How Aysling cut customer onboarding time in half

Any business owner can relate to the pain of moving between a dozen, or dozens, of different software tools and platforms as they try to run their company.

Aysling is an enterprise resource management platform that consolidates a galaxy of business management solutions into a single platform. “You can do all the things you need to do in one place, instead of 15 different places,” says Jeremy Lewis, Aysling’s client engagement director. The company also offers MagHub, a version of the software tailored to the magazine publishing industry.

But a platform that encompasses so much of a business’s daily operations can be overwhelming for new users. It’s Lewis’s job to help users get up to speed quickly so they can begin to realize the full value of the platform, and Pendo plays a key role in that. The software has also made it possible to offer inexpensive, automated onboarding for smaller customers, lowering barriers to entry for the platform.

Lewis’s small 20-member team covers all of the onboarding and support for the company’s more than 2,000 customers, and that user base is growing by about 20% each year. On average, the team spends 60 hours with each customer. To stay ahead of the growth, they needed to reduce the amount of time per customer without sacrificing the quality of service.

The team needed a solution that would let them be less hands-on in the early stages as customers learned how to use the app and more hands-on as customers began to require more strategic consulting. Pendo’s in-app guidance capabilities helped the team automate the most repetitive onboarding tasks, and the analytics features provided insight into how users were progressing through the platform.

Now, when users first log into the system, they’re asked to take a survey to narrow down their role into one of four main use cases: sales, production, finance, or administration. That’s followed by a walkthrough of the main dashboard tailored to that role, Lewis says.

After that initial experience, users are presented with a checklist of other walkthroughs for specific tasks useful to their role. Those can be accessed via a Pendo Resource Center at the user’s own pace.

The team also used Pendo guides to announce the release of a digital adaptation of MagHub’s three-day on-site user education program. And, they didn’t need to ask for any help from the engineering team to deploy that messaging.

Pendo’s usage analytics are also helping Aysling refine its product. “We’re starting to delete pages or change how people navigate based purely off of the analytics,” Lewis says.

Lewis estimates Pendo has led to a 40 to 50% decrease in the time it takes his team to get customers up to speed on the platforms. “There are definitely customers that we haven’t even had to talk to, and some that went through the whole process and talked to us for maybe three hours,” he says.

Pendo helped the company drastically reduce the cost of quickstart training by about 20% for the average customer. That lowers barriers to entry for many customers, leading to increased revenue for Aysling. They’re even offering an onboarding package that is entirely automated through a combination of Pendo and video content for $500, and the two dozen clients who’ve taken advantage of it are all still engaged with the platform, Lewis says.

“It definitely helped us get customers in the door,” he says, especially very small publishers.