How Hive takes the pulse of its product to refine the user experience

Attracting top talent in today’s competitive job market is no easy feat, but hanging on to the best employees you already have can be even tougher without keeping an ear close to the ground.

Hive’s employee engagement platform allows human resources professionals to use employee surveys and feedback, the support from a team of occupational psychologists, eNPS, and other tools to obtain a deeper understanding of the challenges around culture and attrition at their company. Armed with that knowledge, they can work to alleviate those pain points and better engage their workforce.

Hive’s purpose is a simple one, says Product Director Guy Clack: To make every working life more productive, engaging and fulfilling. Hive’s platform, offering a powerful lens for gauging company culture and morale, is key to this. Clack realized he and his team lacked a way to obtain similar visibility into their company’s own product usage data. Now that the Newcastle upon Tyne-based company has entered the scale-up stage, which has come with some big organizational changes and new challenges, being able to capture that information is more important than ever.

“We’re moving from a sales-led to a product-led organization at a rapid pace and trying to deliver increased value to customers while doing it,” says Clack. “We had no centralized view of usage of the platform. [Customer Success managers] were always out with clients, and we needed more insight internally.”

Pendo fixed that problem. The software’s analytics and guidance capabilities let Hive understand user friction points, then quickly find ways to help customers get past them through in-app guides, customer success outreach, or onboarding on the fly. “Pendo is a key part of the quantitative data that we take out and apply with other qualitative data and validate with prospects and customers to be sure we are not wasting our energies,” Clack said.

Pendo proved particularly crucial by alleviating much of the burden that the company’s customer success team was experiencing during a time of rapid change for the business.

When a bug was discovered in the software, says Emma Booth, Hive’s product owner, Pendo allowed the customer success team to quickly assess which users were most likely to have been affected by it based on recent usage data for the feature in question. Then, customer success reached out to just those users to reassure them that it was being addressed instead of sending out a notification to their entire customer base.

That builds customer trust. “They could see that we were trying to keep them in the loop and trying to communicate with them,” Booth said. “Without Pendo, we wouldn’t have had a clue who had been affected.”

At the same time, using Pendo helps Hive free up engineering resources and manage its roadmap and product backlog, prioritizing projects that address the needs of existing customers and positioning the company for future growth.

With deeper usage data, the product team can see which features are the most popular among users, then make a decision on which ones to build out next for more efficient innovation. One feature rolled out in this manner is already drawing engagement from 40 percent of users in its first 30 days, Clack notes.

“From my point of view, the guides have been really valuable and we’ve been able to make relatively quick but effective UX improvements to the platform in a much more reactive basis, without having to eat into any engineering resources, at all,” says James Heffernan, a UX designer at Hive. “That’s something we really have a bottleneck with, resources.”

And, Pendo’s ability to apply custom, branded themes to guides makes them look like they’ve always been part of the platform, not generated by a third-party tool, he says.