Glooko keeps health care providers and people with diabetes connected during a pandemic with Pendo guides

With medical offices closing amid COVID-19, it’s become more difficult for doctors and patients to connect regularly. For people with diabetes, who need more regular check-ups and constant monitoring of biometrics like glucose levels and insulin dosages, it’s a situation that presents a drastically increased health risk within a health crisis.

That’s where Glooko steps in. Glooko offers a web and mobile platform for monitoring and automatically reporting diabetes health data to health care providers, supporting 95% of all diabetes devices, and syncs with them all via a single interface. Recognizing the challenges posed by the pandemic for its users and the public health risks associated with them, the company has made its remote patient care service—typically a premium feature—free until further notice. This ensures doctors and their patients can maintain that critical level of contact from a distance.

To make sure health care providers are aware of the free offering, Glooko is using Pendo to promote it when they log into the platform, says product manager Jeff Chang. The offer was initially announced using a Pendo banner guide on the web app’s homepage, targeted at health care provider users, says Jessica Ison, Glooko’s knowledge manager. That guide included a link to a page where providers could learn how to invite their patients to connect with them, so they could begin monitoring their data remotely.

The Glooko team expects that the free offering will not only help providers better treat their patients, but also show them the value of being able to monitor their levels and data remotely when COVID-19 is no longer a threat. Hopefully, that will lead to account expansion, conversion, and growth opportunities down the road, Ison says.

Driving communication, product planning, and feature adoption

Pendo is also helping Glooko plan the future of the product and drive users toward new or enhanced features. Ison says Pendo’s analytics have opened up a whole new world of insight into the product, and in-app messaging provides a fast and easy way to announce new functionality to those users who would benefit from it most.

Heat maps of user activity inform product and feature development by revealing ways that users engage with the platform that the team would not have known about otherwise. During COVID-19, Glooko is also pushing hard to expand the number of diabetes monitoring devices that can integrate with the platform to help as many patients as possible.

When those new features, upgrades, or integrations are released, Ison is able to build and deploy Pendo in-app messages to announce them, driving awareness and adoption without any assistance from engineering or development teams. Guides are also used to distribute release notes and support documentation.

“Being able to use Pendo when we’ve got updates or things we need to let users know about frees up internal resources to continue building our best-in-class platform,” Ison says. Chang says this cut development and quality assurance work by about 50%.

Pendo in-app guides have also become a go-to resource for Ison when she needs to quickly notify users of incidents like support outages. That helps keep customer service inquiries to the support team down, and the guides can be updated on the fly to keep users informed of changes to the situation.

“Our goal is to provide users with as much information as we can upfront in order to empower users to more effectively self-serve, and Pendo is helping us do that,” Ison says.