Wie SkuVault seine Nutzer versteht und das Beste aus der Pendo-Plattform herausholt

SkuVault’s inventory and warehouse management software helps e-commerce retailers solve one of their biggest challenges: tracking inventory across multiple warehouses. SkuVault allows sellers to sync their warehouses with 50+ integration channels and brick-and-mortar stores to help manage inventory at scale, eliminate oversells, and streamline pick-and-pack workflows.

Die Technologie von SkuVault wurde speziell für Lagerarbeiter entwickelt, die für die Ausführung von Bestellungen zuständig sind. Diana Nolting, Vice President für Produkte bei SkuVault, erklärt: „[Wir sind für die Leute gemacht], die voraussagen, wie viel sie bestellen sollten, die sich mit ihren Kanälen verbinden und einfach versuchen, ihre Software zu optimieren.“

Aber in einer Branche, die auf komplexen, vernetzten Systemen aufbaut – und in der Zeit Geld ist (besonders während der Hauptsaison) – wusste SkuVault, dass sie die Workflows ihrer Benutzer besser verstehen mussten, um ihre digitalen Erfahrungen zu verbessern und zu beschleunigen.

Nutzung von Verhaltensanalysen zur Bestandsaufnahme des Nutzerverhaltens

When Nolting first joined the SkuVault team in 2020, the company was still in the early stages of growing its product management function and treating it as a discipline distinct from engineering and development. This meant that the SkuVault team had a lot of data at their disposal, but lacked the behavioral analytics they needed to truly get closer to their users.

“We didn’t really understand our full customer base. That was really the foundation for our decision to purchase Pendo,” said Nolting. “We needed to get out there to talk to people . . . But we also needed a way to make sense of what they weren’t telling us.”

Vor Pendo verließ sich das SkuVault-Team bei den Produktdaten stark auf Google Analytics, hatte aber immer noch keine Sichtbarkeit in Bezug auf Nutzerverhalten und Engagement. „Die Google-Analytics-Seitenaufrufe sagten uns nicht, was funktionierte und was nicht – und sie gaben uns auch keine Bestätigung für das anekdotische Feedback, das wir hörten“, erklärt Nolting. 

Nolting wusste, dass sie ein Tool brauchte, mit dem SkuVault den „stillen 80 %“ zuhören konnte, um das Unternehmen voranzubringen und ihr wachsendes Produktteam zu befähigen, die richtigen Entscheidungen zu treffen.

„Wir wussten, dass wir eine Software für die Verhaltensanalyse brauchten, weil wir unsere Geschäftstätigkeit erheblich ausweiten wollten. Wir benötigten etwas, das keine großen technischen Investitionen erforderte. Wir brauchten eine Plattform, mit der wir unsere unterschiedlichen Systeme zusammenführen und [in Salesforce] integrieren konnten – denn wir hatten eine Menge Daten, aber keine Möglichkeit, sie miteinander zu verknüpfen. Und wir mussten in der Lage sein, zu sehen, was die Leute taten, und [diese Verhaltensweisen] so zu verstehen, dass sie konsumierbar waren, [selbst bei] der großen Anzahl von Kunden, die wir haben.“ 

Pendo delivered on all fronts—and proved to be easy to implement without significant engineering effort or technical resources.

During their evaluation for a product experience and digital adoption platform, Nolting and the SkuVault team also collaborated closely with Pendo’s value consulting team to help justify their investment and make a more confident decision. This engagement included a qualitative analysis of how Pendo aligned to SkuVault’s strategic initiatives, as well as financial models quantifying the value of Pendo—with business cases focused on reducing support cases (short term) and improving retention (longer term).

Einführung von In-App-Anleitungen zur Verbesserung von Onboarding und Support

From the start, Pendo’s retroactive analytics were a huge draw for Nolting and her team. “[I love] the fact that anytime I tag something, I get all the historical data back to the date that we set it,” she explained. “We can test and play and still have it all from the date we installed Pendo—which is huge. If we want to run an A/B test, we don’t have to wait two weeks and come back [to see the results].”

Standing up a behavioral analytics solution was SkuVault’s most immediate need. But after implementing Pendo Analytics, Nolting and her team quickly saw the opportunity in-app guides could unlock for their product experience. “We really thought [analytics] was the biggest thing we needed. But once we started using it and with where we are now a year and a half later, we’ve [learned that] the best way for us to gain access to talk to our clients is through in-app guides and surveys,” she said. 

Nolting merkte außerdem an, dass dieser gezielte und datengestützte Ansatz für die produktinterne Kommunikation angesichts der Art der Nutzerbasis von SkuVault besonders nützlich ist. „Wir arbeiten mit Lagerarbeitern, Mitarbeitern mit Kundenkontakt und sogenannten ‚Deskless Workers’ – Menschen, die keinen Zugriff auf ein Telefon haben. Außerdem gilt: Zeit ist Geld. Wir mussten einen Weg finden, um gezielte Mitteilungen zu verbreiten und gleichzeitig Feedback zu bekommen.“

The SkuVault team started with just a few very pinpointed in-app guides, and have seen great results so far. Not only has this contextual approach allowed them to deepen their penetration across their logo base to gather Net Promoter Scores (NPS), it has also allowed the team to gather additional qualitative feedback associated with those scores they wouldn’t have received via email alone. 

