Cin7 uses Pendo to reduce friction and increase conversions by 75%

Cin7 is a fully integrated, cloud-based inventory management software that streamlines stock management for businesses of all sizes. As online sales and ecommerce become the norm, Cin7 makes it cheaper, faster, and easier for businesses all over the world to get their products into their customers’ hands.

Cin7’s customers are fast-growing product businesses. And with implementing software at scale, comes complexity. “We have a full sales and onboarding cycle to configure the software for our customers and ensure that all of their employees are brought up to speed as quickly as possible,” explained Adrian Mendoza, a digital experience analyst at Cin7.

The need to guide new users through their onboarding experience was what initially drew Cin7 to Pendo—along with the need to get more granular data about how customers were actually using their platform. “In terms of telemetry, we had nothing before Pendo. We only had customer transaction data,” Medoza explained. He added that Cin7 also didn’t have any tools in place to help scale proactive customer communications prior to Pendo.

So the Cin7 team turned to Pendo’s all-in-one platform to help them address these key challenges—and more—across their business. And today, they’ve also expanded beyond their initial deployment of Pendo Analytics and Pendo In-app Guides with the recent addition of visual data via Pendo Session Replay.

“A big plus [is that] Pendo is essentially all in one. You can do everything without any extra cost.”

Adrian Mendoza | Digital Experience Analyst, Cin7

Using in-app guides to deflect support cases and improve onboarding

One of the first ways Cin7 leveraged Pendo In-app Guides was for proactively addressing bugs and outages. 

Before Pendo, the Cin7 customer support team would normally be bombarded with messages and inquiries from customers whenever they ran into these kinds of issues, leading to a spike in support cases. With Pendo, Mendoza and his team can instead get out in front of bugs and outages with messages directly inside the product—signaling that the team is working on a fix, and helping to reduce incoming support tickets. 

The Cin7 team now also uses Pendo In-app Guides to highlight new features—or even features that are helpful but under-used—to customers. “Anecdotally, our product managers and support teams know what people should be using. So if adoption is low, we can put out a tooltip that says, ‘Hey, do you know that you can do this?’,” Mendoza explained. 

Mendoza recently deployed a tooltip to help users complete a key step in an accounting workflow that resulted in a 143% increase in usage. He also noted that 30% of the people who were exposed to this particular messaging only used the feature because they saw the tooltip, equating to ~1,000 users saving time and being able to focus on more complex work in the Cin7 platform.

Mendoza also noted that in-app guides have been hugely valuable for Cin7’s customer education team. They now use Pendo to create onboarding guides and walkthroughs for all of their new customers—ensuring every user knows how to get to value, fast. “[The team] made a hundred guides, but it only took them one or two weeks. I don’t know how long it would have taken a developer to do that,” he said. 

This entire project would have been incredibly expensive and time-consuming without Pendo. In fact, the Cin7 team received a quote from an external development team indicating that it would take them at least six months to design and deploy the same number of guides. But after consulting with their Pendo account team, it was clear to Cin7 that leveraging the platform for this project would not only be faster—but also more cost effective.

“When people talk about Pendo [at Cin7], they think about how a lot of easy fixes can be delivered, with basically zero developer time.”

Adrian Mendoza | Digital Experience Analyst, Cin7

Integrating product analytics into ML models to build intent signals

In addition to using Pendo Analytics to understand user behaviors and product performance, the Cin7 team has integrated usage data from Pendo with their machine learning models to create a proprietary lead scoring system. This system helps sellers identify the prospects and customers that are most likely to convert using customer data like features used, industry, location, subscription tier, account value, and more. 

Mendoza explained, “The thing that sets apart who buys the most is how many visitors they have and if they’ve used one of our three most important high value features—which we can only get through Pendo.” By pulling feature usage data out of Pendo and into Salesforce, the Cin7 team was able to create a logistic regression model that sellers now rely on to help accelerate deals.

“You can’t really get buy-in unless you can show results. The Pendo team was able to help us find those things, and then implement Pendo in a way that we could share with the rest of the company. Now, everyone uses the product.”

