How Red Hat used Pendo to avoid over 2,300 hours of rework in a single month

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions—including high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Their hybrid cloud infrastructure, middleware, agile integration, cloud-native application development, and management and automation solutions are trusted by enterprise organizations around the world.

Red Hat’s journey with Pendo initially began with their deployment of Pendo on the Red Hat Learning Subscription platform. The team was looking to drive additional consumption of their external customer training—an initiative that’s key to overall customer success at Red Hat. “[The team leading that effort] spoke very highly of the analytics capabilities that Pendo has,” said Gabi Ghali, director of IT, service management and automation platforms at Red Hat. 

Knowing that Pendo would similarly provide deep insights into employee engagement, Ghali and his team made the decision to use Pendo in their employee-facing applications, too. And with over 2,300 hours of rework mitigated in just one month thanks to their digital adoption efforts, they haven’t looked back since.

Building a Digital Adoption Center of Excellence (CoE) to drive success in Workday

As the Red Hat team readied themselves to replace all of their legacy HR systems with Workday, they knew they needed to assemble a unified team with a cohesive strategy to lead the rollout and ensure the ongoing success of the tool. So they established a Digital Adoption Center of Excellence (CoE). 

“We needed to make sure [the implementation] was seamless, and that associates felt supported through the transition,” said Ghali. “[We needed to make sure] that they had the help they needed, when they needed it, and didn’t need to go through a lot of training ahead of time—or submit a lot of tickets after the fact.”

Cheryl Coleman (Senior Manager, Digital Adoption and Robotic Process Automation at Red Hat) was put at the helm of this team. She explained, “We wanted to establish operational excellence, so that users would have a level of expectation for any application we deploy to. We wanted to establish a mechanism for service delivery. And we wanted to explore how we could enable others in the organization to be force enablers for our team.” 

Before the Workday implementation, Coleman noted that digital adoption had only really existed in Red Hat on a much smaller scale—specifically to support sellers. But she and her team knew that the Workday rollout—which would impact over 19,000 Red Hatters—would require a more holistic approach. “We needed to stand up the CoE because we were delivering an application that the entire employee base would be required to touch,” she said.

Coleman brought in Pendo (replacing their previous digital adoption solution, WalkMe) as a partner to support growth across all of Red Hat’s internal applications and partner enablement.

Ultimately, Coleman’s team’s efforts to drive digital adoption in Workday were deemed a success—paving the way for future CoE initiatives across the organization. “We were able to show really great engagement starting on day one. And [the data showed] we were impacting productivity and efficiencies over time,” Coleman explained. “Digital adoption was a [big] part of that success.”

Using segments and branded content to target users who need help (while leaving others alone)

Beyond the Workday deployment, Pendo’s ability to target content and guidance to specific cohorts of users continues to be very important to Ghali, Coleman, and the entire Red Hat team. “[We want to] target the users that seem to need a little help, [without] getting in the way of the associates that seem to be on the right path,” Ghali said. Building analytics-informed segments and targeted in-app guides in Pendo allows his team to do exactly that. 

Coleman also noted that it’s important to her team that any digital adoption content they produce feels in-line with the Red Hat brand—creating a more cohesive user experience. “We want to make sure that all Red Hatters have a level of expectation and trust—that when they opt into our content, they’re going to see content geared just for them, not generic in-app content,” she said. “We give [our associates] the opportunity to opt into content when they want, and opt out when they no longer need it. We’re looking to strike a balance between being helpful and unobtrusive.”

Further, Ghali and his team have integrated Pendo with Red Hat’s internal single sign-on (SSO) platform—allowing them to get a holistic view of the associate journey and engagement across tools. This allows them to get even more granular insights to further refine the Pendo metadata they use to target in-app guides—including data points like what role each user is in, how long they’ve been with the company, where they’re located, and what cost center they sit in. “This helps us target the most effective content to [the right people],” Ghali explained.

Accelerating deals and eliminating over 2,300 hours of rework in Salesforce, Concur, and beyond

Since the initial Workday implementation, Ghali’s team has rolled out digital adoption content via Pendo to over 40+ internal applications across the enterprise, with the goal of helping associates be as productive as possible. And Coleman’s CoE team is supporting all of those platform owners to drive adoption of their apps.

For example, Coleman and her team are leveraging Pendo In-app Guides to accelerate travel and expense approvals in Concur. In addition to targeted in-app support, they created a simple guide on the “Approve” button in all people managers’ instances of Concur. This simple action has enabled Red Hat to reinforce a critical action for managers—reviewing employees’ receipts before approving expense reports—resulting in a significant increase in process compliance and reducing needless audits for the finance team.

Red Hat also uses Pendo in Salesforce—a tool which Red Hat’s thousands of sellers rely on every day. They are leveraging Pendo to scale training and compliance within the platform, without the need to hire new heads to support ongoing enablement. In Salesforce, specifically, using in-app guides to show associates how to correctly submit what Red Hat calls a “BU Guidance” case has resulted in over 1,200 hours of needless rework being deflected—which would typically require over 16 hours per case to resolve. 

Coleman also shared that Pendo In-app Guides’ auto form-fill functionality has streamlined the process for Red Hat associates submitting contracts with nonstandard elements in Salesforce. “The template is automatically populated in that description field, so sales users don’t have to start from scratch—they just fill in the key parts that they need to,” she said. Before deploying these guides, Coleman noted that each incorrectly submitted contract required over eight hours of rework to resolve. In June 2023 alone, that amounted to almost 1,100 hours of rework avoided—thanks to Pendo.

“Our sellers want to be out making more sales for Red Hat as a whole. [With Pendo], we’re reducing the sales cycle time—and that’s a win.”

Cheryl Coleman | Senior Manager, Digital Adoption and Robotic Process Automation, Red Hat

Using Pendo AI to scale digital adoption

Looking to the future, Ghali and Coleman are eager to leverage Pendo AI to understand—and ultimately emulate—the tone and style of all the content their teams have already deployed through Pendo. They then plan to use Pendo’s generative AI capabilities to produce more valuable content to put in front of their end users.

“AI could help [our team] really scale what they are doing, make it easier for other teams to create and manage digital adoption content across even more of the apps, . . . and make sure our teams get the most value possible from our software stack,” Ghali explained. He also noted that this would help encourage “citizen development” and proliferate more ideas Red Hat can use in their digital adoption content. “Pendo AI will enable us to focus on more use cases across the company, while getting more time back to be creative and innovative.”