How Healthicity Uses Data to Gather a Holistic View of Customer and Market Insights

The regulatory environment surrounding healthcare is complex enough, and the last thing the compliance officers who navigate it for practices and hospital systems want to be doing is spending hours learning new software platforms. Healthicity’s platform streamlines their work, and the company is using Pendo to make sure improving their product and getting officers to adopt it is a seamless experience. Stephanie Hanson, the company’s VP of product, shared how her team uses data—both qualitative and quantitative—to gain the valuable insights that guide their product development in our webinar “How Healthicity Uses Data to Gather a Holistic View of Customer and Market Insights.” Here are some of Hanson’s tips:

Data is helpful, but data with context is even better

Having lots of data is great, but you’ve got to be able to make sense of it all. To do that, you need to know who and where the data came from. On Healthicity’s platform, the “who” are health care compliance officers who are often not very tech-savvy, resistant to change, and very busy. That knowledge, paired with usage data generated by the users, helps the product team make learning the software as light of a lift as possible by using targeted, in-app Pendo guides instead of making users read a 100-page manual.

Feature adoption and NPS as “north star” metrics

Before any new feature goes live, the first thing Healthicity’s product team does is tag it in Pendo to make sure they’re capturing how many users are adopting it right out of the gate. This allowed them to confirm that a feature designed to streamline and organize users’ downloads was working as expected, leading to a big uptick in the amount of material being downloaded on the platform. NPS surveys are also a crucial tool for gauging user sentiment, and usage data can pinpoint exactly what led a respondent to give a bad score, so the team can fix it.

Balancing qualitative and quantitative data

Mountains of data can lead you in all sorts of directions. Sometimes, it helps to just have a conversation to point you in the right one. Getting a sense of what problems users are trying to solve straight from the horse’s mouth can help ensure that you’re using all that data you’ve collected to arrive at the correct solution. Right now, that combination is helping the team refine a major overhaul of their core product by marrying user feature request data with feedback from a handful of large customers who test drove prototypes of the redesign.

Keep your customers in the loop

Once you’ve collected lots of feedback from your customers, it’s critical to communicate to them that they’ve been heard and their input is being acted upon. Healthicity does this by making its product roadmap available to users, so they can see which features are being built and what’s on deck. When features are released, Pendo Feedback helps the team automate the process of letting those who requested it know via email.

The data never lies

Qualitative data goes a long way in narrowing a product team’s focus, but when it comes time to measure whether that highly-requested feature that you put so much time into building is actually being adopted, quantitative data reigns supreme.

Good times, bad times

It feels good to hear about all your wins, but don’t be afraid to hear about where you’re coming up short. That information is every bit as valuable, if not more. So, put yourself out there, and know that you’re not going to please everybody. Balancing the good and the bad will help you make sound decisions.

Here’s the full recording: