How PetDesk cultivated a more collaborative, product-led mindset with Pendo Feedback

PetDesk is dedicated to keeping our furry friends healthy and happy. Their offerings include a mobile app to help pet parents stay on top of their pet’s care, plus a full suite of products and tools to help veterinarians improve how they manage their practices and communicate with clients.

The PetDesk team originally brought in Pendo when they realized they needed greater visibility into how their users—pet parents and veterinarians alike—were really using their products. They wanted to track behavioral patterns and usage trends to gain a fuller view of their customers’ challenges, and back up their customer success team’s anecdotal feedback with objective data. 

“We wanted some actual data on what [our users] were clicking on, their actions, and their time spent in our application, so that we could further understand what was going on,” said Shona Fenner, product manager at PetDesk.

Just a few months after they first started using Pendo, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The PetDesk product team was forced to rapidly shift their focus to up-leveling their communications resources for their veterinary practice customers, so they could continue operating while minimizing physical contact with clients. 

“We really touted ourselves on listening to our customers, but we didn’t have a scalable way of doing it,” said Fenner. “We had to completely change a lot of our plans for our roadmap and how our business operated.” 

The PetDesk team needed a feedback management tool that could form the backbone of their voice of the customer (VoC) program—one that married qualitative and quantitative data to tell a clear story about customer engagement. “Our old tool wasn’t catering to what we actually needed to do. It wasn’t dynamic, and it didn’t integrate with the solutions our customer-facing teams were actually using,” said Fenner. PetDesk also needed a platform to increase visibility into the product roadmap and help their customer-facing teams feel more included in shaping the product’s future.

Pendo Feedback was the solution PetDesk needed.

Realizing the power of the platform

Pendo Feedback allows Fenner and her team to build on the robust customer insights they are already gathering within the Pendo platform. The seamless integration of quantitative analytics and qualitative user feedback inside the Pendo product suite allows PetDesk to get a complete picture of the customer experience and has helped the team “uncover things we never expected,” said Fenner. 

Being able to easily connect usage behavior in Pendo to requests gaining traction in Pendo Feedback has helped the PetDesk team make data-informed decisions about which requests to weigh most heavily, and which customers to flag as risks or opportunities for their customer success team.

Pendo’s analytics and in-app messaging capabilities have also allowed the company to gain an understanding of how usage has changed, identify friction points, and deploy guides to convey important information and announce new features. Pendo’s Retention tool helps PetDesk identify repeat visitors to the product, while Data Explorer allows them to measure the impact of in-app guides on feature adoption.

Leveraging the full Pendo platform has enabled PetDesk to understand which features their customers are getting the most value from, and the pathways they’re taking to get there. This has helped PetDesk’s product and support teams identify if the issues mentioned in customer feedback requests have their roots in the product’s functionality, or if they’re a result of enablement gaps.

Knowing exactly what to build next

PetDesk uses the insights they’ve gleaned from Pendo Feedback to plan and inform their product roadmap. It helps them prioritize which features to build next, and has improved cross-organizational visibility into where the product team is spending their time—and why. Currently, PetDesk’s roadmap is only available internally, though they have plans to make it public next year. 

Pendo Feedback’s interactive dashboard also encourages PetDesk’s employees to engage with each other’s submissions and chime in on which requests they think should be prioritized, based on what they’re hearing from their own customers. This dialog has been vitally important in helping the product team validate their decisions and know exactly where to focus their efforts next.

“Now, we can produce what our [customers and customer-facing teams] have been asking for. It’s even helped our internal teams’ requests become more educated. I’m super curious about what’s going to happen when we make [Pendo Feedback] customer-facing—but in the meantime, the internal votes mixed with the customer feedback has been a really good marriage for us as far as how we talk about feedback in meetings and how we present it to our product managers,” said Fenner.

Empowering internal teams

Another major win for the PetDesk team has been Pendo Feedback’s impact on the team’s morale and feelings of inclusion. 

“Before we implemented Pendo Feedback, our customer-facing teams felt a little lost and like they didn’t have a voice,” said Fenner. Pendo Feedback has allowed PetDesk’s customer success teams to clearly see the trajectory and impact of their feedback requests—whether submitted by themselves directly or on behalf of their customers. 

“The team gets to see their wishes [in the roadmap], help us prioritize them, and then see them get talked about and built,” Fenner explained. 

Having Pendo Feedback as a pillar of PetDesk’s broader VoC program has completely changed the customer success team’s opinion of the product team, too. “There was definitely a feeling that feedback was going into a void. But now, the customer success team has better context around what’s going to happen and not happen—and they have a better understanding of the effort involved,” said Fenner.

Pendo Feedback’s ethos of transparency has permeated even further throughout the organization, inspiring a cultural shift and encouraging employees beyond product and customer success to be curious about what’s coming next. 

Fenner and her team regularly share key insights and product updates with other internal stakeholders in a meeting they’ve coined “OPP,” or “Other People’s Plans.” “It’s led to really good socialization, not just of what we need to do from a business angle, but also what our customers are expecting us to do,” said Fenner. “And then there’s the internal team aspect, too. You want to be happy at work—and to feel like you’re contributing and being heard—while also improving the product at large.”

As Fenner as her team continue to track towards rolling out Pendo Feedback to their external audiences in the coming year, she’s excited to see it empower PetDesk’s customers, too. “It’s helped our teams feel that they’re part of something greater and that they’re actively doing something,” she said. “Helping the team understand [the product] better and feel more included is a tremendous win.”