Wie Sage mit Pendo Funktionen mit 90 % Kundenzufriedenheit entwickelt

Why is it so hard to give your customers what they really want?

You can start by asking for feedback, of course. But your success depends on whether:

• You can collect enough responses
• A clear majority of them ask for a specific feature
• Customers are honest with you about what they want
• Customers are honest with themselves about their desires

What starts as a simple question and answer becomes a much more complicated process.

The clever folks at Sage found a solution. They polled their customers, analyzed their responses, produced a solution, and confirmed that it met customers’ needs.

Here’s how Sage used Pendo to accomplish extraordinary acts of customer telepathy.

A customer-centered production model

Sage provides payroll, HR, and finance software to over two million customers worldwide. One of its products, Sage Intacct, is cloud-based software that helps small to midsize business customers meet their financial accounting and compliance needs.

The company is dedicated to building products and features that support their customers. Sage prioritizes projects that deliver positive impacts for customers—an outcome-first mindset—rather than simply completing tasks.

This value-add mindset led the product team to consider a new feature: allowing customers to update bills after submitting them for approval. The team had spent some time pondering how to develop this feature, but wanted proof that customers wanted, needed, and would use it.

And the (customer) survey says…

The Sage team needed to understand their users’ mindset before rolling out a change that might affect their customers’ billing capabilities. The end users were working in a highly regulated industry with stringent compliance requirements and rigorous auditing at every step. This new feature needed to address that reality.

Who should be allowed to make changes? What if a bill were already partially approved? How would security and compliance considerations affect this new feature?

And, most importantly: Would building this feature deliver a clear beneficial outcome for customers?

Jennifer Carlson, director of UX, and Tracy Tremblay, group product manager at Sage, led their respective teams to make a plan for launching the potential new feature.

They created a Pendo In-app Guide that linked to a survey gauging users’ desire for the feature and their expectations about how it should work.

But Carlson and Tremblay didn’t blast the survey to their entire customer base. They created a segment to target the guide only to users who worked directly in bill approvals. This ensured the survey would only reach relevant users, which would boost the reply rate and render more reliable data.

A well-targeted survey delivers a development roadmap

In just two days, the UX and product teams received over 1,000 responses, with overwhelming positivity toward the feature. “Customers very much wanted the additional capability, and the survey information changed and enhanced the original requirements and design to meet our customers’ needs more directly,” says Carlson.

The survey data provided exactly what the team needed to confirm their hypothesis. This customer consensus put an end to internal debate and empowered the team to start building with confidence.

As an added bonus, the final design was easier to build than originally planned. The user feedback dictated a less restrictive set of controls that took less time to develop.

A customer satisfaction home run

After only two months, Sage launched the “recalling a submitted bill” capability. As the feature was so heavily based on customer feedback, the product team had high hopes for its success.

To measure satisfaction, the feature launch included a targeted survey asking for feedback from users who had interacted with the new feature multiple times. A record-high number of customers rated “strongly agree” on both ease of use and meeting their needs, and many took the time to write out feedback in the optional free response field.

“It’s just so rewarding and encouraging to hear from the customer feedback that we created something that they truly need, use, and love,” Carlson says.

Carlson and Tremblay were more than pleased by the initial response. But they still needed to see if customers would continue to use the feature over time.

Completing the picture with qualitative and quantitative data

All that positive customer feedback is qualitative data—related to emotion, not expressible in practical terms. While gauging sentiment is incredibly valuable on its own, Sage also needed to see if the quantitative data—the real-life product usage—told the same story.

Sage used Pendo Analytics to track that quantitative data. They were able to record how many users activated the feature and how many clicks each user made within it.

Clicks on the Recall buttons and links grew tremendously during the first six months post-launch. Clicks increased from 1519 to 4166, representing a 174% growth with an ongoing upward trend. The number of unique visitors per week for the Recall buttons and links also grew from 462 to 944, a 104 % increase.

Data also showed that users had a clear preference for where they chose to interact with the feature: They preferred using it for individual bills versus a bulk recall by a 2:1 ratio. This insight will help focus future development to continue delighting customers.

Detailed feedback plus fast implementation equals happy customers

Sage shows a tenacious commitment to figuring out what its customers want and delivering on those needs. Since they can’t develop a telepathic bond with customers, Pendo is the next best thing. “Pendo helps us drive a better customer experience because we have access to quick customer feedback,” says Tremblay.

Pendo made it easy for Sage to:

• Roll out a targeted survey to maximize relevant responses
• Parse the survey data to guide development
• Analyze post-rollout activity to prove success

With Pendo, Sage can design alongside the customer. They can quickly measure usage, collect feedback, and refine based on what they learned.

It’s easy for software companies to adopt a “delivery” mindset: Let’s build a thing and ship it as quickly as we can, so we can ship the next thing. With Pendo, Sage is actualizing an “outcome” mindset. They’re not delivering massive monolithic software updates; they’re improving their users’ day-to-day work life.

And Sage doesn’t have to wonder if their customers like this approach. They have the data to prove it.