How Essity scales employee onboarding and accelerates software adoption with Pendo

1,200 employees. Spread out over 38 countries. A software platform that you need to teach all of them to use, amid a raging pandemic that has made in-person training impossible. 

Sounds easy, right? If not, that’s because it definitely isn’t. But nonetheless, that’s the situation Essity, a leading global hygiene and health company, was squaring off against. It would require a major digital transformation effort.

Debbie Wiggins, business systems director of Essity’s professional hygiene division, was running point on the initiative and needed a solution that could automate the employee onboarding process right inside the app, so that every user of their Tork Vision Cleaning Service platform could be trained effectively and asynchronously.

Enter Pendo.

Driving employees to do the right thing at the right time

As the largest global supplier of professional hygiene products and services through its Tork brand, Essity prioritizes having the best portfolio of tools and processes available for its commercial team. To adapt to pandemic times, however, the company had to change the way it worked and embrace a digital-first stance. 

Along with the increased demand for digital solutions came a spike in user support requests as employees learned how to use them. The Essity team turned to Pendo to solve this problem.

Onboarding new professional hygiene team employees and supporting them throughout each work day—especially when their workforce is globally distributed and numbers in the thousands—is no easy task. “We needed to be able to reach our users at scale, wherever they were working, whenever they were working, not only to support them, but to proactively drive them to do the right thing,” Wiggins said. 

Pendo proved integral to helping Essity provide the best user experience possible and ensure employees were making the right choices when using their platform, so that they could work as efficiently as possible.

Pendo’s analytics helped Essity understand exactly how their customers’ cleaning crews were using the platform, so they could identify areas where the product could be improved, And, they were able to zero in on the spots that were causing user friction, so they could provide customized support with Pendo’s in-app guidance and messaging capabilities.

Using Pendo, Essity was able to proactively transform cleaners’ behavior and ensure the company lived up to the promises it made to its customers. 

Guiding the sales process every step of the way

After its success with Pendo on its Tork Vision Cleaning Service, Essity Professional Hygiene decided to expand its use into its commercial operations. One of the most important of these tools is Essity’s internal customer relationship management (CRM) system.

To guide its sales team through the entire process of using the CRM, from identifying leads to closing deals, Essity used Pendo to provide the kind of customized walkthroughs and support that representatives needed right inside the app.

Now, sales reps are closing deals more effectively, while managers are able to gauge employee behavior accurately, obtain detailed insight into user journeys, and plan data-informed improvements to processes and workflows.

“We feel that [Pendo] is helping us turn our software into something that our users can really value and that can really help them to do their job on a daily basis—not just another tool that they have to use.”