How Essity is using Pendo to transform its professional hygiene business 

If there’s one thing the pandemic has shown about today’s workplace, it’s that every company is a software company in one way or another. 

Consider Essity, a leading global hygiene and health company with over 45,000 employees and a presence in 150 countries. Given the nature of its products, Essity may not be the first company that comes to mind when you think of digital transformation. But as Debbie Wiggins, business systems director of Essity’s professional hygiene division, made clear, “digital transformation is a top focus for us. We know we need to be responsive in an ever-changing world.” 

Driving employees to do the right thing at the right time

As the largest global supplier of professional hygiene products and services through its Tork brand, Essity prioritizes having the best portfolio of tools and processes available for its commercial team. To continue to succeed in the age of COVID, however, the company had to further digitize and improve its ways of working. 

The onset of the pandemic forced Essity to shift its approach to selling products towards a more digital-first strategy. That meant an increased demand for digital solutions and a growth in user support requests as employees learned how to use them. To meet these challenges, Essity’s professional hygiene team turned to Pendo in order to market, sell, and service the Tork brand as effectively as possible.

Essity knew how difficult it could be to onboard new professional hygiene team employees and then continue to support them throughout each work day—especially when their workforce is globally distributed and numbers in the thousands: We’re talking over 1,200 internal users across 38 countries.  “We needed to be able to reach our users at scale, wherever they were working, whenever they were working, not only to support them, but to proactively drive them to do the right thing,” Wiggins said. 

Essity believes that employee behavior delivers value, and knew Pendo would help its employees make the right choices using digital tools and processes so that they could work as efficiently as possible. It knew this from past experience using Pendo for its Tork Vision Cleaning Service, which helps customers transition to a more data-driven approach to facilities cleaning. 

Pendo helped Essity capture data for its customers of how cleaners were behaving, analyze how it could be improved, and provide customized guidance to cleaners. Using Pendo, Essity was able to proactively transform cleaners’ behavior and ensure the company lived up to the promises it made to its customers. 

Guiding the sales process every step of the way

After its success with Pendo on its Tork Vision Cleaning Service, Essity Professional Hygiene decided to expand its use into its commercial operations. One of the most important of these tools is Essity’s internal customer relationship management (CRM) system.

 In order to guide its sales team through the entire process of using the CRM, from recognizing leads through to closing deals, Essity installed Pendo on the system to provide the kind of customized guidance within the app that employees need. Using Pendo, sales employees can more effectively close deals, while managers can more accurately gauge employee behavior, understand user journeys, and plan data-informed improvements to processes and workflows.

As the company continues using Pendo to improve its commercial practices, Wiggins was clear about the value Pendo provided to her team. “We feel that [Pendo] is helping us turn our software not just into another tool, but something that our users can really value and that can really help them to do their job on a daily basis.” 

To learn more about how Pendo helps drive successful digital transformation, watch Debbie’s full talk from Guide, Pendo’s digital adoption summit, below: