Verizon Connect automates product demos and user onboarding with Pendo guides

Verizon Connect fleet management software allows users to track vehicles in the field, improve worker productivity, and encourages safe driving through a range of customizable GPS solutions. The Verizon Connect user experience team wanted to reduce the costs of customer acquisition, especially with smaller scale accounts, while enabling prospective customers to explore the platform for themselves.

To solve this problem, they created an automated product demo that gives customers a hands-on experience without sales involvement. John Wood, principal UX designer at Verizon Connect described the demo build process, “We used a mix of HTML and Pendo guides to allow users to interact with 24 hours of vehicle data, reports, and automated maps. It’s synthetic data, that prospects can engage with like they would in a live demo.”

Zoe Stringer, senior product designer at Verizon Connect was part of the core team that built the automated demo, “I think the experience is really interesting because we’re using Pendo across multiple pages to tell the story and it allows the user to follow a guided tour or deviate at any time and consume each component of the functionality at their own pace.” This personalization at scale serves up videos and customer success stories, and even allows prospective customers to close out the guides and come back later when they want more context around a part of the product. When the prospect is ready to buy, links to pricing and plans are readily accessible at any point in the demo – turning a prospect into an educated, qualified sales lead at the click of a button.

The design and content were completed by a team of three in 60 days, working alongside the engineers who set up the sandbox demo environment. The ease and flexibility of branding Pendo guides ensured that the entire experience felt like it was a connected part of the Verizon Connect platform and not just a pop up laid on top of it. The new guided demo will launch in August and will transform the way prospective new customers engage with the Verizon Connect platform.

Automating the onboarding process

Verizon Connect is also using Pendo to make a great first impression on new paid and free trial users by automating and personalizing the onboarding process.

Before Pendo, Verizon Connect relied on a manual process for onboarding that involved training delivered to each individual customer in a webinar format. Pendo’s in-app guidance capabilities allowed the company to automate that process, delivering those trainings through in-app walkthroughs and tooltips. Guides can be delivered to users contextually, based on the specific task they are trying to accomplish. 

Below are a few examples of the guides Verizon Connect has deployed:

Initially, product manager Jon Young’s team built onboarding flows based on what they considered the most useful and likely paths users would take through the app. But once they started monitoring usage data in Pendo, they realized each customer’s needs varied, and that the process needed to be less linear to ensure every user saw value as quickly as possible.

 “We’ve kind of evolved the whole onboarding process to say ‘Let’s not take them from point A all the way to point Z, when really they just needed to get somewhere in the middle to actually start getting some value out of the software,” Young said during a webinar with Pendo.

Pendo’s analytics helped Young’s team refine the onboarding process by revealing where users were dropping off. At a minimum, dispatchers have to get to the point of adding their technicians to the system to see value from RevealField, but there is plenty of advanced functionality after that, such as notifying customers when a technician is running behind, and the utility of those can vary by the customer, Young said.

Providing the opportunity to re-launch guides later ensures they get the basics and can still access the other support later.

“We saw from both usage and guide analytics that a lot of times, they were dropping off and not getting to the point of the advanced systems,” he said. “We get them to a point where they can get into the product and start getting that value, then if they want to take the time now to go through and do the advanced stuff they can, or they can go back to it later.” 

Making revisions to the onboarding guide flows was able to be done in real-time with Pendo without engineering or development support, Young said. “It’s easy if you make a mistake to go and tweak something,” he said.

Now, during the Covid-19 outbreak, many of Verizon Connect’s customers are facing significant disruption to their operations. Young said Verizon Connect is offering free access to RevealField until the end of September for about 60,000 customers globally to help them stay on their feet.

With Pendo, getting all those users up to speed and ensuring they see value from the software can be performed in a contactless, automated way. Hopefully, in October, those customers will decide to sign on for the longer term.

“We want to get as many of our trial users in and getting value from the product, and then seeing them in four months down the road say this is something that’s made a big difference for my business and I can’t live without it,” Young said.