How the Black Diamond Wealth Platform uses Pendo Feedback to power a community of product feedback

Valuing the Client’s Voice

The product team behind the Black Diamond® Wealth Platform has always worked to stay ahead of financial technology trends, while also providing a premier service experience for its clients. To excel at this, they needed an efficient way to collect, listen, and respond to client feedback.

Black Diamond purchased Pendo Feedback to replace an outdated system of tracking feature requests and customer feedback in a massive spreadsheet. Through that legacy process, feedback was collected manually from a variety of sources like email, customer success calls, surveys, salespeople, and anywhere else it was offered. In fact, they had become quite good at it. But they didn’t have an efficient way of sorting, grouping and prioritizing the feedback, and then reporting back on what they planned to do with it.

“This was particularly challenging considering we have thousands of passionate advisor users and over 20,000 end clients interacting on our platform — and a product team of 32 responsible for managing all of that feedback,” says Bjorn Widerstedt, VP of Product Management for Black Diamond. “It was a struggle to route contextual product feedback to the correct product owners and rank the thousands of customer inputs in order of relevance and priority.”

Bjorn and his team wanted clients to know just how valuable their ideas and feedback were. But to build out an effective product roadmap, they needed a simpler way to identify popular and important themes for prioritization.

After implementing Pendo Feedback, Black Diamond was able to host all feedback in a centralized place, sort the data in a variety of ways to help inform product decisions, and then communicate those decisions back to clients. Having a better system in place made taking action on client-driven functionality much more achievable.

Black Diamond can now recognize within seconds that 400 of its 5,000 pieces of feedback overlap as well as search by themes and topics to find common threads. In addition, they can sort by client type and revenue to see if similar accounts are having comparable issues. Pendo Feedback also provides a new layer of transparency since clients are able to see what other people are requesting and know what the Black Diamond product team is actively working on.

“It’s a relief to know that as we continue to grow we will not lose the intimacy of real-time feedback,” says Widerstedt. “Pendo Feedback is a simple experience that helps organizations build a community of innovation. A space where our clients and the product team can have a shared view of how the product is evolving.”

With Pendo Feedback functionality integrated into its platform, Black Diamond can achieve its goal of delivering a seamless user experience. “We walked into this project wanting to find a solution that powered efficiencies to help us deliver a high level of service. What we discovered is the fulfilling sense of community and involvement it afforded,” says Widerstedt. “That to us is a pivotal piece to being a leading financial technology provider.”