When new users are potential future customers
Cybersecurity is something that businesses can’t take lightly—especially in today’s digital-first world. As companies add more and more software tools to their technology stack, there is an inherent level of added risk, too. Whistic, a leading provider of proactive vendor security, aims to help teams manage this third party risk. Its platform simplifies how businesses assess, publish, and share security documentation with customers and vendors.
As a result, Whistic’s user base includes a lot of people who are not paying customers—they are customers of their customers. This means the company has new users accessing their product constantly, making it essential to provide a seamless experience. Leslie Bonsteel, a product manager focused on product-led growth, explained, “We are always looking for ways to ensure [these users] are having a really good experience and that they see value in our platform because they are people who could potentially use Whistic in the future.”
The Whistic team turned to Pendo to help with this initiative since it allowed them to not only track user behavior, but also take action on the data and make quick UI changes or call attention to key features with in-app guides. Bonsteel explained, “With Pendo, we love being able to have analytics and in-app guides together in the same platform so that we can take action on our data.”
The best adoption strategies are data-driven
Bonsteel first turned to Pendo to analyze product usage data and identify the behaviors of their most active users. “We were able to say, ‘Here are five or six features that we know are really important,’” she said. “From there, we could compare adoption and usage of those features by our most active users to everyone else and determine how to enable lower usage people to be more successful in the product.” Bonsteel noted that this is all in an effort to reduce customer churn down the line.
The Whistic team is also utilizing Data Explorer to analyze data more deeply and identify gaps or friction in their product experience. Bonsteel shared, “This helps us figure out where we need to focus our attention and either improve the UI or educate users on features that may not be intuitive in order to drive deeper adoption.” One way Bonsteel and team are working to drive adoption is with in-app walkthroughs that guide users through a task or workflow step by step. They also plan to house these walkthroughs in their Pendo Resource Center to provide ongoing education as new users experience their product.
Bonsteel noted, “There is a lot of turnover in the role that we work with, so if one of our champions leaves we can [use Pendo to] easily show new users how to do things in the product rather than having them wait for an onboarding session.”
Whistic is coming up on a year of leveraging Pendo—in combination with other efforts—to improve adoption of their product. Bonsteel shared that the company has seen higher adoption quarter-over-quarter and more of their customers are behaving in similar ways as their most active users.
Bonsteel also highlighted the impact of being able to access data and insights so quickly in Pendo. “I think what I love most about Pendo is that I can get answers so fast. If one of our customer success managers is having trouble getting a hold of a customer, in literally thirty seconds I can identify other contacts based on [the account’s] product usage,” she explained. “The ability to get to that level of data as easily as we can is a game changer. Pendo gives me access to a lot of information that I can’t get in other ways.”
Getting the most out of Pendo with a TAM
A key part of Whistic’s success with Pendo is their use of a technical account manager, or TAM. Bonsteel explained that early on there were high expectations at Whistic for what they were going to be able to do with Pendo. After getting started in the product, they made the decision to bring on a TAM to help them make the most of their investment.
“After getting a TAM, we saw the positive impact almost immediately,” Bonsteel noted. Better yet, the Whistic team continues to feel that impact today. “Even now, sometimes I’m trying to do something in Pendo that I don’t do very often, so [our TAM] has been great to show me different approaches to problems and how other people are using the product that might apply in our situation.”
In addition to diagnosing the root of problems and helping solve them, Bonsteel called out the benefit of their TAM acting as the bridge to the Pendo Support team when something arises that is outside of his knowledge set. She explained, “[Our TAM] is one of my very favorite parts of Pendo. It’s definitely one of the best investments we made, and is hugely responsible for our success.”
