A sneak peek into our newest product: How we’re evolving customer communications

Pendo’s mission is simple—elevate the world’s experience with software—and there are two parts to this. First, we need to help our customers build the best products imaginable. Then, we need to ensure the customers of our customers have valuable experiences every time they log in. 

Pendo has done its job when product teams are basking in the up-and-to-the-right 📈 business metrics of products that have delivered the “can’t live without it” value customers are hoping for.

While you may have added incredible value to your product (we believe it!), the truth is, product value won’t move the needle for your business unless customers are experiencing it. What’s the bridge between building the right product and ensuring the right users keep coming back to it? Communication. And not just any communication. The right communication, at the right time, to the right user, all the time.

What’s possible when you automate behavior-driven messaging 

There’s a reason you’ve heard about personalization over and over again. That’s because it works. We’ve seen it ourselves here at Pendo. Take our latest overhaul to our very own user onboarding. In October of 2023, we set a KPI to revamp our user onboarding flows based on refreshed job-to-be-done data fields. (Pro tip: As your product evolves, so should your onboarding strategy.)

We’ve seen great success with our in-app onboarding flows. And based on successful cross-channel feature launch announcements, we knew we could get even more traction from our efforts if our in-app experiences were backed by coordinated, out-of-app communications. So, we manually built bridges between Pendo and our email platform at the time, SendGrid, to create cohesive cross-channel communication journeys for our new users tailored to user-selected Jobs To Be Done (JBTD). 

Spoiler alert—aligning email and in-app guides was not easy. But was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY. We saw a 40% increase in second week retention (users coming back to the product) compared to the guides-only iteration. Users who received the new onboarding flow were also more likely to engage with core events, which led to a 21% faster time to first use. 

P.S. – We’ll be doing a live deep dive on our strategy for this initiative at a Pendo on Pendo session at Pendominum 2024. Register here.

With these metrics in our mind, we knew two things right away: Product teams (including ours) need to leverage the magic recipe of email + guides + user behavior, and we need to find a simpler way to regularly achieve these results. 

A new way of product communication is on the horizon 

On the heels of record high onboarding and activation metrics, Pendo’s product and customer communication teams set out to build an easier way to do this. We landed on a solution that includes the tools to build personalized, cross-channel communication journeys, without ever leaving Pendo. 

As we built this solution, we obsessed over three key challenges: 

1. Communication tools built for product teams (including Pendo) can currently only reach users when they are in the app.
2. Even if product teams beg and borrow resources to send out-of-app communications, it’s extremely manual to ensure those messages are personalized, automated, and aligned with in-app communications.
3. Measuring the impact of cross-channel communication journeys requires patching together message engagement metrics and product analytics across multiple platforms.      

As we dove in on solving these problems for ourselves, we quickly learned that we weren’t alone. Throughout an extensive product discovery cycle, our research and user feedback was undeniable—we were tapping into a pain point felt by a vast majority of our customers, and product teams needed a better solution to achieve their business goals. 

After a whole lot of iteration, beta testing, and customer feedback, we’ve added a new tool to our product communication toolkit that’s already driving amazing results for our adoption goals here at Pendo. And the best part? This October, it will be available for you, too! We couldn’t be more excited to introduce you to the next evolution of the Pendo One platform at Pendomonium 2024. In the meantime, to stay in-the-know about what’s in store, be sure to join the interest list for updates, announcements, and early product previews.

This is just a sneak peek of Pendo One’s newest addition. To be the first to hear all about it, join us at product’s biggest festival of the year: Pendomonium 2024.