How 4 companies used product-led strategies to accelerate their digital transformation

Product-led strategies benefit teams of all sizes in a number of ways—from streamlining sales and marketing processes, to reducing support tickets, to freeing up employees to focus on the highest value opportunities. Our recent report, The business value of being product led, examined the core business benefits companies gain by leveraging product-led tools and tactics. It revealed benefits in four key areas:

1. Customer health: Product-led companies retain more customers and revenue
2. Growth: Product-led companies generate higher-quality leads and more engaged users
3. User productivity: Product-led companies spend less time on manual support, data collection, and onboarding
4. Product development: Product-led companies make data-informed decisions to innovate and iterate faster

In this post, we’ll dive a little deeper into how four different enterprise organizations used Pendo to become product led and improve their product experience, and look at the measurable value they’ve realized across their business through these efforts.

Customer health

How IHS Markit used Product Engagement Score to identify a single metric of customer health

Problem:
The IHS Markit team needed a way to combine their quantitative and qualitative user data to tell a unified story about the product experience for their Engineering Workbench platform. They also wanted to become more data-driven in their decision making and help their product managers (PMs) better prioritize where to invest their time and resources. 

Solution:
The team turned to Product Engagement Score (PES) in Pendo—a composite metric that combines adoption, stickiness, and growth to provide a holistic overview of product health. The process of selecting the Core Events needed to calculate PES was a helpful forcing mechanism for the IHS Markit team, requiring them to designate which behaviors within their product most closely correlated to positive user outcomes. In describing this process, IHS Markit’s associate director of user experience, Ellie O’Connor, said, “Just the idea of having to take a 60+ year business with over 650,000 users and say, ‘These are the 10 key things we think a user should be doing in our product,’ was eye-opening. We were able to bring a little bit of realism and focus into what really matters in our product.”

Business value:
With PES, IHS Markit gained a new, consistent way to make data-driven decisions. Even beyond the product team, sales reps and customer success managers (CSMs) became empowered to drill into each of their accounts and gauge their health, have more strategic renewal conversations, and proactively take measures to prevent churn. For example, using Core Events in PES, O’Conner and her team discovered that users were taking nearly eight days from their first login to access some of the most important features within the product. Armed with that knowledge, she was able to work with the right teams to redesign the product’s onboarding flow and get users to those moments faster.

Click here to read IHS Markit’s full success story.

Growth

How Citrix created personalized onboarding experiences to drive conversions from free trials

Problem:
The Citrix team knew that new users of their ShareFile product created free accounts for a variety of reasons. However, the onboarding experience those users received post-sign-up wasn’t tailored for their specific use cases. Citrix wanted a way to make the learning experience as relevant as possible from the start to help get users to value faster and to encourage them to upgrade to a paid plan after their trial ended.

Solution:
Citrix used in-app guides to create personalized onboarding flows based on individual users’ jobs-to-be-done,  informed by paid search data. Drew Grantham, an in-product marketing specialist for Citrix’s ShareFile product noted, “We always try to think about the user experience and what they want to get out of the product. If a user is coming to ShareFile for a specific need, we want to message them accordingly.” The ShareFile team also utilized Pendo for in-app guidance beyond a user’s first login, to mitigate common questions the support team
frequently received around user management. 

Business value:
Populating these onboarding walkthroughs with use-case-specific messaging not only created a more delightful experience for new users, it also ensured that the information they were being served was as relevant as possible. After implementing these guides, the Citrix team saw a 60% increase in free trial conversions and a 40% reduction in support cases around user management.

Click here to hear more about this use case, directly from the Citrix team.

User productivity

How Elsevier used a Resource Center to speed up adoption of their new platform while reducing support ticket volumes

Problem:
When the Elsevier team launched their new content collaboration platform, Elsa, they knew it would take some time to get users comfortable working within it. They produced a large collection of enablement materials, but quickly realized that users were still struggling to find exactly what they needed.

Solution:
Elsevier used the Pendo Resource Center to build an always-available, in-app repository of resources for users—featuring helpful onboarding guides, FAQs, and announcements. And they used in-app guides to intermittently inform and remind users about these various resources. When discussing the process of implementing the Resource Center, Lisa Gervais (former senior user engagement specialist at Elsevier) said, “It was something we knew we could get up quickly and implement without development resources, and it [didn’t] cost us anything to do.”

Business value:
By bringing their most frequently requested training and reference materials inside the product, Elsevier helped users be more productive, faster—resulting in increased product adoption and a 28.5% increase in Elsa’s System Usability Scale (SUS). The team also saw an impressive 42.8% reduction in first line support queries as a result of this in-app guidance.

Click here to hear more about this story directly from the Elsevier team.

Product development

How Okta uses Pendo to understand user behavior and improve the product planning process

Problem:
The Okta team needed a way to understand how users were interacting with and navigating the Okta platform so they could improve their planning initiatives for future releases. They also wanted an end-to-end product-led platform that could give them the ability to encourage adoption and ideal user behaviors at scale.

Solution:
Okta used Pendo’s product analytics to understand where users were dropping off their workflows and see how exactly they were navigating the platform. They also used targeted in-app messages to guide users to critical configuration processes, and put mechanisms in place to gather user sentiment and feedback directly within the product. Tom Witczak (director of digital experience at Okta) said, “Pendo is our platform for measuring, end-to-end, feature and service adoption and helping bolster each of those numbers with in-app guides or retargeting tactics.”

Business value:
By using Pendo to understand user behaviors, guide ideal workflows, and gather contextual user feedback, Okta saw a 25% increase in product adoption and a 57% QoQ increase in user-submitted feature ideas. This closed loop of product data has eliminated the extended development cycles that were once needed for the data team to pull usage reports, has created a single source of truth for product data across the company, and has sped up the time it takes for internal teams to make tactical decisions about where to take the product next.

Click here to read Okta’s full success story.

Want to dive even deeper? Download our full report on the business value of being product led to see the quantifiable impact product-led tools and tactics could have on your company’s bottom line.