Pendo helped CallRail's product team rebuild their mobile app from the ground up—using behavioral data, in-app feedback, and targeted guides to turn a liability into a growth driver.
4.5★
App Store rating (up from 1.5 stars)
99%+
Crash-free rate after rebuild
25%
Of Messaging adoption now comes from mobile
CallRail's legacy mobile app needed an update, but the team required better behavioral data first.
When Product Manager Sarah Parham stepped into ownership of the mobile app, the situation was clear and urgent. The app hadn't been updated in years, leaving users frustrated and the product at risk of undermining broader adoption goals. At the same time, CallRail was rolling out new capabilities like Messaging, making a reliable mobile experience critical. This wasn't just a product issue. It was a business risk. So the team made a bold call: rebuild the mobile app from the ground up—and use Pendo to guide every step.
The app needed an update to pull it out of the 1.5-star App Store rating into an experience customers could trust.
The team had no way to see how users were actually interacting with the app. Every decision about the rebuild had to be made on assumptions rather than evidence.
Without a system to collect and act on user input at scale, the team had no reliable mechanism for staying aligned with what customers actually needed.
CallRail was rolling out Messaging and other capabilities that depended on mobile adoption. A broken app wasn't just a product problem—it was a business risk.
“My product role at CallRail has always been really centered around Pendo. And in late 2024, I was given the exciting opportunity or challenge to manage our mobile apps as well. And it was really clear automatically that we needed to make some changes in the mobile app.”
Sarah Parham, Product Manager @ CallRail
While CallRail was already using Pendo across its web platform, mobile remained a blind spot—until Parham put Pendo to work there too.
"By using Pendo every step of the way, we were able to see exactly how users behaved," said Parham. "It turned all of the assumptions I had into actual real-time insights that I could share with my teammates."
From day one, Pendo became the foundation for how the team validated decisions, prioritized work, and measured success. Roadmap decisions were no longer based on internal opinions. They were grounded in real user behavior.
CallRail's
Advice
Don't wait until after the launch to add instrumentation. Instrument Pendo before you start building so that every decision you make is informed by real data from the start.
Rather than guessing who to involve in the rebuild, CallRail used in-app guides within the legacy app to identify and recruit approximately 50 highly engaged customers for their beta program.
These weren't random volunteers. They were active users who already lived in the product—the people with the most informed opinions about what needed to change.
The team worked closely with each participant, meeting twice to understand needs and validate direction before committing to a final build path.
CallRail's
Advice
Use in-app guides to recruit beta participants from within your existing user base. Your most engaged users will give you the most actionable feedback—and they're already inside your product.
With Pendo tracking every click, flow, and interaction across the beta, the team quickly identified what mattered most to users: reviewing calls, sending messages, and placing outbound calls.
Just as importantly, they uncovered friction points early—before launching the new experience to a broader audience. Issues that might have become public complaints instead became development priorities.
This visibility compressed the feedback cycle dramatically and gave the team confidence that the features they were building actually matched user intent.
To stay continuously connected to user sentiment without the overhead of scheduling calls, the team built a scalable feedback engine with Pendo.
A persistent "Share Your Feedback" form generated more than 500 responses during beta and after launch. This gave the team a steady stream of high-signal insights—enough to accelerate iteration cycles and keep decisions grounded in reality.
"Even the small tools in Pendo, like in-app feedback or dashboards, really changed the perception for everyone at CallRail," Parham said. "Pendo gave us one source of truth that we can all look at and say, 'This is what users care about.'"
“Pendo gave us one source of truth that we can all look at and say, 'This is what users care about.'”
Sarah Parham, Product Manager @ CallRail
CallRail's
Advice
Don't rely solely on scheduled user interviews. Build a persistent, always-on feedback mechanism so you're collecting signal continuously—not just at planned checkpoints.
As behavioral data and feedback flowed in, Parham built dedicated dashboards for iOS and Android inside Pendo.
These dashboards eliminated manual reporting and reduced reliance on engineering and BI teams. More importantly, they made mobile performance visible across the business—product managers, leadership, sales, and marketing could all see the same adoption trends, feature engagement, and user behavior in real time.
That shared visibility accelerated decision-making and created alignment around what mattered most.
CallRail's
Advice
Build dashboards that go beyond your product team. When leadership and cross-functional partners can see the same data you're looking at, decisions happen faster and with less friction.
A poor product experience erodes brand trust—but a great one can rebuild it, if you meet users at the right moment.
Once the new app launched, the team used a targeted "Enjoying the app?" prompt to encourage reviews strategically. Satisfied users were directed to leave public app store reviews; others were routed to a private feedback form.
About 40% of users selected "Yes" and were sent to the app stores. The remaining 60% shared feedback directly with the team—ensuring no valuable signal was lost, even from users who weren't ready to leave a public review.
The result was a dramatic shift in public perception without sacrificing internal insight.
CallRail's
Advice
Segment your review prompt response. Routing happy users to public stores and less satisfied users to private feedback protects your brand while keeping your feedback loop intact.
What was once a liability is now a growth driver. CallRail didn't just rebuild an app—they rebuilt confidence in their product, their process, and their ability to deliver what users actually need.
App Store rating (up from 1.5 stars)
A sustained, strategic approach to collecting reviews transformed public perception of the app—and of the CallRail brand.
Crash-free rate
Stability improved dramatically after the rebuild, turning one of the app's biggest liabilities into a point of pride.
Users adopted the new app post-launch
Strong adoption of the rebuilt experience validated that the team had built something users actually wanted to use.
Of Messaging adoption now comes from mobile
The mobile app is now a meaningful channel for new feature adoption—not an afterthought.
“We really would have been flying blind without Pendo. Launching features, iterating, improving that adoption—that's what Pendo is really best at.”
Sarah Parham
Product Manager @ CallRail
Before the rebuild, not after it.
The behavioral data and feedback infrastructure CallRail built with Pendo were most valuable because they were in place from day one. By the time the new app launched, the team already knew what users needed—and had the data to prove it.
