How NAVEX Global reduced an entire month of support calls within minutes

Email used to be the default communication channel for the product team at NAVEX Global, a risk and compliance SaaS provider to companies around the world. Every six weeks or so, the team would send an email to active users with product release updates and planned outages related to those new deployments.

Despite that communication, support tickets still came in during update times and planned outages from users trying to log in. It turned out that only a very small percentage of the company’s more than 500,000 monthly active users opened those emails.

NAVEX Global needed another way to get the attention of its large user base, eliminate these frustrations, and provide a better experience for everyone.

When NAVEX Global implemented Pendo, the company hoped to understand how users were engaging with multiple products across its platform. Shelly La Rock, director of product operations at NAVEX Global, thinks about that now. “Originally, we were not contemplating use of guides, which kind of strikes me as funny now. Our initial intentions were to use it for engagement data only.”

Branching out from the original intended use, Shelly decided to see whether Pendo could be used to improve communication with NAVEX Global’s users. She launched a Pendo guide to announce a new update in the company’s EthicsPoint® Incident Management product. “I thought, ‘Hey, let’s try Pendo and see what happens.’” In the first 24 hours, that initial Pendo guide reached almost 70% of the customer base. “We went from connecting with less than 300 users in a week via email to 24,000 in a day.”

With this first win, Shelly and her team began to deploy guides across four different NAVEX Global product lines. By completely revamping the release notifications process, Shelly estimates that Pendo saves 50 person-hours every six weeks across a team of five people. The team also started using guides to notify customers of bugs—deflecting up to 1,000 support tickets, while better serving customers, within six months.

“I would estimate in the last six months alone, we’ve used Pendo guides to deflect more than 1,000 support calls. That’s an entire month’s worth with a guide that only took a few minutes to launch.” Shelly La Rock, Director of Product Operations, NAVEX Global

“This amounts to several hundred person-hours of work each year saved by implementing Pendo guides,” Shelly said. “Getting that bandwidth back is a big part of our Pendo ROI calculation.”

As all software contains bugs, Pendo guides also helped NAVEX Global cut down on bug-related support calls. One day, support reached out to let Shelly know that they’d received more than 60 calls about a newly identified bug. Shelly immediately posted a guide to notify customers that a bug fix was in the works. Her team also used guides to offer workarounds to limit the loss of productivity during the event. Once the guide was live, support calls related to this issue dropped significantly.

Prioritizing giving customers a positive experience, the product team also targeted a guide to everyone impacted.

“For the first time, we had customers actually call and thank us for being proactive in communication.” Shelly said.

What started as an experiment with a single guide has expanded into a transformative in-app communication strategy for Shelly and her team.

“It’s opened up an entirely new world for us to be able to communicate to our customers,” she said.

About NAVEX

NAVEX Global’s comprehensive suite of ethics and compliance software, content, and services helps organizations protect their people, reputation, and bottom line. Trusted by more than 14,000 customers, our solutions are informed by the largest ethics and compliance community in the world.