Actionstep is a law firm management platform with practice management and legal accounting solutions that connect, organize, and automate all the work that happens at midsize law firms.
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Actionstep needed a more efficient way to document and triage customer feedback.
Using Pendo Listen’s AI features, feedback trends became clear and helped the team prioritize what to tackle and how to communicate with customers.
Faster feedback triage, product-led decisions, and increased customer satisfaction.
Law firms are often as unique and diverse as the clients they serve. Mid-sized firms can have multiple focus areas, everything from family law to real estate. Due to the variability of their practice's needs, it’s important for firms to have software that understands and serves their unique set of needs.
Actionstep, a cloud-based law firm management platform does just that. Their platform automates tedious paper-driven processes, saving firms time and making it easier to serve their clients.
As a business that promises time savings and efficient workflows, it’s understandable that they needed those same efficiencies in-house, specifically when it came to managing customer feedback. That’s why they turned to Pendo.
Natasha Dubauskas-Reed, director of innovation at Actionstep, wanted to create better internal processes for documenting and triaging feedback for her team, when "customer feedback felt like a black hole.”
The team had feedback coming from multiple sources with no single path to visibility. “We had a dedicated customer feedback email. We'd also hear anecdotal feedback from sales, either through word of mouth or their emails,” explained Dubauskas-Reed. “We had every single kind of path to bring feedback in, and it was impossible to organize.”
That fragmented process also made it hard to understand what mattered most. “It was a lot of ‘Who’s screaming the loudest?’, rather than ‘What are the most people screaming about?’” she explained. "We needed clarity around what to prioritize in our product roadmap."
At its peak, the Actionstep innovation team received 25 to 50 feedback emails a day. Product managers spent at least an hour on each, and sometimes up to a whole day trying to manually tag, file, and sort through the feedback. Eventually, the process broke down. “In the end, we couldn’t get through all of it because it was just so overwhelming,” said Dubauskas-Reed.
“When we implemented Pendo, it created a feedback loop where we could get all the data into one place. We could triage it and focus on what’s most important to our customers,”’ explained Dubauskas-Reed. Listen also helped the team work alongside customers and keep them up to date on their roadmap plans, decision-making processes, and product updates.
Because Pendo Listen does the initial triage automatically with AI, it surfaced trends and enabled product managers to focus on strategy instead of manual sorting. The product managers immediately got time back in their day to focus on problem solving instead of organization.
The transformation hasn’t just saved time, it’s reshaped how Actionstep brings customers into the product development process. “Now that we have the ability to see all the feedback, we can reach out directly to customers because we know that they've asked for it,” explained Dubauskas-Reed. Actionstep also improved how they run and communicate beta testing phases.
“We’re developing a beta process around Pendo,…before we would struggle to find customers to beta test and now, we know which customers to target and at times must close beta as we have too many customers wanting to be involved."
The company also uses Pendo to communicate progress back to users. “We're just in the process of updating our portal,” Dubauskas-Reed said. “Every time we move from one stage to another, we'll send out emails to keep customers engaged and informed. There's an actual loop.”
While the team is still building out analytics dashboards in Pendo, the shift is already paying off. “Customers are a lot more engaged than they used to be,” Dubauskas-Reed said. “We're definitely seeing a lot more feedback from customers, in a centralized place.”
Actionstep now segments feedback by product domain, with each product manager reviewing their area weekly. And while revenue data isn’t fully integrated yet, the team uses license count as a proxy to help prioritize. “One customer could give you feedback, and could be a one-person firm or a 500-person firm.” Having that type of data is critical for prioritization.
Looking ahead, Actionstep plans to expand Pendo usage across its North America platforms and clean up implementation across 800+ tagged pages. Dubauskas-Reed is also working to open up product data to teams like customer success and services. “Each one of those teams can come in and grab the data they need quickly and easily with Pendo.”
Ultimately, the biggest shift is cultural for our customers. “Before, it almost felt like a black hole for a customer—they would submit feedback and never hear anything again,” Dubauskas-Reed said. “Now, we have a real feedback loop. Customers know what’s being released and that they had an impact on our product decisions.”
