How Hugo makes taking meeting notes a delight

The way we work has changed drastically in just a few decades. For today’s companies, remote work has gone from a trend to the norm, and many are using more than 100 software-as-a-service tools, on average, to get jobs done.

But what about meetings? Though they represent a significant portion of each of our work days, says Darren Chait, co-founder of San Francisco-based Hugo, they don’t seem to have kept pace.

“We see meetings as this unchanged final frontier of productivity,” says Chait. Hugo’s software aims to change that, offering the ability to create centralized, searchable meeting notes for the whole company and feed decisions made or tasks assigned during meetings directly into other productivity tools, like Slack, Jira, or Salesforce.

You can’t tap into that versatility without knowing how to best use the app for your organization’s unique meeting needs, though. Here’s how Hugo uses Pendo to interact with each individual user and guide them through their daily tasks based on the way they work.

Creating novel moments of delight

Chait says one of the company’s earliest applications of Pendo involved delivering moments of delight for customers unlike anything they knew their competitors to be doing. That includes anything from rewarding customers with physical gifts for action completed in-app to delivering tailored messages to users triggered by their unique actions.

“We’ve seen a million tooltip tutorials. We’ve seen a million drip emails. We know it’s out there, and so do our customers,” Chait said. “They know just like we do what everyone else is doing. So how do we get them excited. How do we create delight when we do what everyone else is doing? By altering that.”

In one instance, the Hugo team uses Pendo to prompt customers who perform certain tasks in the app to provide a mailing address, then they send them a “Welcome to Hugo” package in the mail. In another, if the team identifies a client that’s on the verge of converting to a paid account, they’ll offer a deal or incentive in real time via Pendo guide to get them on board.

“They weren’t expecting that,” Chait says. “They already had a conception of pricing and what the upgrade flow looks like.”

Re-thinking onboarding

Chait’s a believer that user onboarding is a long-term relationship with the customer rather than a one-and-done introduction. That’s why Hugo slices their long onboarding message up into 20 different easy-to-follow guides. Each step of the onboarding journey is triggered contextually and delivered through Pendo’s in-app guidance when a user reaches a certain milestone or engages with the software in a particular way.

“Rather than have some opt in and opt out of being finished, we’ll serve them the first four steps, then we’ll leave them alone for a bit and let them do a couple things,” Chait says. “We’ll follow up that action with [a couple more steps]. This continues indefinitely—every month or so we’re adding more and more.”

Chait said making these changes saw the company’s daily average users double.

Analytics aren’t just about history

Analytics are great for understanding how something happened, but for Chait, they’re even more powerful when they can be used to make something new happen.

“It’s not just to make decisions based on what’s happened—that’s really important,” he says. “Analytics and data, for us, is what drives future behavior. It’s what triggers everything.”

Say, for instance, Hugo notices a user who is a bit of a night owl. They’ve logged into the product, and Pendo usage data indicates that it’s the middle of the night in their time zone. The system will “fire off an email that says ‘Hey, I saw you’re in Hugo now. That’s pretty late. We haven’t spoken to you in the last few weeks and you fit these criteria. What are you working on, can we help you with anything?’” says Chait.

That email has the highest response rate on the platform, and it’s based entirely on an analytics event that serves no other purpose for the company, Chait noted.

Pendo analytics also let Hugo provide feedback to users through emails and in-app guides immediately after they complete meeting notes to help them optimize their use of the software, reminding them to tag people involved in the meeting for sharing or distribute the agenda in a timely manner.

“It’s as if you’ve got an expert sitting there reading the minutes and agendas every week,” Chait says. “This is creating delight, all based on analytics. Re-think event-triggered user interaction. That’s how you create customer delight.”