Infor makes data-driven product decisions with Pendo

Infor is a global leader in enterprise software solutions for every aspect of a business. At more than 16,000 employees strong, Infor is currently the third largest enterprise technology provider in the world.  The Talent Science division at Infor provides predictive talent analytics software that uses behavioral and performance data to enable businesses to better select, retain, and develop their most promising talent. The solution includes behavioral, cognitive, and cultural assessments, and also matches talent to particular jobs and roles.

Brian Severski is the product director and Alex Reilly is a senior customer success manager on the Infor customer success team. Both were key players in bringing Pendo into the arsenal of business solutions deployed by Infor. More than 30 users across the leadership and customer success teams use Pendo to strategically monitor everything from device usage to user feedback and overall system user experience.

Taking the complexity out of complex trial offers

The product team at Infor Talent Science had considered offering a free trial in the past but the depth of their product onboarding experience made them wary of the time-intensive nature of trialing with new users.

Brian and team were concerned with how much bandwidth it would take to launch a trial offering because the process does not allow for self-setup. By using Pendo to provide a predominantly automated onboarding system, they were able to significantly reduce the amount of effort required to get a trial up and running and avoid an extensive implementation process for each new trial.

“It’s created an efficient scenario whereby we can set these trials up quickly. Since launch, we’ve saved an hour of effort for each trial and were able to redeploy those saved hours to a consultant team focused on more strategic tasks.”

Alex added, “Pendo has definitely made us more agile. It’s been highly configurable so that we can make something specific to a client that took maybe 30 minutes when it would have taken our developers four weeks to turn around.”

Creating a customer-centric experience

Alex and the customer success team support large franchise accounts and had been looking for a better way to communicate with the individual franchise owners. In the past, they had used email and other communication channels but ultimately found it difficult to monitor the messaging and feedback with each individual owner. They needed a solution where they could track the full communication loop with each owner.

“We knew there had to be an easier way to provide feedback to customers,” Alex said.  Once they discovered Pendo, they began to put guides in front of users to serve them the information they needed to utilize their system more effectively. Having these orientations automate across different parts of their system allowed them to save countless man hours in training and follow up.

Another bonus was that the leadership team could use the account-specific analytics provided by Pendo to have a more data-driven conversation with clients. Pendo’s polling functionality allows them to survey specific customers about topics that were important to their user populations and executive teams. This information helps the team provide better recommendations based on thousands of responses from job applicants, which ultimately helps the customer success team show added value to their customers.

Helping customers stay ahead of industry trends

The ability to understand user behavior has helped Infor Talent Science provide a better product experience and adapt quickly as clients and job candidates began to consume their product in new ways.  The customer success team discovered that mobile device usage grew from 20% to 50% in the last two years and have adjusted their product experience on mobile to support this change in adoption.

On the product side of the house, Brian and team launched an NPS survey for the first time that helped them identify detractors and possible churn risks. Survey responses led them to create a better job application process. “A driving business need for clients right now is that the unemployment rate is at a low level, which creates a really competitive talent market. When there’s a process like a behavioral assessment that’s used at some point during your application process, clients want that to look really good. Pendo allows us to collect direct feedback from job seekers and we use that feedback to drive our own product strategy,” Brian noted.

Product innovation requires more than a gut feeling

Brian summed it up best when he talked about the ways that Pendo has allowed their organization to stay flexible and responsive to the needs of their users.

“As much as we all like to think that we’ve got the crystal ball in our head, we don’t. With Pendo, we’ve been shifting to a more objective product management and strategy path now, making data and feedback-driven decisions. We’re now driving product that is meeting real business needs, both for our candidate population end users, but also certainly our enterprise users as well. The objective decision-making we’re able to do along the way using Pendo is critical.”