How Pendo helped SugarCRM give their users a voice

Nothing’s worse than spending tons of time building out new functionality, only to find that your users don’t want half of what you built, or that you didn’t include some of the features they do need. 

That’s the situation the SugarCRM team wanted to avoid when working on bringing their customers a better way to expose and visualize the data coming into their instance with a new dashboarding UI.

“That many data points can be represented in one location is very, very important in managing how you understand the data and use it to best help your customers,” Katherine Spencer, senior director of UX design at SugarCRM, of the project.

Spencer and her team wanted to make sure they were taking their customers’ actual needs into consideration during the build, so they could deliver exactly what they needed and not base their efforts on assumptions. “We wanted our users to get the exact information they needed at the time for the project they are working on,” she said.

To collect that information, they turned to Pendo. First, the UX team compiled a list of data dashboarding features they were considering adding to the platform, such as support for rearranging  and resizing visualizations. Then, they used Pendo’s in-app messaging capabilities to deliver a survey to users.

The survey was structured very specifically to introduce the team, explain the reason they needed the information, and request their email address to send them the full survey. 

The guide was viewed thousands of times and pulled in over 500 responses in just 48 hours. The data helped the team put together a ranked list of the highest-value features to focus on building first. That enabled them to launch one quarter earlier than projected, and with more confidence. The new functionality has been well received by SugarCRM’s user base.

“We were blown away by how successful this was,” Spencer said. “We had excited users and were able to provide a high value feature, faster as a result.”