Healthicity replaces 100-page user manual with Pendo in-app guidance

Modern medical technology has given doctors and surgeons the ability to understand what’s going on in patients’ bodies down to their DNA, opening the door for everything from developing better ways of fighting disease to preventing ailments before they ever strike.

But those feats of medical prowess are only half the story. Health care is a highly-regulated, multi-billion-dollar industry, and there’s a whole army of compliance and billing professionals who manage that side of the equation.

“The clinical side is obviously filled with technology—amazing things—but the business side is really behind the times, usually about a decade,” says Stephanie Hanson, VP of product and development at Healthicity, which helps back office professionals at hospitals and medical practices manage complex compliance, billing, and training programs.

Healthicity replaces the spreadsheets and reporting systems that health care compliance officers are used to working in with an advanced platform that saves them time and improves efficiency. But for busy health care professionals, learning how to use an entirely new tool can be a lot to ask. To lessen that burden, Healthicity uses Pendo.

“They’re usually wearing a lot of hats. They feel like they have the world on their shoulders and they’re just trying to keep everything going,” Hanson says. “So when new compliance challenges are identified, our clients don’t have time to read through a 100-page user guide, or dig through endless training videos to figure out what the heck to do.”

Pendo replaced a series of onboarding video tours that were hard to scale and maintain. Every time the platform changed, the videos had to follow suit. Healthicity’s first task in Pendo was creating a series of guides to replace the videos from the previous vendor. Using Pendo’s integration with Zendesk, Hanson’s team populates those guides with short and digestible knowledge base articles designed to help users retain the information and reduce the need to contact support.

Pendo streamlines user support and communication

Not only did it completely address the scalability issues, but Pendo offered a whole new range of capabilities for understanding how users were engaging with the software and where they were getting stuck. Healthicity can now easily get to the ground truth of feature adoption, gauge user satisfaction, collect user feedback, and keep users informed about new features on the horizon.

Before Pendo, informing users of upcoming maintenance windows and new product releases involved laboriously scraping a database of users, then getting that list to marketing along with the content to be used in an email blast. All that, and only one in four key decision makers opened the emails, Hanson notes. “You’re feeling like you’re basically banging your head against a wall,” she says.

Now, Healthicity uses in-app messaging to make these announcements and offer walkthroughs of any changes. “When I think about the time savings … I used to spend days getting this done, and now I’m spending hours,” Hanson says.

A guide connecting users to an article about how to use the app’s self-service download center has been viewed more than 18,000 times, and the article has been opened over 3,000 times, Hanson notes. Another that provided support to users experiencing a browser compatibility issue had a 69% open rate. Users engage with the guides at about 12 times the rate of marketing emails because the reach has broadened so significantly.

And that labyrinthian 100-page manual that had to be updated with each release? Gone. Replaced, by Pendo guides and a Resource Center. “This has been just a tremendous uptick in knowledge for our customers,” Hanson says.

Feedback prioritizes high-value feature requests

Pendo Feedback has also been a game-changer for Healthicity’s user feedback collection and product planning processes.

Integrating Pendo with Salesforce allows the product team to match feature requests with customer annual recurring revenue, providing a sense for the value of each request. “You can say for example, ‘Okay, this is a low-hanging fruit enhancement request—five people have submitted it and it represents an easy opportunity to improve customer satisfaction,’” Hanson says.

It also lets the company keep customers informed of whether their requested feature will be built, and when. Hanson considers it a “product manager’s dream.”

“Being able to close that feedback loop, to make sure that people understand, ‘Hey, we’re working on this,’ or ‘That’s a really nice idea, but no, we’re not going to work on this,’” Hanson says. “That can be really effective. We could push it to the right people and they would understand what we’re doing within our app, what we’re committed to do for our users.”