Patientco uses Pendo to draw insight from the frontlines, boosting customer satisfaction

Patientco, a healthcare payment technology platform for Health Systems, makes protecting data a top priority. The platform has strict security protocols and embedded functionality to prevent unauthorized access, one being automatically logging out a user if they are inactive in the system for a period of time.

It’s a common feature in most industries that handle highly regulated data to ensure no unauthorized eyes can land on sensitive information. This is especially true for the healthcare industry, where patients trust that their health and financial information is secure. But for the Patientco users who spend hours each day working on the platform, being logged out without warning and having to log back in every time they had to turn away for a few minutes became a cumbersome workflow.

Bobbie Brookins, a Marketing Manager at Patientco, knew this auto-logout security feature was creating frustration among users when it emerged as a feedback theme in the in-app NPS survey she’s been supporting with the use of Pendo. “One of Patientco’s core values is to Improve Each and Every Day, so our team puts a lot of importance on getting feedback and improving in order to create an optimal experience for all of our users,” Brookins says.

Being able to conduct surveys via in-app guides allows Brookins to collect feedback directly from the people who are using the software day-to-day. Having data straight from the frontlines is equally as valuable from a product improvement standpoint as drawing it from the executives who make the decision to buy and implement Patientco, but may not use the platform on a daily basis.

“When we do NPS with (the buyers), the feedback is typically more focused on innovation and industry thought leadership,” Brookins says, but the user-level data reveals specific areas of UX improvement: “We were getting multiple comments that said, ‘You log me out too often!’ It was clearly a concern across the user base.”

First, Brookins deployed Pendo in-app guides to the users who reported their displeasure of the logout frequency by providing additional information about the security feature and why it is in place. This was done to let the users know their feedback was heard and to help educate them on our compliance practices.

Then, she took the NPS feedback to the product and development teams to brainstorm ways to apply a technical solution. By using Pendo to identify the issue, clear up some of the confusion and frustration surrounding it, and work with the development team to add a notification warning users they were about to be logged out, Patientco was able to boost NPS by 16 points over a six month period.

“In the end, we didn’t make any changes to our security standards or process, the users are still being logged out due to inactivity, but the additional communication from the warning message made all the difference with how they perceived the workflow and experience,” Brookins says.

“The lack of warning was such a small thing that we didn’t realize could be so frustrating for users,” she continues. “Being able to inform the development team and offer the direct insight, ‘This is how the users feel,’ and give exact data around business cases has really helped us to work together to improve our user experience.” Beyond adding the warning message, the Patientco team has focused engineering efforts to continue to enhance the platform’s security and user experience, like incorporating Active Directory Single Sign On.

Using Pendo has become a fixture in Brookins’ voice of the customer product request process, she says. “Being able to give specific use cases and how many people it’s affecting really helps move things along.” Brookins takes the suggestions users provide, not only through NPS surveys but other in-app polls and surveys throughout the year, to create product enhancement requests that are reviewed by the Patientco product and UX teams regularly and incorporated into the platform.

Identifying and targeting personas

The NPS data Brookins and team are drawing from Pendo aren’t just useful in surfacing issues that need to be fixed. It’s also allowing them to examine the behaviors of power users in specific personas to find out what makes them so successful on the platform.

After separating the high-usage promoters out of the data and splitting them into personas by job title, Brookins uses Pendo’s paths and funnels features to map their journey through the product from beginning to end. Armed with those insights, the team can then target the less engaged members of those same personas through Pendo’s segmentation feature and in-app guides to deliver educational materials and webinars or tooltips and walkthroughs to increase engagement and product usage.

Integrating with Zendesk

While NPS data has allowed Brookins and the Patientco team to provide highly targeted assistance to users, their use of Pendo for in-app support goes well beyond that.

Brookins says Patientco’s Knowledge Base was previously embedded on the platform’s home page, which meant it was easy to miss and hard to find again once users began exploring deeper into the functionality. So, Brookins used Pendo’s Zendesk integration to place a widget on each page, offering users quick, on-demand access to the support content, and Pendo usage data ensures only the most relevant articles are presented based on the user’s current task.

Afterward, use of the Knowledge Base saw a 10x increase, and support tickets decreased, allowing users to take advantage of more self-service education opportunities.

“We had a low number of clicks [before the Pendo integration], about 50 per month, on the Knowledge Base, and then it went up to around 500,” Brookins says. “Having it on every single page is super important because the support articles populate based off of the page that they’re on.”

COVID-19

Though healthcare has been an industry at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus, it hasn’t been immune from the social distancing measures that have forced a slowdown in the economy. At most hospitals, the elective procedures that make up a significant portion of their activity were put on hold.

As the pandemic accelerated and much of the activity that hospitals bill for were being postponed, Pendo helped Brookins keep tabs on monthly average users on the platform to forecast expected levels of usage and plan accordingly.

Pendo’s Resource Center and in-app guides also helped Brookins promote new features rolled out in response to the rapidly changing circumstances due to the virus, like enhanced digital communication tools and contactless payment options. Tooltip guides were used to quickly teach users how to use them.

Pendo analytics helped the team measure adoption and usage. Usage of one digital communication feature rose from just 8 users per month to 27 users per month, Brookins notes— over a 300% increase.