5 ways Pendo is helping BEE put their product-led philosophy to work

BEE stands for “Best Editor Ever.” To achieve that ambitious goal, BEE has adopted a product-led philosophy, pushing the product to get better every day—both in terms of the needs it fulfills and the experience it provides. Enter Pendo.

Powering dynamic customer journeys with product led

Product led isn’t just another buzzword. It’s a strategy that harnesses product usage as the primary driver in retaining customers, driving growth, and influencing organisational priorities. As a hyper-growth business on a mission to democratise content design, BEE’s products are not just a part of the customer experience. They are the customer experience.

Born from the expertise of MailUp, BEE has been a long-time Pendo customer and a big believer in boosting growth through product and product knowledge.

“A lot of growth comes from product-driven initiatives” said Massimo Arrigoni, BEE’s chief executive officer.  “Pendo helps us better understand what people are doing within our product, and act on that in a meaningful way. Whether you’re trying to cross-sell new features or build retention, you need to start with actual data”.

Pendo supports BEE’s product-led philosophy in several ways:

Onboarding

BEE has created multiple in-app guides that lead customers through the product discovery flow, ensuring they get a 360° view of the product while pointing them toward specific, important features. BEE uses a mixture of one-step guides based on specific actions it wants users to take, as well as three- to four-step guides that walk customers through the app and make sure they take key actions during their onboarding journey.

In A/B testing of two versions of a page, in-app guide use has reduced average core action time (the average time a user took to perform a core action during their first visit to BEE) by more than 50%, from 1-day  pre-walkthrough to 0.7 days post-walkthrough in one scenario and from 2 days to 0.9 days in another.

“Whether customers want to design emails, landing pages, or single page websites, using Pendo guides to lead them through the product and feature discovery flow ensures they can realise the value of BEE from day one.  From a business point of view, the quicker a user starts fully utilising the capabilities of our product the greater their lifetime revenue value”, said Elena Loatelli, a product marketing specialist at BEE.

Feature tracking

Pendo’s analytics help BEE monitor usage patterns. Harnessing meaningful and actionable insights from metrics like feature adoption, usage, and in-app time allows for deeper analysis of customer behaviour and the creation of dynamic customer journeys. During a recent third-party feature campaign, Pendo data-driven insights helped BEE drive up usage by 45% in just three weeks.

Feature tracking is also enabling BEE to create dynamic customer segments based on role and activity for lead classification, which can then be used to drive upsell and cross-sell initiatives. This has resulted in a 3-fold increase in conversion. They also create custom guides based on feature usage to drive up customer engagement and feature adoption depending on a user’s segment. 

Analysis of low-usage features and feature friction points in real time also allows BEE to be proactive in supporting users with specific guides, acting to improve feature visibility, or removing friction within the application.

“Pendo plays an important role in feature tracking. By analysing customer behaviours we can recognise and define touchpoints and create highly dynamic customer journeys based on specific needs and use”, said Loatelli.

Design decisions

Traditionally, designers rely heavily on qualitative feedback when making UX improvements, but BEE leverages both qualitative and quantitative research. On the qualitative side, jobs-to-be-done interviews are held regularly with new and existing customers. On the quantitative end, using Pendo analytics BEE has been able to better understand how the UI is functioning and rapidly improve usability.

A recent examination of the percentage screen resolution used across BEE’s customer base signalled the need to move a button in the UI higher up the page. This seemingly small change had a big impact: average time on task dropped from 1 minute 3 seconds to just 47 seconds, and delivered a 4% uplift in the number of customers landing on the button.  

Customer communication

BEE is using Pendo to deliver data-driven, personalised, in-app communications. Pendo’s Resource Centre has been particularly valuable for delivering extraordinary or urgent communications, announcing product improvements and new features, and empowering customers to open support tickets right inside the app.

“Pendo ensures we can engage with customers, and they can engage with us, on demand or at a moment’s notice and always in the most meaningful way possible.  This ensures that in addition to constantly pushing the product to get better every day in terms of both usability and functionality, we can consistently engage in the timely and highly-intuitive manner so integral to superior customer experience and therefore NPS, retention, and long-term customer value,” said Loatelli.

Hyper growth support

“Pendo is playing a vital role in our growth”, said Loatelli.  “We have exciting plans to expand our relationship, both short and long term, by adopting features that will assist us in creating ever-more dynamic and personalised customer journeys, market-leading levels of engagement, and importantly the ability to constantly improve BEE, and make it grow.” 

Thanks to Pendo, BEE has become truly product-led.