How Cognigy ensures every customer’s first experience makes a lasting impression

Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly common part of how customer service works—a trend that has only accelerated during the global pandemic.  Many enterprise companies have recognised the advantage in leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies to offer personalised, automated customer service interactions.

By removing repetitive, low-value tasks from the customer service process, conversational AI platforms ensure agents can focus on where their human touch adds the most value. Cognigy’s platform Cognigy.AI does this by allowing anyone to create and deploy human-like virtual agents with a low-code UI.

Achieving differentiation in a competitive market

As a scale-up company operating in a highly competitive market, a pillar of Cognigy’s growth is its unique ‘test and try’ experience.  This trial environment allows potential users to explore the full scope and potential of Cognigy.AI, using pre-built kits and tutorials.

To make sure potential customers find value in the platform quickly, Sebastian Glock, Cognigy’s head of product marketing, knew it would be critical to provide a seamless onboarding and first-use experience. In other words, he wanted to serve up the platform’s “aha” moments directly to trial users, instead of leaving it to chance that they’d discover them on their own.

“We want to be confident that every trial user experiences those all-important ‘aha’ moments, and that likewise we have complete clarity of decision-making as we evolve our product,” Sebastian said.

Pendo’s analytics and in-app guidance offered an ideal solution. Pendo ensures Cognigy can intuitively understand the user journey within the trial environment, including how users interact with the platform and how they use and combine features, to continually inform and improve the customer experience. Then, in-app guidance is used to lead users down optimal paths and encourage them to expand their usage to include features they may have overlooked.

Guiding users to a unique onboarding experience

“Pendo guides are the central pillar of our onboarding experience”, said Glock.

Using Pendo, Cognigy has helped thousands of new users build their first conversational bot, from scratch, within the first 180 seconds of signing up. This rapid, self-serve product experience helps the team deliver on their brand promise of creating powerful virtual assistants quickly and easily.

“Pendo had version one ready in just three days, and since that day we have relied on it as an integral part of our technology stack,” Glock added.

Lightning-fast reactions

The Cognigy team puts a high premium on user feedback. They pride themselves on always being quick to make changes and innovate in response to customer needs.  Product usage insights from Pendo let Cognigy’s developers quickly evaluate the highest impact areas to focus on, opening up new opportunities to make quick changes and launch new features that will make a positive impact on the user experience.

For example, Pendo enables Cognigy to spot friction points in the onboarding journey and identify features with improvable adoption rates.  These data-driven insights allow developers to constantly optimise and differentiate the UX of the platform.

“Pendo is empowering Cognigy teams across both the product development and sales processes.  It has added an additional layer of speed by informing advanced data-driven decision making,” explained Glock.  “We now analyse how users move through the trial and dig deep into their user journeys to better understand behaviour and uncover actionable insights that can be harnessed to continuously improve the onboarding experience.”

A partnership for future growth

Cognigy considers Pendo to be a valuable partner in their future growth strategy.  “Pendo has integrated seamlessly into our technology stack.  Its comprehensive capability set and the actionable insights it provides constantly equip us to better understand customers and prospects, differentiate our offering, and deliver experiences users love.”