How Filevine strengthens partnerships with Pendo Feedback

In the legal field, getting the full picture about every client and case is critical. That’s where Filevine comes in. Their software helps legal firms collaborate, communicate, and manage their workloads with ease through a single, unified platform.

The Filevine team knew it was important to put customer feedback at the center of their product to ensure they were working on the features their users needed immediately while also making the correct roadmap decisions for the product’s future. But, they didn’t have an easy way to gather, track, communicate, or close the loop on all the input they were receiving. 

“It was a little bit of a black hole. [The feedback] wasn’t tracked, and it wasn’t followed up on anywhere. There was just no process or system for that,” said Mary Lyon, director of product feedback at Filevine. “It definitely caused some frustration internally, but also for the customer.”

After recognizing the need to build a more structured feedback engine, Filevine created a Product Feedback team within their organization. They also established a customer program called Filevine Insiders, which invites customers to engage with their team through beta testing, user testing, and panels. 

The last piece of the puzzle was implementing a platform to help the Filevine team aggregate and analyze their feedback—and ultimately close the loop. Filevine needed a solution that could break down silos, help them cast a wide net for feedback collection, effectively inform their product roadmap, and seamlessly integrate into their applications and existing communication channels. 

Pendo Feedback delivered on all fronts.

Gathering contextual, timely feedback

Pendo Feedback allows Filevine’s customers and internal teams to share their comments and ideas while using the Filevine app. Having already seen a drop-off in submissions through their legacy system, the Filevine team knew this in-app functionality would be key to successfully gathering customer feedback. 

With Pendo Feedback, Filevine collects both customer and internal feedback directly within their Filevine application. This means users no longer have to leave the app and access another tool to submit their thoughts, which vastly increases the likelihood that they will provide feedback. This in-app functionality has also helped Filevine capture more contextual submissions, and has made it easier for them to react to suggestions quickly.

Leveraging the Pendo platform to get a complete view of the customer

Another key selling point for Filevine was Pendo’s ability to create a holistic view of the customer journey within their application. “We needed something that was going to connect the dots, because segmented feedback isn’t nearly as useful,” Lyon said. “Having feedback that you have a lot of context around is so much more powerful. Pendo is perfect for that.”

With the Pendo platform and Pendo Feedback, Filevine can now easily collect and analyze each user’s sentiment, behaviors, and feedback suggestions to get a clearer understanding of their needs and identify any product or process gaps. This helps Filevine’s success teams communicate with their customers more effectively, and helps product teams understand the “why” behind the feedback they’re receiving.

“Using Pendo’s behavioral analytics and in-app guidance in conjunction with Pendo Feedback really is what made it a perfect package,” said Lyon. “The ability to have all of the usage context, right alongside the feedback, was really pivotal.”

Managing ideas and informing the roadmap

Pendo also helped Filevine create better processes around the management of ideas. Before Pendo, the team had no way to aggregate customer feedback with usage data. This made it hard for Filevine’s product team to understand what ideas were being requested most frequently, which were most popular, and the status of the ideas being acted on by the product and engineering teams. 

“Our old system was basically a glorified spreadsheet,” Lyon said. “There was no visibility or reporting or anything like that.” 

Pendo Feedback allows Filevine to easily segment and organize all the feedback they receive so they can spot trends and identify key areas for improvement. Pendo Feedback’s voting and prioritization functionality, which allows customers and internal teams to vote on already-submitted product requests, also allows the Filevine team to identify which ideas present the quickest wins or highest-value optimizations to the business. Plus, Filevine’s CEO dashboard within Pendo Feedback makes reporting easy by allowing Filevine’s leadership to quickly see the key feedback and usage metrics that matter most to them.

Encouraging engagement and closing the loop

Pendo Feedback allows Filevine’s customers and users to engage with each other’s ideas, and automates the process of closing the loop once any action has been taken on their submissions. Pendo Feedback’s two-way communication features have encouraged Filevine’s already active customer community to meaningfully engage with the Filevine team—ultimately improving the product and allowing customers to see (and get excited about) responses to their requests in real-time.

Pendo Feedback has also proven popular with the Filevine community. Within the first six months of using it, Filevine has sent over 1,400 notifications and emails to users who submitted feedback. Lyon also noted that there have been 309 comment threads back and forth between users, discussing various submitted ideas and sharing the progress being made on them by the Filevine team. 

“One of the biggest pieces that Pendo Feedback had that other solutions didn’t was the ability to close the communication loop,” Lyon said. “[It has] the ability to communicate back to customers and internal employees and keep them up to date on the status of their requests. We weren’t able to do that before.” And, it’s all been accomplished without additional headcount or resources. 

Currently, Filevine is using the roadmap functionality of Pendo Feedback to communicate internally, with plans to share their roadmaps publicly in the future. This additional functionality will further deepen Filevine’s customer connections and encourage continued dialogue to strengthen its software.

“There’s a very open communication line. It helps our customers feel secure in their decision—like they’re getting some support moving forward,” Lyon said. “They feel like it is a long-term partnership, which is absolutely how we want them to feel.”

Extracting themes and topics with machine learning

Filevine is currently partnering with Pendo as a Design Partner and early adopter of our new machine learning capabilities, Pendo Simon. 

With Simon in Pendo Feedback, Lyon and her team were able to distill a list of 1,915 feedback requests in Filevine’s dashboard down into eight key topic areas of focus for the team to address. 

“Instead of spending a couple of work weeks deciphering the patterns and trends we were seeing, we suddenly had all of the patterns identified for us—which was huge,” said Lyon. “Our product owners were able to take those patterns back to their software development teams and plan the roadmap.” Machine learning dramatically accelerated the pace at which the Filevine team could act on the feedback they were receiving—and helped them more confidently plan and validate their roadmap.

This new machine learning capability has also paved the way for deeper product innovation at Filevine. “We wanted 2021 to be the year of ‘Documents,'” explained Lyon, so the Filevine team released a number of updates in their app to address this topic. With Simon, Lyon and her team have been able to identify additional subtopics, understand patterns in the feedback requests following every release, and ultimately better address the pain points their customers were experiencing at the time. “This has actually sped up our iteration process for our product owners,” said Lyon. 

Further, Filevine has been able to better operationalize feedback across their organization and more efficiently address their customers’ needs. “Overall, this tool has really reduced the number of man-hours our team is having to spend on feedback,” said Lyon. “Now, we’re able to almost immediately start our user research and problem validation, and begin roadmapping these items from the moment they enter the system. It’s really sped up the feedback process into real-life releases for our customers—which makes us and them extremely happy.”