How Credly combined Pendo and Calendly for quicker, deeper user research

No one knows what they need from your platform best like the people actually using it every day.

Over at digital credential management platform Credly, Product Manager Adrienne Peirce knows that well, and spends a lot of time conducting customer interviews to keep her finger on the pulse of what the platform’s users need and how they feel about the product. 

But manually identifying the right customers to speak with for very specific topics is inefficient and time-consuming. “A big part of product management is knowing what customers want rather than guessing what they need,” she said. “It was very difficult to engage customers in dialogue.”

Peirce wanted to streamline the process for securing interviews and make it easier for customers to schedule them on their own, and Pendo’s integration with Calendly proved the perfect tool.

She had been using appointment scheduling app Calendly to get interviews on the books, and, as a Pendo user, realized that the integration would allow her to embed the scheduling feature inside Pendo in-app guides, so users could be reached and encouraged to schedule a chat right inside Credly’s platform.

Pendo also made it easy to target only the customers that were actively using a feature she was interested in learning more about or improving. “I could put the guide right on that feature page, because I assume if you’re on that page, you’re using the feature,” she said. “It’s a much more lightweight and agile way of targeting customers. It put the back and forth email game to an end.”

This approach has broadened the pool of users Peirce is able to connect with, increased both the volume and cadence of feedback collection, and provided much deeper insight into usage and sentiment. She likened the difference to switching from waterfall development to agile development in the software field, and estimates that she’s pulling in two to four times as much valuable user feedback as she was prior to launching the integration. Those insights are now crucial to Credly’s product strategy and planning processes.

“It leveled the playing field among all of our customers. I was speaking to people I otherwise wouldn’t have known to reach out to,” she said. “We’ve decreased our emphasis on some parts of the platform, and increased it on others.”

Pendo’s analytics are also helping direct the conversations Peirce is having with customers to get the most out of them. Prior to the call, she’ll examine their usage of the platform, so she’s informed about their use cases ahead of time and can focus on more important topics during her limited time with the customer.

Pendo data has also revealed the highest-usage parts of the platform, which has led the team to reconfigure their UI to make those features more visible and easily accessible to all users, and the lowest usage features, some of which have been retired. “Having data to support those decisions is so useful,” she noted.

Recently, Peirce’s team has begun using Pendo’s Core Events feature to monitor time-to-value on each of the platform’s top 10 most important features. That information is helping them develop segment-specific new user onboarding and feature-specific in-app walkthroughs to help users find value in the platform as quickly as possible—a key driver of retention.