LabCorp uses Pendo to identify onboarding friction and reduce ticket backlog by 99%

LabCorp’s product team keeps a laser focus on providing a personal experience for every patient, which is vitally important as the company supports millions of patient interactions every day.

This passion for a personalized experience drove Bob Zurek, the company’s VP of product management, to bring in Pendo to help his team better understand the ways users interact with their patient portal with an eye toward uncovering points of friction.

Using Pendo, Zurek’s team identified two seemingly small issues that were having an outsized impact on their customers’ onboarding experience and, as a result, were generating a high volume of support tickets.

The LabCorp product team first learned that many patients were dropping out of the registration process to use the LabCorp Patient mobile app. By studying their users’ journeys, they found that their system would return an error message if the user added an extra space after their name. Pendo helped them to understand the scope of this issue and prioritize the fix with their counterparts in engineering. The registration experience improved dramatically without users ever knowing—and the percentage of dropouts dropped markedly.

Analyzing customer path data led to another surprising discovery: some users weren’t completing their registration because a third-party authentication tool was taking so long to load that patients were often abandoning the process. Zurek took this insight straight to the authentication partner.

“I had the data to show them what was going on. I was able to say this is one of our biggest pain points right now with our consumers – who are patients and family members seeking convenient access to test results – and ask them how they could help,” said Zurek. The partner quickly acknowledged the issue and implemented a fix. And as a result, LabCorp was able to again increase the number of successful registrations.

LabCorp wouldn’t have been able to uncover these subtle issues without truly understanding the paths that different cohorts of users were following. Within weeks of identifying and fixing just these two issues, support tickets plummeted. Friction-related tickets dropped from several thousand to about a hundred over the course of several months, cutting their backlog by 99%.

Waiting for lab results is an emotional event for many people, which is why LabCorp is so focused on providing a secure, convenient digital experience that doesn’t contribute to patient anxiety. Zurek summarized the global organization’s very human aspiration, “We don’t want to add to what can often be a stressful time in their lives. Our opportunity here is to be as innovative as possible, with a goal that every interaction with LabCorp supports them in getting the health information they need, as part of LabCorp’s mission to improve health and improve lives. We want to be their partner every step of the way.”

The LabCorp product team has used Pendo to understand and support their patients in new ways. One of LabCorp’s three key objectives is to use technology to improve the delivery of care. Working closely with Pendo, LabCorp was able to do just that, by taking advantage of user insights and guidance to provide the very best end-to-end patient experience in their industry.