Abrigo guides product planning, drives retention, and communicates in-app with Pendo

While the behemoths of banking like Wells Fargo, Chase, and Bank of America have sophisticated in-house software development teams building out their risk management systems, that sort of thing is much harder to come by for a smaller bank or credit union without as many resources.

Abrigo helps community financial institutions fill that gap by offering a slew of compliance, credit risk, and lending software solutions. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a single platform, so Abrigo is using Pendo to help narrow the focus on which features to improve and which to add next, leading users to value earlier. During Covid-19, Pendo’s in-app messaging capabilities helped quickly get important messaging in front of the users for whom it was most relevant.

Chris Boericke, a senior product manager at Abrigo, says the company has historically lacked a tool that let them understand exactly how users were interacting with the software. That meant product decisions were made based on gut instinct or feedback from the platform’s most vocal users.

“We’ve been bitten by that in the past, where we’ve talked to just a couple of users and ended up building the wrong thing,” Boericke says. For instance, a change to the platform’s document upload feature that forced uniformity in file naming conventions led to a storm of disgruntled users calling into support lines.

Pendo has added a new layer to the product design process and opened up entirely new avenues for collecting and analyzing qualitative data. Product usage insights from Pendo let Boericke and his team quickly identify Abrigo’s power users—those who aren’t necessarily the loudest, but certainly the most prolific users—and reach out to them directly to solicit feedback.

This approach helped the team refine the scope of changes to a feature that is typically only available for high-level users, so they could give access to lower-level users on their teams, too.

Boericke used Pendo to tag the feature to identify the specific users who were experiencing problems when using it, then reached out to those users directly. The feedback they received changed their approach to revamping the feature. “We found out that what we were planning on doing was definitely not going to help them,” he says.

Driving renewal and retention

Pendo has also given Abrigo a way to more quickly identify “red accounts,” those that aren’t using the platform very heavily and could be at risk of not renewing their contract. “It could be that they weren’t trained properly and need to be re-trained, or because they’re thinking of switching,” Boericke says.

Historically, Abrigo’s customer success team would receive a report on those accounts on a quarterly basis, since it was quite labor-intensive to compile and analyze the data and get it into Salesforce.

Because Pendo can provide the data underpinning those reports in real-time, Boericke and his team have been able to speed that process up considerably. “[Pendo] is a lot more flexible. We can make those decisions and change [the reports], and immediately get the up-to-date report to identify red accounts,” he says.

After that, a customer success manager will begin proactively reaching out to the accounts to figure out how to get them back on track. And, when a customer’s renewal is getting close, CSMs use Pendo guides to remind them to schedule a check-in.

Targeting in-app messaging through segmentation

When enhancements and upgrades to features are rolled out, Boericke and his team use Pendo guides to announce them.

At first, these would be delivered as large message boxes on the platform, but the team has recently been using Pendo’s segmentation capabilities to target the messaging to only the users who are affected by the changes. That way, they can ensure they aren’t overwhelming the rest of their users with too many guides.

“Before, we were just overloading people. Now, we’re trying to be a little more strategic with our guides,” Boericke says.

Guides have also been useful for notifying customers when a third-party app that the platform depends on has an outage, which helps reduce support calls about issues Abrigo has no control over. “It’s been fantastic to do that so quickly and easily,” Boericke says.

The team has also leveraged a Pendo Resource Center to house the steady stream of new information related to the Paycheck Protection Program, a new federal program to assist small businesses impacted by Covid-19.

The Resource Center gives them a way to centralize all that messaging in one, unobtrusive location that can be accessed at any time. Boericke says the team is now working to use the Resource Center across its application.