Best Practices

Less is more: Consolidating your product stack like the pros

Published Apr 10, 2024
Product organizations are ditching point solutions for product experience platforms.

Anything that could go digital, has gone digital. From industry networking to elementary school enrollment, you can do just about everything with an internet-connected device. But even a fully-charged battery and wifi might not be enough to help users adopt digital tools to their full potential. 

Pendo users John Thorpe (Director of Product Management, TraceGains) and Kemp Tucker (Product Manager, FACTS) know that—which is why they rely on Pendo to drive adoption, understand user behaviors, and make better decisions for their products. Here’s how the two organizations use Pendo One across their entire organizations.

P.S. – This is a recap of a webinar. If you’re an auditory learner, scroll to the bottom.

TraceGains: Lowering operational costs by $150k a year

From CLIF Bars to Tillamook, TraceGains helps power your favorite foods with two core services: supply chain management software, and a supplier networking platform for Food & Beverage (F&B) professionals. To build and activate their products, Thorpe implemented Pendo Analytics in 2019. Five years later, they use the entire Pendo platform across four separate teams. 

Amidst a major platform migration and a pivot from sales-led to product-led growth (PLG), Thorpe and his team saw the inherent value of letting their product speak for itself. 

Here are a few ways TraceGains adopted Pendo to hit their business goals:  

  1. Analytics: Product leans on user analytics to guide investments, understand engagement, and create a PLG strategy that’s backed by real user behaviors. Analytics also gives Thorpe’s team the credibility and data they need to validate their roadmap.
  2. In-app Guides: After migrating users to their new platform, customer success (CS) used targeted guides to onboard users and offered tailored walkthroughs for different roles. TraceGains saw a 22% increase in live training attendance, and a 600% increase in user certifications with Guides.
  3. Net Promoter Scores (NPS): Throughout the migration, the CS team monitored customer sentiment and flagged points of frustration with in-app NPS monitoring. They could flag frustrated or at-risk customers, while also understanding the behaviors of satisfied users.

FACTS: Increasing feature adoption by 44% with 1,000+ Guides

Teachers and school faculty are up to their eyes in work—add on learning new software, and there’s simply not enough time in the day. That’s why 11,000+ K12 schools rely on FACTS for everything from school administration and financial management to student-teacher communications. Tucker and the product management team first used Pendo in 2018 to drive adoption of their Student Information System (SIS). Three years later, all four of their products rely on Pendo’s platform. 

FACTS’ newest tool, Email Series Manager, is one of their most complex products to-date—and when they first launched it, only 23% of users were successfully completing the workflow. To understand why adoption was behind, Tucker began tracking core actions and using Pendo Funnels. Then, he created a segment of the users that hadn’t completed target actions around the Email Series Manager, and asked where they were getting stuck. 

50% of responses said they’re too busy to use the tool—and another 25% didn’t know what to put in their emails. With this in mind, FACTS began creating template emails so their users could build emails quickly and easily. This increased adoption by 12%, and the product team knew where to focus next. 

Tucker and his team use Pendo across their software to drive adoption and monitor customer sentiment, including:

  1. In-app Guides: Product drove a 44% increase in feature adoption across both existing and new products with over 1,000 published Guides. This way, Tucker can ensure that their products are adding value to schools, and they’re spending dev resources wisely.
  2. NPS: FACTS saw NPS responses jump from 400 via email to 17,000 via Pendo NPS—over one year. By asking users for feedback directly in the flow of work, Tucker can better track how well their software is doing its job, and where they can improve the product experience.
  3. Resource Center: FACTS saw a 100% increase in online training attendance by giving users access to guides, announcements, feedback, and other content on demand. Wow!

Learn what else you can do with Pendo One

“Good enough” digital experiences put your organization’s growth and goals in jeopardy. With the right platform, you can make smarter product decisions, drive adoption, and empower cross-functional teams. 

Watch the webinar, or explore our collection of customer stories to learn how other organizations are leveraging Pendo’s all-in-one solution to drive product adoption.