so does the demand for support and guidance. To scale your outreach and education efforts effectively, consider automating the first touches with new users:

Create a welcome lightbox guide. Introduce new users to your platform with a dedicated "welcome" lightbox or pop-up message. This provides users with an immediate sense of orientation and guidance as they begin their journey. Include essential information, such as key features, resources, and next steps, to help users get started on the right foot.
Create a follow-up walkthrough guide. After the initial welcome, follow up with new users by offering a short, focused walkthrough of your platform's key navigation and features. Keep it concise, highlighting two to three essential steps or tasks that users commonly need assistance with. This step-by-step guidance can help users feel more confident and empowered as they explore the platform further.
Segment for your audience. Segment your user base based on their "first visit" field or creation date in your metadata. This segmentation allows you to tailor to specific needs of different user groups. For example, you can prioritize support resources for users who are still in the early stages of onboarding or target outreach campaigns to re-engage users who haven't returned to the platform since their initial visit.

Educate customers proactively

Continued education is vital for ensuring your customers have ongoing value from your product. It's essential to assess adoption early on and provide users with contextual education and resources to support their journey.

Here are some proactive strategies to help assess adoption and drive continued value:

Review stickiness. Use your account health dashboard to assess stickiness for your book of business. This metric provides insights into how engaged users are with your product over time.
Evaluate retention. Compare retention rates for both visitors and accounts in your book of business. Adjust segmentation to focus on customers who had their first visit within the last 30 to 90 days, providing targeted support to nurture their engagement.
Reach out proactively. Identify customers who aren't adopting or are struggling to realize value quickly. Proactive outreach can help address their challenges and guide them toward success.
Provide in-app guidance. Outline an in-app checklist of essential tasks to help users achieve success. Display this checklist in the Resource Center through walkthrough guides or announcements, offering structured support within the product itself.
Highlight feature announcements. Showcase new feature announcements to demonstrate ongoing investment in improving the user experience. This not only keeps users informed but also presents new opportunities for them to enhance their value.
Offer community options and training. Showcase community forums, live training sessions, and recorded webinars to provide additional resources for learning and engagement. These platforms foster collaboration and offer valuable insights for users.

By proactively educating your customers and providing tailored support, you can empower them to maximize the value they derive from your product.

Target inactive customers

Consider implementing a "No login program" to target inactive customers. This campaign focuses on user inactivity, a critical risk factor, to improve usage and overall product health. Contact customers who haven't logged in within the last 30 days and use the call-to-action (CTA) to direct them back to your app. Provide a "welcome back" guide to help users pick up where they left off.

Launch intervention guides

Intervention guides are effective tools for highlighting features to users who haven't utilized them, thus promoting adoption. This 1:many approach enables personalized messaging tailored to engage your customer base.

For example, at Pendo, we use intervention guides to target users who haven't set up Core Events, used Data Explorer, created a path report, or published a guide, which are all essential features for maximizing the value of our solution. Engaging with these features is crucial for our customers' success and optimal utilization of our platform.

For more detailed guidelines on how to use guides to scale your outreach, see our Onboard users at scale Academy course.

Understand customer sentiment

Understanding your customer is crucial for customer success, providing insight into satisfaction, loyalty, and areas for improvement. In Pendo, you can use polls and NPS surveys to collect and understand customer feedback and sentiment.

Measure overall product satisfaction with NPS

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a widely-used metric for assessing customer loyalty and overall user satisfaction. By focusing on NPS, your business can prioritize customer-centricity, drive continuous improvement, and foster advocacy for organic growth.

Use NPS to capture quantitative and qualitative product feedback, understand the satisfaction levels of your highest-paying customers are, and correlate usage metrics with customer sentiment.

Remember that, while the actual score is important, the feedback it generates is equally valuable for building strong customer relationships.

We recommend that your account and success team engage with customers based on their NPS responses. This not only provides an opportunity for meaningful conversation but also strengthens relationships, even in cases of low NPS scores. Detractors often offer candid feedback that can be invaluable for improvement.

For detailed guidelines on how to create an NPS survey, see Set up an NPS survey.

Gather in-app feedback from power users

This approach effectively captures feedback from actively engaged customers, resulting in higher participation rates and more immediate insights. Using Pendo guide polls, target users who have interacted with features multiple times to obtain valuable input for improvement.

Consider the format of the poll (for example, numerical or open text) based on the type of information being collected and the user engagement levels. Tailoring the poll format enhances the user experience and increases the relevance of responses.

Gather more robust data on your customers

Enhance your understanding of customer needs by leveraging poll responses as metadata to enrich user profiles and improve segmentation capabilities. Analyzing this data provides valuable insights for strategic decision-making and enhances the overall user experience

Consider conducting A/B testing to determine the most effective polling method. Testing different approaches allows you to identify the optimal strategy for maximizing user engagement and response rates.

Additionally, consider using Pendo's API or integrating with Salesforce to push poll data out of Pendo and enrich your data with more robust segmentation capabilities.

Here's an example where we use a survey to gather role information for all new users:

Create moments of delight

Surprise and delight your customers with personalized in-app messaging to promote product loyalty and create exceptional experiences. Use content such as birthday guides, anniversary messages, funding announcements, and more to build emotional connections with your product.

Here's an example of an anniversary guide we launch for Pendo users, a milestone we believe is worth celebrating: