WebPT launches telehealth product in a quarter of the time with Pendo

It’s hard to find a more hands-on field in medicine than physical therapy. That means investing in telehealth solutions hasn’t exactly been top-of-mind for therapy practices or the technology platforms they use. That is, until COVID-19 struck and closed physical practices around the world.

Practically overnight, it became Director of Product Management Scott Hebert and his team’s job to pivot physical therapy management platform WebPT’s product roadmap toward a telehealth model as quickly as possible, so the physical therapy practices that could no longer see patients in person wouldn’t miss a beat in providing treatment. Hebert knew his team was going to be under the gun for this project, and turned to Pendo to design and roll that capability out in a quarter of the typical time.

Traditionally, Hebert’s team has followed what he calls the “10-10-10” model for releases: a feature is rolled out first to just 10 end users, then to 10% of its user base, then 10,000 accounts. That process usually takes about a month—sometimes substantially longer—but because of the immediate need, it would need to be compressed into just a week.

“We had to get really good samples from really targeted audiences, and we had to be sure that we were measuring everything quickly,” Hebert says. Pendo’s real-time, retroactive analytics proved critical here.

Pendo guides allowed the team to quickly communicate the feature’s availability to users under a tight deadline, help them get started with it, and show each user the optimal paths for using it. Then, Pendo’s analytics offered a real-time look at how therapists were navigating the new offering, where they were running into roadblocks or seeing success.

Pendo data also helps the team predict adoption rates based on the effectiveness of each guide and set goals. “We were able to understand the conversion rate pretty early on in the process to forecast demand in the later stages, and that ended up being pretty accurate,” Hebert says. “It let us set organizational expectations around how many people would enable this over a seven-day period.”

The result: WebPT was able to go from having no telehealth capability to having a full, robust telehealth offering, with a successful launch completed in less than a week. As it stands now, the team has exceeded internal targets.

Touchless onboarding

Hebert’s team typically prefers a more hands-on, white glove approach to getting new users up to speed, but during the telehealth project, that wasn’t possible, and there was no time for it anyways.

Pendo again fit in well here, Hebert says, offering an effective, touchless approach for training and support. The team was able to properly segment and deliver feature visibility to over 75% of their target user base in seven days and onboarded 100% of accounts using a zero-touch model without increasing support ticket volume above normal levels, Hebert says.

“We were able to guide our users directly to self-adoption and train them with a few simple guides,” he says. “We were able to use Pendo as a light-weight LMS.”

Hebert says Pendo is “the best tool in WebPT’s arsenal” to quickly segment users based on the various personas that use the platform and obtain real-time data specific to their use cases. “We’re a pretty heavily persona-driven company, and it’s critical to understand and know who the different personas are,” he says. “You obviously want to match your messaging to persona for the best conversion rates.”

This capability was key during the telehealth pivot, when speed was the number one priority. There was no need to involve engineering resources or wait for full data to get piped into data warehouses to obtain insights: It was already at their fingertips through Pendo. “I go to Pendo first to get a quick look at how certain KPIs are performing, and then check them against our larger data source,” he says.