SiteCompli used Guides to increase feature adoption by 20x

Kristen Hariton is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at SiteCompli, a platform for real estate compliance.  “We launched our first product in New York City, one of the toughest real estate markets in the world.  As a result, we get to work with some of the most important and influential real estate companies in the world – but you’d be amazed how much of the industry is still paper-based.  Driving adoption and engagement of an online software platform for users from real estate execs to building superintendents is critical.”

“After using our product for a while, we realized that these ‘old school’ companies now had automation and sophistication when they were dealing with compliance issues, but were still struggling with other parts of their businesses.  As we added features that helped bring automation to property operations, we needed to make sure we were training them on these new industry best practices.”

She continues, “I’ve been with SiteCompli for about four and a half years.  I started out in customer success which gave me lot of background with our customers, their challenges, and how they used our product.  What I was particularly interested in was training on our product, and on our industry itself.  Our product started out as one core product for New York City to help owners and managers get a handle on their various compliance issues.  We’ve since evolved into more of a property operations and management platform.  As we grew, and added new features we saw more and more of a need to deliver training in the product.”

The large impact of small feature announcements

“Before Pendo, we had very limited access to regular metrics,” said Kristen.  “We didn’t know who was using which feature, or how much they were used.  We didn’t have any way to segment our users, so there was no way to identify commonalities.  We were really in the dark when it came to metrics around adoption.”

“This past quarter we identified four features that are correlated with our power users – those that spend a lot of time in the product.  We wanted to see if there was a way we could push more of our users to adopt those features so we tested two things.  First we created an email drip campaign for new users.  Anyone who was new to SiteCompli or hadn’t used our new platform received a series of emails prompting them to try out the new features.  We saw that new users adopted those features much more quickly and frequently.  For example, one of those features is called ‘Sync my Calendar’.  It allows you to take all of the dates you’re tracking through SiteCompli and push them directly to your calendar.  From that point forward it automatically syncs up.  Adoption of that feature increased by 287% for users that received the email drip.”

“Secondly, for our existing users, we deployed Pendo guides to increase feature adoption.  We have a calendar interface in the product, but the ‘Sync my Calendar’ button that I mentioned before is located in your personal settings so they’re on different pages.  We deployed a small guide that when you clicked on the calendar tab it would pop up and and say ‘Hey – did you know you can get these dates directly in your calendar?’.  The guide had a button that would take you to the settings page where the sync button is located.  What’s really interesting is that users who didn’t get the email and saw the guide, their usage of the feature went up by 2000%.  It’s amazing how little announcements like this can have such a huge impact.”

Onboarding users into a new platform

Another key area that SiteCompli was focused on was user onboarding.  “We know that we wanted to have an onboarding program,” said Kristen, “but we wanted something that was flexible, something that we could make changes to without having to burden members of other teams.”

This was especially important as SiteCompli rolled out their new platform.  “We took our New York platform, our core platform, and we enhanced it significantly,” said Kristen.  “There were new features, there were things that customers were used to that were in different places or enhanced, so there were lots of things that we wanted to do to make sure that users were comfortable as they migrated to this new interface.”

“We’ve learned pretty quickly that onboarding is a never ending process.  You’re always tweaking and adjusting the experience as the product changes.  We started out with a pretty in-depth onboarding walkthrough, but the Pendo data showed us that new users weren’t engaging with the content.  So we made it much shorter, we made the text shorter and more specific, and we allow people to track their progress.  Today our onboarding starts with a short overview video, followed by a 6-step walkthrough.  With the improved walkthrough we saw a 47% month-to-month increase in user engagement.   Having the ability to monitor things, and quickly make changes to ensure that people are actually getting value out of them is one of the key things that I like about Pendo.”

“The next thing for us is to customize the onboarding experience further.  We want to tailor the experience for different segments – for example whether the customer is in the residential or commercial space, or even individualized for specific accounts.”