How Pendo helps Sherpany guide business leaders to meeting success

Did you know that business leaders spend an average of 23 hours per week in meetings, but that as much as 80% of that time is wasted?

Sherpany’s vision is to create a world where every meeting counts. To date, 5,000+ business leaders from over 200 large- and medium-size organisations across Europe are achieving exactly that thanks to Sherpany’s meeting management platform. Two words define the Sherpany approach: excellence and productivity. To help its users achieve the best possible product experience for more agile and productive meetings, Sherpany chose Pendo.

Making a great first impression counts

Sherpany believes that great achievements start in great meetings. Their product team also knows that a great first impression is the foundation of a great customer lifecycle experience.  

However, manually onboarding users with face-to-face training sessions led by members of the customer success (CS) team was becoming decreasingly viable as Sherpany’s customer base continued to grow throughout Europe. As a high-growth business seeking to attract large- and medium-size customers, Sherpany needed to transform their new user onboarding process, enabling them to train new users at scale—while continuing to deliver that all-important, personal touch.  

After reviewing the various options available in the market, Sherpany selected Pendo as the only product experience solution able to deliver the superior in-app onboarding experience the team needed.

Top tips for meeting success

Sherpany now delivers in-app guides and tooltips to help users unlock maximum value—and start having more productive meetings—swiftly. The onboarding experience is optimised by guiding users through the platform discovery journey. The Sherpany team uses these in-app communications to highlight key features and encourage users to interact with them, drive desired behaviours, and deliver personalised enablement with tailored and timely in-app communication.

“A great onboarding experience is vital in long-term customer satisfaction and retention,” explains Nina Hoeberichts, customer experience specialist at Sherpany. “Deploying Pendo has been a journey of discovery on just what a difference a great first impression can make. Our onboarding process now flows seamlessly. When users log in, they see a series of in-app walkthroughs and tooltip tours that not only make the process more dynamic, but lead them to immediately start changing their behaviours and adopting the processes required to improve meeting productivity.”

Using Pendo to help automate the routine elements of their onboarding programs has been critical in Sherpany’s own product journey. It has enabled them to onboard new users at scale across multiple territories—thanks to the ability to build guides in multiple languages—and just as importantly, it’s allowed them to gain deeper insights into user interactions which enables the product team to continue evolving and improving both platform functionality and the product experience.

Driving better product decision making

Sherpany loves being able to connect with users at such a granular level. “We can help shape customers’ continued journey of discovery, talk to them, highlight best practices, provide tips and tricks, and ultimately open their eyes to what is possible in Sherpany to make their meetings better and more efficient,” says Hoeberichts.    

“We’ve also been undertaking fake door tests to examine if a new feature is helpful to the user or not,” adds Ricardo Palmela, Sherpany product manager. “Thanks to the insights delivered by Pendo, we can drill down and understand what characteristics of a particular product or feature are most beneficial to users, or, conversely, highlight features with low-usage that we need to replace.”

Being able to engage quickly—and in a highly relevant and contextual way—with users, at scale (and without the need for lots of developers and account managers) has been a real game changer for Sherpany in terms of increasing customer satisfaction, usage, and retention.  

Taking the users’ pulse

Before Pendo, Sherpany was keen to supplement quantitative usage data with qualitative user experience insights through targeted surveys, interviews, and user testing, but struggled to recruit participants. 

Now, Sherpany leverages Pendo to deliver in-app surveys, allowing them to collect timely and relevant feedback which is vital to delivering a successful customer experience. “We can now guide users to simply click a button, book a slot, and take a survey—rather than emailing them with a request to participate and hoping they respond,” explains Palmela.    

The results have been impressive, to say the least. In-app surveys have been 100x more successful than their email counterparts. Sherpany has also seen a 10% lift in user testing recruitment, and now interviews 1 in every 10 users. The valuable insights that the team is now able to gather ensure that Sherpany can continuously optimise the product and user experience, and take the guesswork out of feature planning and prioritisation.

Bringing the vision to life

Now that the team has seen just what Pendo is capable of, Sherpany plans to continue fine-tuning both their user onboarding programs and the customer lifecycle experience.  

“Pendo will play a significant role in the future success of our solution,” said Hoeberichts. “We’ve seen the impact of in-app guides, tooltips, and in-app surveys, and plan to explore every opportunity to make the user experience even better.”

As part of their commitment to supporting business leaders with the digital transformation of their organisations’ meeting cultures, Sherpany is now looking to build a Resource Centre using Pendo to further increase customer satisfaction with self-serve best practice guidance, tips, resources, and feature walkthroughs on-demand.  

Hoeberichts explained, “Pendo is helping us achieve our vision of creating a world where every meeting counts.”