Personalized in-app user onboarding saves over 300 customer success hours without losing the “white glove” experience

BombBomb is a tool that allows customers to get face-to-face with more people, more often through simple video email. The BombBomb platform allows people to get personal with their connections to inspire engagement and build stronger relationships. They partnered with Pendo to create a better product experience as they work to fulfill their mission of “rehumanizing” the planet. Jeremy Kleier, a customer success engineer at BombBomb, spoke with us about how the team has been able to utilize Pendo for more intuitive onboarding over the last year.

“With in-app messaging, the customer is never alone.”

The BombBomb team started using Pendo for customer training. They wanted to make it quick and easy for users to learn how to use the BombBomb platform. “Our goal was to improve the customer workflow; instead of having customers go to external sources to learn how to complete a task, we wanted to show them how to do it from right within the app, step by step,” Kleier explained. “This way, customers could get an easy, no-fuss breakdown of how to use our product while feeling as if we were walking them through it along the way. With in-app messaging, the customer is never alone.”

Onboarding “Prompt”ly

However, they quickly discovered the added value Pendo could provide when onboarding users into a new platform. This became a key use case for the team when they released their newest product, Prompt. Prompt was developed to fill the missing gap of a personalized communication strategy for the real estate market. Their initial onboarding strategy for this product quickly changed when they recognized the demand that was driving it. Kleier explained, “When we launched Prompt, we thought we would sell the product at a sustainable pace where we could create a ‘white glove’ experience and do a personal onboarding session for everyone. As it turned out, our customer success managers (CSMs) weren’t able to keep up with the pace that Prompt was selling at, so we needed to find a scalable solution that wouldn’t take away from the personable feeling we’d worked so hard to create.”

So, the team turned to Pendo to create a more intuitive onboarding process directly in the product. They created an onboarding program via Pendo Guides that was so easy and intuitive, their new customers felt empowered to continue the journey on their own. The onboarding process was simple but effective. Kleier recounted, “We created about six in-app Guides to give people a warm welcome to Prompt, teach them how to upload contact lists into the correct spot, show them how to order their customized email design and complete a few more tasks that were critical in setting up their Prompt account.”

Using Pendo allowed the BombBomb team to scale their onboarding program. On average, each onboarding call was costing their team 30 minutes to complete, contrary to the 15 minutes it took their team to create the single onboarding stream with Pendo.

They had a total of 644 users complete an onboarding walkthrough, and they set up four different walkthroughs for users. If each of those 644 users would have completed a 30-minute CSM call, it would have cost BombBomb 322 hours in support time. Without Pendo, BombBomb would have needed to dedicate eight full-time onboarding specialists to complete these trainings within one week.

The key to effective onboarding for the BombBomb team was their ability to customize the experience based on customer needs. Each of their enterprise customers needed a different type of experience, so offering the same onboarding flow to everyone just didn’t make sense. They created a “Create Your Own Experience” onboarding flow that allowed customers to choose what they were trying to accomplish with onboarding.

As well, an unexpected outcome of Pendo’s onboarding experience was additional insights into the customer journey. Kleier saw this change happen firsthand: “Pendo also made us think more about the customer experience instead of just the user experience. We were examining the customer journey, which can become a long, convoluted process depending on the avenue in how people became our customers. We didn’t want our customers to be overwhelmed by emails and phone calls and Pendo Guides all saying the same thing, so Pendo forced us to consider how we approached customers through our communication avenues and encouraged brevity in our verbiage in-app.”

Expanding into mobile

For many software companies, the customer journey spans mobile and web experiences as customers move between devices – precisely what BombBomb aims to do with their newly launched mobile capabilities. The BombBomb team describes the new features by stating, “In the new app, customers will be able to send video email, schedule emails, use canned responses, and track sent messages – just like they would in the BombBomb application – all while being in a mobile inbox environment.”

To support this launch, BombBomb recently started using Pendo’s mobile capabilities. Similar to their web results, the team at BombBomb is using Pendo Mobile for their onboarding coordination and functionality. “Pendo is, again, going to play a critical role in onboarding our mobile users so they feel comfortable in our new inbox environment that is packed with functionality,” Kleier said.

We’ve had this capability with our desktop application, but implementing it on mobile activity is going to provide us with more insight than we’ve ever had about how our customers operate on their mobile devices while using our products.

BombBomb plans to use Pendo to discover the best way to onboard mobile users. Kleier explains, “We’re really looking forward to A/B testing the different versions of mobile onboarding. We’ve had this capability with our desktop application, but implementing it on mobile activity is going to provide us with more insight than we’ve ever had about how our customers operate on their mobile devices while using our products.”

The BombBomb team lives by their philosophy that video messaging provides a more personal and human connection, and they’ve used their own platform to create this video about their experience with Pendo.