Keap uses Pendo In-app Guides to increase feature adoption by 168%

Keap provides small business automation tools, combining CRM, email marketing, and task management applications into one. They specialize in helping small businesses retain and grow their client base with software that automates the entire business across sales, marketing, service and operations. 

Keap’s newest offering, Keap Pay, streamlines the payment experience for customers and provides insights into their payment journeys. As the Keap team planned the development roadmap and product launch for Keap Pay, they faced unique obstacles with how to announce the new offering, migrate users from a third-party platform, and drive feature adoption.

Bobbie Jo Gregor, product marketing manager at Keap, leaned on Pendo In-app Guides and Session Replay to communicate with customers about the new Keap Pay offering and gain rapid insights to improve the user experience—resulting in 168% increase in feature adoption from the beta period to general availability. 

Expanding the platform to meet customer needs

Keap’s customers had previously been using WePay as a third-party online payments system. But feedback from their partners and affiliates indicated that the third-party integrations weren’t providing the flexibility that their customers needed. The Keap team was also scoping out ways they could expand their product offerings to reduce complexity for their customers by providing more solutions on a single platform. 

“For our customers, our tool automates their entire business,” says Gregor. “We started looking at other areas in the product where we can improve that experience and help automate other areas of their business. And for us, that’s the payments area.”

Expanding their automation solutions into a payments offering solved a lot of problems. It gave their customers the desired flexibility, kept the payment system in one place, and allowed Keap to expand their business. 

As an embedded solution, Keap Pay created more customizable experiences on the finance and payment side that could ultimately serve their customers more efficiently. 

Speed is key to relieve customer pain points

While the Keap product team had a roadmap in place to develop and launch Keap Pay, their plans accelerated once they learned that WePay was shutting down operations in a matter of months. It was imperative that they launch Keap Pay before the WePay shutdown in order to avoid disrupting customers’ flow of business and online payments.

Ultimately, the team had to accelerate their original product timeline from nine months to four to launch an MVP version of Keap Pay that would be at parity with WePay. They spent two months in beta testing, followed by two bug bashes, with a plan to launch to the wider customer base during a livestream event. 

Leveraging Pendo In-guides and Session Replay to refine the transition

When beta testing was complete, Gregor started using Pendo In-app Guides to communicate to WePay customers that a change was coming. They had a three-month window to refine the transition process and leveraged Session Replay to learn exactly how their customers were behaving during initial adoption.

Keap quickly saw that adoption numbers were not where they wanted them to be. With Pendo Session Replay, they were able to understand why. By reviewing video replays of customers interacting with in-app guides, the team quickly uncovered two key problems: 

1. Flow divergence: The original flow directed users to a help article that lived outside of the product. Gregor’s team was able to change that immediately by adjusting the flow to customers directly to the payments page instead and increase their likelihood to sign up for Keap Pay.
2.  Conflicting software versions: Keap’s customers are migrating from a legacy product to a newer version. Launching Keap Pay during the migration process was challenging since Keap Pay was developed on the new version and was not part of the legacy product. With the migration process still a year away from completion, Keap used in-app guides to reach both groups of users—one on the legacy app to direct users to the newer version and another to direct users to the payments product page to set up Keap Pay. 

These optimizations, along with support from customer success to engage users about Keap Pay, boosted feature adoption by 168%. And Gregor’s team continued to hit their adoption goals for the next two months. To top it off, three weeks later Gregor’s team announced the general availability of Keap Pay at their livestream event, bringing the payments solution to an even larger customer base and with solid adoption from the beta period to bolster the launch. 

Looking ahead: Anticipating customer needs

Leveraging Pendo immediately showed Gregor and the larger Keap team where their customers were getting stuck, and provided them a way to make fast adjustments that aligned their users’ behavior with the business goal–driving adoption.  

Looking forward, Gregor is challenging her team to identify leading indicators in customer behavior to uncover opportunities. Their goal is to be a step ahead in anticipating customer needs. They also use Pendo Session replay to paint a fuller picture of customer behavior and where the experience can be improved to achieve business objectives. 

“Instead of being led by a feeling or assumption, with Pendo Replays I had physical evidence to show where our customers were getting stuck, lost, or confused. Identifying the initial challenges our customers faced when signing up with Keap Pay enabled us to adjust our release strategy, improve our onboarding process, and ultimately achieve our launch goals.  Product releases rarely go exactly as planned, so tools like Pendo are invaluable for swiftly pinpointing and addressing issues early on. Our team is really encouraged to find other ways to leverage Pendo in our future releases, not only to market but also to refine our strategies and identify other product-led strategies we can implement to help us improve how we release and launch new features to our customers.”