Adrian Mendoza | Digital Experience Analyst, Cin7

Getting visual evidence to validate product decisions with Pendo Session Replay

Cin7 recently added Pendo Session Replay to their subscription to deepen their understanding of their users even further. “Whenever we have a question in mind [that we want to answer], we go into Session Replay to try and find the subset of people who could [help us] answer the questions we’re asking,” said Mendoza.

Mendoza shared a recent example of when Pendo Session Replay helped him uncover unexpected product insights. While he was watching a series of replays from Cin7’s accounting dashboard, he noticed that numerous users were running into the same friction point in the workflow. On further investigation, Mendoza discovered that the issue was stemming from a bug the team didn’t yet know about. Thanks to Session Replay, he could share these insights with the support team to get a fix deployed quickly.

Because Session Replay integrates with the rest of the Pendo platform, this discovery process was seamless for Mendoza. He was able to use Pendo segments to narrow his focus to users leveraging Cin7’s accounting integration. This enabled him to hone in on the replays associated with those users to get the insights he needed, without needing to sort through thousands of other unrelated replays. Mendoza was also able to quickly deploy in-app guides to reach these affected users. “Pendo creates the content, but it’s also what you use to surface [the content]. It’s a nice all-in-one kind of tool,” he said.

Pendo Session Replay’s robust—and fully customizable—privacy settings have also been a major draw for the Cin7 team. “In our company, personal identifiable information (PII) and post-GDPR privacy concerns are very front of mind, all the time,” Mendoza explained. He noted that Pendo’s privacy options have allowed the Cin7 team to take advantage of the value of visual evidence through session replays, without worrying about compliance. “Pendo is really good at making sure we get to the place we need to be. Now there’s no question of whether our customers’ data is unsafe . . . Other companies can’t do [that].”

“Session Replay cuts down the time it takes to get full visibility [into the user experience] from weeks to minutes.”

Adrian Mendoza | Digital Experience Analyst, Cin7 

Bringing it all together in a single platform

As Cin7’s primary Pendo user, Mendoza shared that having all of the tools he needs to understand and engage with customers in a single platform is a massive value-add for the business. “A lot of the stuff we do in Pendo can be done by one person,” he said. “That’s already a very big efficiency because a lot of what we create in-app would [typically] take developer work—and the analysis, creation, monitoring, and iteration all happens within Pendo.”

Mendoza also shared that before Pendo, the team felt a lot of thrash because they relied on a number of different point solutions to get their work done. He said that even when they were using specialized tools for each, teams would end up needing to pull usage data from Pendo anyway. “With [tools] created only for [a specific purpose], you would expect them to be very good at that one thing. But in terms of actually using them practically day to day, it adds a lot of friction,” he said. “With Pendo, that doesn’t happen because everything’s in there.”

“When our senior leadership team wants to have conversations about how to get the ball moving on things, [they look to the] usage data. And that really only exists in our company through Pendo.”

Adrian Mendoza | Digital Experience Analyst, Cin7 

Driving growth and retention with Pendo

The Cin7 also leverages Pendo to help make the transition easier for customers trialing the Cin7 platform.

“With the trial experience, we’re aiming to increase conversion rates. And this has happened solely by adding a product tour—all through Pendo—[based on] data from the people that are most successful when they’re in a trial.” Within the first three months of launching this new trial and product tour experience, the team has seen a 75% increase in conversions for users who engage with the tour vs. those who don’t.

Mendoza also noted that Pendo has a critical role to play in Cin7’s focus on customer retention and value. “Pendo is really pivotal in figuring out which people are in a trial but [aren’t] using [a feature]—or which people fit our usage criteria for someone who should probably have [a feature], but don’t.” he explained. This kind of insight helps teams throughout the business make better decisions about which levers to pull to drive desired customer behaviors.

“Even if not everyone [at Cin7] actively logs in every day, Pendo is a place for solutions for everyone,” Mendoza said.