How K4Connect delivers in-app training and support to senior living staff in Covid-19

With senior living communities under strict lockdowns due to Covid-19, maintaining communication has become more difficult, yet more critical than ever.

K4Connect’s platform empowers residents and staff at the communities with technology to improve communication and connectedness, automate their lives, and entertain themselves. The company has experienced rapid growth that reflects the demand for a tool to address isolation and loneliness during this time. It’s now serving 800 communities, up from 125 two months ago.

K4Connect’s training and customer support traditionally includes a hands-on approach in addition to digital tools and resources, visiting communities in person to help get them up and running on the platform. But the restrictions have made that impossible. Over the last few months, they’ve found an entirely new use case for Pendo—automated in-app onboarding and support.

“Where we used to be boots-on-the-ground and able to go into a community and do training and onboard new residents and staff, we’re really having to think through how we do that differently,” says Diana Gore, a product manager on the caregiver experience team. Gore says Pendo’s in-app messaging capabilities allow K4Connect to offer the same level of support and communication they always have, but in a touchless format.

Improving onboarding and driving feature adoption

Pendo guides are proving to be the perfect, low-friction solution for onboarding busier-than-ever caregivers to K4Connect’s platform and introducing new capabilities.

When the team adds new features—like an updated dashboard, an enhanced “Family and Friends” communication tools, or a content library— step-by-step walkthroughs help teach the staff how to use them. The K4Connect team also highlights upcoming webinars using Pendo guides, and recently developed an onboarding guide in the Pendo Resource Center that provides a self-service avenue for community staff to learn how to use K4Connect’s key functionality.

That all takes the place of an in-person visit without sacrificing the quality of instruction or increasing the risk of spreading the coronavirus to an especially vulnerable population.

“In the past, our customer success managers would have tried to set up a call with them to really walk through the updates or they would have had a webinar,” Gore said. “Now, we’re really thinking through how we get that information to people so they can consume it in a way that works for their schedule.”

K4Connect also plans to roll out guides and walkthroughs for residents, teaching them how to use features of the app that let them control the temperature of their room or video chat with their families.

Already, they’re using in-app messaging to share K4Connect’s own response to Covid-19. When K4Connect added information about Covid-19 to its support center, in-app guides were deployed through Pendo to point users toward them, ensuring they wouldn’t be missed.

“We’re hitting them in the places where we know that they’re active to make sure that they stay up-to-date on what’s new,” says Natalie Jones, director of marketing and communications.

Analytics inform optimization

K4Connect is a long-time Pendo customer, who used Pendo in its early startup stages to understand what users were doing in the product as the company expanded nationally and frequent on-site visits became harder to manage for customers further away. The data helped reveal which users needed the most support, allowing K4Connect to prioritize in-person visits as far away as Pennsylvania and California, and guide product development.

“Pendo gives us the ability to see who is utilizing what parts of the product and who our superusers are so that we really can lean into who we want to talk to about certain parts of the product,” says Gore. If a feature is changed, for instance, and Gore sees usage drop off a cliff, it raises a red flag to dig deeper with users to find out why. Conversely, it allows the team to see which features users find least useful and deprecate those, reducing inefficiencies in the system.

Pendo’s ability to collect NPS scores also helps K4Connect keep a finger on the pulse of their customers. Scores from promoters allow the team to feel confident in the parts of the product they’re providing positive feedback on, while detractors point them in the right direction to fix things or connect those users with the customer success team.

Pendo’s in-app messaging is allowing K4Connect to quickly communicate those fixes and build walkthroughs and tooltips to help users past friction points, in addition to offering a quick, adaptive way to communicate with and train users when it’s not possible to do it in person during Covid-19.