Sonar Software is a leading cloud-based provider of BSS/OSS solutions for Internet Service Providers. The platform offers a range of rich features that are mission-critical to the daily work of ISPs.
Software
51-200
NA
Frisco, Texas, USA
Sonar Software struggled with unorganized feedback, making it hard for their small team to prioritize or communicate clearly with customers.
With Pendo Listen, the team gained structure and AI insights, making it easier to spot themes and share roadmap updates transparently.
Triage is faster, insights are clearer, and product decisions are now driven by real customer data—instead of spreadsheets.
Ever tried steering a boat without a rudder? It's pretty tough, but that's exactly what it feels like to wade through an endless ocean of feedback.
It’s the exact position Kristen Fiddes, business analyst at Sonar Software, found herself in when she joined the company and inherited the product feedback portal. "It was just so overwhelming," she recalled. "Our team had difficulty seeing feedback beyond the top-voted items and analyzing a wider range was a very manual process."
As a company that helps Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with billing and financial reporting, “Sonar is essentially the one-stop shop for all operations functions for our customers,” explained Fiddes. Customer feedback is a crucial part of how Sonar determines its product roadmap.
As the person who sits at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer experience, Fiddes is the self-proclaimed feedback steward for the engineering and product teams at Sonar.
But with the old feedback portal, the team lacked clarity and visibility into what was important. With over 800 total feedback items, triage became an uphill battle.
The portal was hard to search and often confusing for customers. The high volume of feedback, combined with manual upkeep, sometimes resulted in outdated or inaccurate statuses. Customers could misunderstand where work was in the queue and often struggled to locate what had already been submitted. For a small team of three product managers and one analyst, the setup made prioritization harder, not easier.
"There just wasn't a good way to organize things," said Fiddes. That all changed when Sonar moved to Pendo Listen.
With Listen, Fiddes finally had a system that helped her team manage and make sense of customer feedback. Not only did she want the ability to better view and understand feedback, her team needed to communicate sensitively (but precisely) with customers about what was in progress.
“We want to be more communicative with customers, manage their expectations, and maintain transparency with our priorities.”
To do this, Sonar set up their new feedback portal to showcase their roadmap and alleviate customer confusion.
This new structure does more than manage expectations—it improves knowledge and actionability with the data. Rather than submitting requests tailored to a single workflow or product area, customers began sharing problems more broadly, and Sonar could surface patterns and feedback trends across different customer segments.
"We support a range of businesses.Some are small operators with 1,000 customers, while others have 100,000 customers,” said Fiddes. “What makes sense for one may not make sense for others. So when they submit ideas, I can see patterns and understand if there’s a better way to handle problems to help the most customers at once.”
Fiddes wasn’t looking for AI, but when she turned it on, she saw immediate value. “AI slop is real, and nine times out of ten, all it is is a chatbot,” said Fiddes. “Listen is an AI product that’s actually helpful.”
Using Listen’s conversational UI, Explore, and its AI feedback analysis, her team can instantly spot emerging themes and high-impact ideas. "Our PMs cover so many areas. Using Listen really helps them understand common complaints when they want to focus on specific product areas."
Pendo Listen’s AI tools also help Fiddes amplify customer voices that might otherwise be lost, like those captured in Net Promoter Score (NPS) responses. Before Pendo, their NPS scores lived in a vacuum. The data was reviewed regularly, but without a clear connection between sentiment data and product feedback, translating that data into action was a challenge. "Now, with the integration, I can send them into Listen. It helps tell the story of what people are upset about, without someone having to go to the feedback portal,” explained Fiddes.
Today, Fiddes no longer spends hours wrangling CSV files or manually categorizing feedback. She uses Pendo to instantly see who voted on a feature, how it’s performing post-launch, and whether those voters are engaging with it. "Before, that would mean downloading all the votes, matching to emails, checking customer spend in a separate CSV. Now, everything lives in one place."
With more actionable data at their fingertips, Sonar’s product team is better equipped to build what matters most to their customers. "Our goal is to make more data-driven decisions," said Fiddes. "Rather than, 'this sounds like a good idea,' it's, ‘how many people actually want that? Are they using it? And if not, why not?’"
For a lean team trying to maximize impact, that context makes all the difference.
Even though the team is early into their Listen journey, Fiddes is excited about what’s next. “We’re finalizing more integrations with Pendo, like Salesforce and Hubspot, to unify our data. Instead of wrangling everything across multiple platforms, it’s all in Pendo. Two steps, and it’s done.”
