News

Understanding customer feedback at scale with Zelta AI

Published Jul 31, 2024
Pendo acquires Zelta AI to give users qualitative insights for more impactful products.

Over the last several years, Pendo has been on a mission to automate the highly manual, rote tasks of product management and to equip product teams with useful insights that help them build and launch successful products.

One of those highly manual tasks is gathering user feedback. When I led product teams, I’d coach my people to sit with support or meet with sales to get a pulse on what customers want or how users feel about our products. While certainly helpful for gaining insight, none of that was scalable. And it was way too easy to introduce bias when you’re relying on individuals to synthesize feedback. 

The truth today is that most qualitative feedback sits in disparate systems both inside an organization and across social media channels and review sites. It’s too scattered to organize in a spreadsheet. And yet, we desperately need this data to ensure we’re building the right things.

This is the problem we set out to solve with Pendo Listen, the newest part of the Pendo platform, which leverages LLMs to sort and find insights in troves of qualitative user feedback. Today, we accelerate our Listen roadmap with the acquisition of Zelta AI, an AI-powered customer intelligence platform.

Zelta ingests customer feedback shared in applications with troves of unstructured data — think Gong and Zoom calls, support tickets, survey responses, Salesforce records, Reddit threads, G2 reviews, email, and more. Like Pendo Listen, it leverages AI to glean insights from qualitative data to help product teams build products that deliver on business outcomes. In the coming months, we plan to integrate the technology into Pendo Listen, giving our customers a more complete understanding of their customers, and more product data from which AI can uncover insights. 

This was always part of our plan for Listen, and I’m excited to see it come to fruition quickly with the help of the Zelta team.

Very similar to how Pendo began 11 years ago, Zelta was born out of its founders’ pain. As a McKinsey consultant helping clients design digital experiences, Pierce Healy was daunted by the task of compiling and making sense of qualitative user feedback. He recognized the value of user requests and opinions for uncovering opportunities for his clients to drive growth or reduce churn, but those important nuggets of insight were too hard to find. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, it became possible to leverage AI to design a solution. 

The Zelta technology makes it incredibly easy to uncover insights from virtually anywhere. With single-click integrations to 150+ sources, and a conversational user interface, product managers can create truly custom queries and consume the information in whatever format works best for them. The Zelta team envisioned becoming an AI assistant for doing any kind of analysis, and we’re excited to help realize that vision with Zelta inside Pendo.

The team will also help us launch an AI center of excellence based out of our NYC office. We plan to add a team of machine learning and AI experts to complement the Pendo AI work happening in our R&D hub in Herzliya, Israel.

It is a really exciting time to be in product. For too long, product teams have been either drowning in data or flying blind without it. With Pendo Listen + Zelta, there’s no excuse for either scenario. 

Customer feedback is now at our fingertips and we can leverage AI to find signals in the noise, and to help product teams deliver products that customers actually use and that deliver outcomes for our companies.

Welcome, Zelta, to the Pendo team!