Introducing the Product Engagement Score API: Bring the power of PES to the rest of your business

Editor’s note: In August 2022, we expanded the functionality of the Product Engagement Score (PES) API to offer our customers even more flexibility when using PES. Now, users can specify any number of Core Events they would like to use for calculating the Adoption component of PES. Learn more about these updates and additional use cases below.

The Product Engagement Score (PES)—which takes the average of a product’s adoption, stickiness, and growth—offers product and customer success teams a better way to measure how customers engage with their products. Since we first launched PES in early 2021, we’ve had the opportunity to improve the metric and add new features––all with your valuable feedback in mind. 

Today, we are excited to announce how you can unlock the power of PES even further with the new PES API. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve built the PES API to support key reporting use cases that help you make product data a direct driver for business decisions. With the API, you can bring PES data to conversations with the rest of the business in a simple, scalable way and import PES data into tools and reports you’re already using. This way,  you can view PES alongside things like account health metrics or business metrics. 

If you’re eager to start exploring, you can learn more about the PES API here. If you’re curious about how the PES API can help your business, read on for five ways it fuels better reporting, data-driven decision making, and experimentation.

Export PES into external tools and data warehouses to provide a more holistic view of product performance

Today’s software executives and product managers are looking beyond business metrics like revenue, NRR, and NPS and incorporating product usage metrics to understand overall product health. Bringing PES data into tools you already use—whether it’s Salesforce, PowerBI, or Planhat—makes it easy for you to generate the essential reports that show how your overall business is performing, and then inform how you build and improve products.

For example, if product adoption is low, perhaps it’s time to examine and improve the onboarding experience. Because being product led hinges on being data-driven, we believe that with PES at your fingertips, you can turn product data into actionable insights that drive growth, adoption, and retention. 

Build customer health reports with PES and account data for a more complete picture of customer engagement

Understanding account health is crucial for customer success managers (CSMs) to support and drive value for their customers. To do this, CSMs look at a variety of metrics, including account growth and cancellation data, as well as NPS and PES. In fact, many of our customers use PES data to better understand the health of their customers.

The PES API allows you to export overall PES as well as the component scores by account so that you can build a more complete account health report, directly in your customer success platform, where your customer health data already exists. With these new reports, you can analyze and correlate PES with other account health metrics (e.g. product feedback, number of support tickets) and proactively reach out to customers who may be at risk of churning.

Analyze the impact of PES on customer retention

It’s a well-known fact that acquiring a new customer is expensive—it’s even been found that it could cost up to five times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. So it’s only natural that executives, product managers, and customer success managers alike want to know if and when their customers will churn. If product engagement is decreasing for an account or specific set of accounts, is this an important signal that needs to be flagged?

Last year, we conducted this exact analysis and discovered that PES is, in fact, a leading indicator of customer retention outcomes. With the new PES API, you can view PES data by account and run analyses that will help you identify, understand, and prevent customer churn.

Understand PES for different user segments

For large applications, it’s common to have different personas interact with different parts of the product. Take an enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) application as an example. While sales teams are likely the main target user persona, spending most of their time managing accounts and contacts, product teams may also log into the application to research customer accounts and their specific use cases. Product teams may be looking at logged meeting notes pages instead of accounts or contacts lists. With the PES API, you can define your Core Events by these distinct user persona segments to understand how each segment is interacting with the parts of the product most valuable and relevant to them. You can also define more than ten events in the request, effectively removing the limitation for configuring up to only ten Core Events. With this expanded capability, you’ll be able to understand how adoption and PES scores vary by user segments.

Experiment with different Core Events to analyze their impact on PES

There’s a saying that, “change is the only constant,” and product development is no exception. As your product evolves and improves, your Core Events may shift as users find value in different (or new) parts of your product. With the PES API, you can easily define different Core Events and output the corresponding adoption and overall PES scores to analyze how different sets of events impact your score. And for those who are just getting started with PES, we know how daunting it can be to select your Core Events. Experiment with the PES API and test different events—and any number of events—to land on the right ones that make sense for your product.

We hope these use cases inspire you to explore the PES API, or even to simply get started with PES. If you’re using PES at your company in a different way, we’d love to hear from you!