SkuVault has also seen incredible results by leveraging Pendo In-app Guides to power their onboarding strategy—an approach that Nolting is working to expand to the rest of Linnworks’ (who acquired SkuVault in September 2022) product portfolio. 

“We started rolling out in-app guides to streamline onboarding, [which previously took a] fairly significant amount of time. By embedding ‘micro-training’ on every page where [users might encounter] a feature they don’t use very often—like something they might only use once every two months—and making it available right there, we were able to decrease knowledge-based support tickets by 45%, which was incredible for us.”

Seit der Übernahme von Linnworks konnten Nolting und ihr Team bei SkuVault die Wirksamkeit dieser Maßnahmen nachweisen und damit beginnen, diese Maßnahmen auf das gesamte Unternehmen auszuweiten. „[Das ganze Team] sieht, dass das funktioniert. Und das liegt vor allem daran, dass wir nicht immer jemanden persönlich mit unseren Benutzern interagieren lassen müssen“, sagt sie. 

By providing their users with the enablement and tips they need along the way, the SkuVault team has been able to continually increase their users’ confidence and make their product easier to use. “We really do credit the embedded guides with helping streamline onboarding,” Nolting added. “And we directly attribute the micro-learnings we’ve embedded with that decrease in knowledge-based tickets.” 

Nolting explained that this 45% decrease in knowledge-based tickets equated to the deflection of roughly two months-worth of support tickets—or more than 1,000 unique cases—across the entire SkuVault support team. Additionally, she noted that 25% of SkuVault’s clients are no longer asking the same routine knowledge-based questions they previously opened support tickets for. “We’re now able to answer those [questions] without users even having to start a support case, which has improved stickiness,” she said.

“I just love Pendo because it gives me a way to have more relationships with our clients than I ever could manage one-to-one. I can really interact and connect with them in a way that I couldn’t before . . . It’s really one of the most critical tools we have in our toolbox.”

Bereitstellung von Pendo-Daten im gesamten Unternehmen

Was als Lösung für das SkuVault-Produktteam begann, hat sich inzwischen auf das gesamte Unternehmen ausgeweitet. Jetzt loggen sich Teams aus den Bereichen Vertrieb, Customer Success (CS), Marketing, Onboarding und Vertriebsförderung regelmäßig in Pendo ein, um zu verstehen, wie sich Kunden und Interessenten durch das Angebot bewegen, und diese Erkenntnisse zu nutzen, um das Kundenerlebnis zu verbessern. 

„Mittlerweile loggen sich immer mehr Mitarbeiter des Unternehmens bei Pendo ein“, erklärt Nolting. „Es war wirklich toll zu sehen, wie das ganze Unternehmen Pendo auf verschiedenen Ebenen angenommen hat.“ Hier sind nur einige Beispiele dafür, wie die Teams von SkuVault Pendo nutzen:

• The product team uses Pendo to understand who’s using what in order to prioritize the product roadmap and future investments
• The marketing team uses Pendo as a contextual, in-the-moment communication channel to customers
• The onboarding team uses Pendo to track how their clients are doing with the “homework” they’ve been given, and how well they’re moving through their onboarding experience
• The CS team uses Pendo to see how adoption is trending so they can understand if clients are at risk of attrition—then take proactive steps to mitigate it
• The sales team uses Pendo to see how free trial clients are doing—including how they’re adopting the product or where they may need additional support to get the most value possible

With over 300 features in SkuVault’s inventory management software, Nolting also noted that the team previously had no way of knowing which features were really getting used, or which they should invest further in. But now, thanks to segmentation and rich behavioral insights, teams across SkuVault are able to make data-informed decisions and focus their resources on the right things. “[Pendo has] changed how we build investment cases, and how we prioritize work in different areas,” said Nolting. 

Produktorientierung zur Verbesserung der betrieblichen Effizienz

Bringing all these teams together within Pendo and using product data as a single source of truth for decision-making has helped the SkuVault team gain some other valuable operational efficiencies.

For example, when the product team was considering sunsetting a particular feature, they seamlessly launched an in-app poll to see which of two versions users preferred, and started collecting data right away. This quick validation allowed the product team to move quickly, saved them from pursuing false starts that ultimately wouldn’t be viable, and helped them make an informed decision about where to focus their resources. “We were able to ship the entire project and save a significant amount of development time,” said Nolting.

Finally, Nolting noted that Pendo has enabled SkuVault—and by extension, Linnworks—to expand their reach and start building their product-led go-to-market approach. “Pendo has allowed us to give a voice to the market who we weren’t able to access before,” said Nolting. “Spinning up a product-led go-to-market motion is something that will be incredibly important to us as a company going forward—and it’s going to be served by Pendo. We’re [building] a foundation to be able to access different go-to motions and go-to markets, because now we understand what’s actually happening.”

Moving forward, SkuVault plans to use Pendo to measure impact to retention, and hopes to unify Pendo initiatives across the company. Nolting and her team are also eager to leverage Product Engagement Score (PES) to improve reporting and establish a shared, composite metric to evaluate their product’s performance over time. SkuVault’s relationship with Pendo is just one example of how their ongoing commitment to being customer obsessed is translating into real-world solutions for growing e-commerce businesses.