WebPT decreased support tickets by 50% with in-app help

WebPT is an electronic medical record (EMR) platform for the physical therapy industry. They provide clinics with end-to-end tools for patient management, claims, and billing. Bradley LaFave is the product marketing manager at WebPT, focused on product and feature launches, user feedback, and engagement. “Pendo has made a big difference for us when it comes to announcements because of its segmentation capabilities,” says Bradley. “We have a lot of different types of users in our platform. We wanted to make the news and announcements we were delivering to them more relevant, and make sure that we’re not messaging people unnecessarily. Pendo lets us easily do this, and it also provides detailed usage information and a way to get really quick user feedback.”

Segmented announcements drive feature adoption

“We have three major segments of users: clinical users which are typically therapists, administrative users who are generally not clinical, and billers. Each of these groups uses very different feature sets. For example, our clinical documentation features are only used by therapists.” In each major segment, WebPT has a number of smaller roles. “Our clinical users, for example, could be physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, or athletic trainers, and we have features that are specific to each of those roles. For example, we just rolled out new evaluation codes for athletic trainers. This feature was only relevant to that group. With Pendo we were able to target an announcement to them only.”

“We have the same sort of sub-segments for admin users as well. For example, only a subset of them can control user permissions. So, when we rolled out a new permission setting, we targeted only to those admins. The ability to target like this has made a huge difference. We’re seeing new features get adopted 25 – 50% faster. We don’t have to wait for users to discover new features and figure out how to use them now.”

Rapid feature feedback

The product team at WebPT uses Guides for user feedback as well. “We’ve launched a new program called ‘First Impressions’ to get rapid feedback on the new features we launch,” said Bradley. “Using the Polls feature in Pendo, we add a quick survey to the targeted feature announcements asking users whether or not they think the new feature would be useful for their clinic. Because we’re asking for feedback in the application we see response rates of fifty percent versus the seven or eight percent we’d get for emailed surveys. The targeting allows us to make sure we’re getting relevant feedback from the right users.”

‘First impressions’ survey

WebPT brings together the qualitative user feedback with quantitative usage data in Pendo for detailed analysis. “We segment feedback from users to dig more into the responses. If someone says that they think the feature is useful, we look at their actual usage behavior to see if they’re actively using it. If not, then there’s clearly a disconnect.” The segmentation also helps to add more color to the feedback. “We recently launched a fairly robust profile self-service feature where users can manage permissions for their account,” said Bradley. “The ‘First Impressions’ feedback was more lackluster than I was expecting. However, when we dug into it, we saw that our larger customers were really excited about the feature, and it just wasn’t addressing a big pain point for our smaller customers. Just looking at the feedback alone wouldn’t give us these insights.”

Improving the product experience

“The data from Pendo has helped us better understand our customer experience,” said Bradley. “We can look at things like how long it takes someone to complete an exam, and then benchmark that for usability improvements. In addition to feature announcements, the Guides have helped to explain some of the things in our product that aren’t immediately clear. We look at areas of the product that generate a lot of support requests. One example is with insurance information. In our industry, we deal a lot with insurance, and those processes aren’t always easy. We have a field for insurance in one of the pages in our application, and we saw that users were a little confused as to what exactly they needed to fill in. So we put a tooltip there. With the extra guidance, the number of support questions we got dropped by at least fifty percent.”

Form field tooltip

WebPT is expanding beyond tooltips in the product to more full-fledged training walkthroughs. “Onboarding is a focus,” said Bradley, “but in some ways, it never ends for us. Our members are constantly adding new users, and we’re constantly adding new functionality. Some of the walkthroughs we create will be targeted at newer users, but what’s more important is to target them for different segments. I want to make sure that the training we’re providing is really valuable and relevant for our users.”