3 ways Pendo’s product team uses Listen to improve the product experience

Collecting—and taking action on—customer feedback is essential for any company looking to improve its products and services and stay competitive in the market. Listening helps businesses understand what users really think about and want from software. This way, teams can use these insights to spark innovation and iterate to make the user experience even better.

But listening isn’t just about customer opinions—it should also include insights from internal team members who are on the front lines with customers every day. This is exactly what Pendo Listen enables, helping teams establish clear internal and external feedback loops, drive cross-functional collaboration, and fuel data-driven decision making.

At Pendo, our own product team leverages Listen to infuse customer feedback into their development process—and ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Let’s dig into three ways we use Listen to improve the product experience for our users.

1. Supercharging collaboration with revenue teams

One of our product managers, Cooper, has found that using Listen has greatly improved his interactions with the revenue teams on Slack—especially when it comes to addressing questions and gathering product feedback. Lengthy Slack discussions often produced valuable insights, but capturing those ideas for future reference was a hassle. Cooper used to manage his “idea backlog” in a custom Airtable system, where he had to manually sift through feedback without any direct connections to Pendo or Salesforce data.

With Listen, Cooper can now easily guide sellers and customer-facing team members with a clear call to action (“Please log this in Listen!”) along with a link to the feedback form. This streamlined process not only enables effortless feedback collection, but it also directly ties feedback to the relevant account and visitor.

Although this may seem simple, the time saved is significant. More importantly, it fosters a smooth process for effectively capturing product input from sales, implementation, and support teams for future reference. This enhancement has not only increased Cooper’s efficiency but also improved the team’s ability to act on valuable insights from the front lines.

2. Making data-driven roadmap decisions

Listen is designed for product teams focused on delivering business outcomes, not just launching features. It’s all about validating ideas to ensure they will resonate with users, encouraging usage and even willingness to pay. Rebecca, one of our adoption managers, shared how our adoption team is applying Listen for this use case. 

Our adoption managers integrated Listen into their go-to-market strategy to inform roadmap planning and iteration. After a new feature is released, they launch an in-app guide that encourages customers to share their experiences proactively. They gather both quick sentiments (“I like it” or “Could be better”) and open-text feedback. Each guide feeds into a saved view, where AI summarizes the most pressing customer concerns. These AI summaries live on the team’s Pendo dashboards, allowing them to easily analyze feedback alongside feature usage.

Every week, adoption managers discuss these dashboards with leadership, identifying gaps and pain points reflected in the summaries and adoption data. When issues arise, they collaborate as a team to enhance the experience—by iterating on the feature with engineering, opting for quick fixes with an informational tooltip, or using guides to nudge users towards unexplored features.

3. Turning feedback into actionable insights

Feedback is crucial for effectively understanding customer needs, but the real value comes when teams can take action on this qualitative data. Pendo Listen plays a key role in translating feedback and requests into actionable steps for product teams.
For example, Emily—one of Pendo’s sales engineers—can quickly gather the thoughts and concerns from customers after conversations or demos and log them in Listen. This ensures the feedback doesn’t get lost in the shuffle and is easily accessible to the product team. “I really appreciate having Listen at our fingertips—it gives us one central spot to submit feedback on our customers’ behalf, making our lives so much easier,” she explained.

One of the most impactful capabilities of Listen is being able to track and link feedback all in one place. When Emily hears the same request from multiple customers, she can jump into Listen, look for related feedback, and connect those dots under one idea. This way, when the product team looks into what to prioritize, they can see exactly how many customers have asked for the same feature or change.

On the go-to-market (GTM) side, Emily’s working with the Analytics squad to dig into customer feedback and pull out the top requests for their quarterly planning. Listen has been especially helpful in spotting common themes and understanding the context behind specific use cases.

They’re also using Listen to track down customers who have specifically asked for certain features, making it easier to pinpoint the right people for beta testing or user research. Plus, it helps make sure those customers are included in the guide segments when new features launch so they feel appreciated and involved in the development process.

Want to learn more about how Pendo Listen can help your product team? Take a self-guided tour or get a demo today. Already a Pendo Listen customer? Jump back in to optimize your product discovery process (if you’re in the EU, log in here).