How Flash creates a linear customer journey while supporting PLG with Pendo

All businesses, from three-person garage startups to 10,000+ employee enterprise juggernauts, deserve the same level of customer service when it comes to HR, right? That’s what Flash, a Brazilian platform for managing people, benefits and expenses, believes. Part of their mission and key differentiator is offering unparalleled HR services for both small and large enterprise businesses. 

“We aim to deliver the same quality of HR service regardless of business size. Our principle is always this: from one employee to infinity, we deliver the best service possible,” explains Paula Guilger, head of product at Flash.

Yet as Flash expanded its offerings over time, the team noticed that communicating with their growing audiences got harder to scale with their business growth, increasing complexity in the ways they needed to communicate to their audiences. 

Communications growing pains in an expanding business 

Driving a product-led growth (PLG) strategy is a crucial initiative for Flash. They understand that PLG goes beyond the initial purchase. “When someone purchases the product on their own, they also need to understand the product on their own,” said Guilger. It’s crucial to accurately communicate with customers about the product they purchase.

As the company grew from one business unit to multiple, delivering consistent customer communications became challenging. “We started to feel the  pain around maintaining linear experiences,” shared Guilger. The Flash team saw frustration among customers due to a high volume of new information and new experiences, sometimes without the right level of communication.

Flash needed a platform to support communication with existing users, personalize messages for  different users, and serve as a reliable source of client information across the organization. 

Ensuring in-app guide consistency with internal governance

Guilger’s team knew creating guides would be the best way to engage users because they’re contextualized within software. Plus, Flash’s team can personalize messaging based on metadata-rich user segments. 

After debating between building an internal solution or outsourcing, it became clear that Pendo would be the easiest and fastest way to meet their needs. “We already had the vision of needing in-app guides, but we needed to understand how to operationalize it,” explained Guilger. 

One issue Guilger anticipated was the need for in-app guides governance: “We were afraid everybody would create guides on their own and create an inconsistent UX. At the same time, we couldn’t develop the guides each team needed, when they needed it.”

With guidance from Pendo, Guilger established clear internal rules around who could create guides and relied on cross-team collaboration to prevent duplicative efforts. “We created a governance strategy where we divide users between who owns something, who can publish, who can make changes, and who can alter the Resource Center.”

As the governance plan came together, the team began working on implementing Pendo in various ways. 

Personalizing onboarding while lowering support costs with guides

Pendo Guides became a go-to solution for their onboarding process. One of the key benefits of using guides was creating multiple onboarding flows personalized to each customer’s unique product usage. “For example, somebody can have benefits and a corporate card or benefits and HR, “Guilger explained. “It was hard to predict and create a guided onboarding experience for everyone if we had to hard-code it. Using Pendo gives teams a lot of autonomy and ensures onboarding flows match the user’s exact product needs.”

Guides also helped Flash standardize their communications for updates or new releases. When Flash had a highly anticipated new feature, they used guides and email to communicate the launch. The in-app notification helped drive higher adoption, with over 30% of users seeing the guide within the first week.  

To support their PLG mission, Flash wanted better and more consistent customer feedback. Before Pendo, their NPS response rate was 2%. Understanding that better response rates would deliver key customer insights, Flash used Pendo to gather NPS responses in-app for much higher engagement—up to an 8% response rate. 

To support internal teams and provide self-serve guidance for customers, Guilger created a Resource Center. She can intervene with resources before an issue goes to support: “I have all of our help desk items within the Pendo Resource Center—embedded YouTube videos, FAQs, and product announcements. With a Resource Center, we can answer customer questions before it goes to our support team.” The Resource Center has created a first line of support defense for internal customer success (CS) teams. 

Using Pendo to iterate and grow their PLG approach

Flash continues using Pendo to drive PLG by experimenting with different in-app experiences to optimize conversions. As the company continues to grow and add new products, Pendo will be there to help connect products to revenue growth. 

Guilger looks forward to the challenge, saying, “Things will change, and we’ll need to scale even more. Our big challenge will be connecting our products across our platform, and we’ll use Pendo to support this. We aim to create a singular journey, not many small journeys.”