You’ve heard it before: First impressions matter. Having a robust onboarding process in place is a critical element when that first impression is your best chance to show a user the true value of your product and turn them into long term customers.
In a recent webinar, “How Pendo Allows Verizon Connect to Maximize the Value of Software For Customers,” Jon Young, a product manager with Verizon Connect, discussed how his team is using Pendo’s guidance capabilities to ensure new users realize the product’s full value quickly with an extensive, automated onboarding process.
Young works on Verizon Connect’s RevealField product, which provides fleet management for field services vehicles and operations around the world. The platform allows dispatchers to schedule jobs, send technicians out to them, track vehicle locations and job progress, and collect customer feedback from one platform. That’s a lot of ground to cover in a single piece of software, and as intuitive as it is, onboarding new users can often be a complex process.
Before Pendo, Verizon Connect relied on a manual process for onboarding that involved training delivered to each individual customer in a webinar format. Pendo’s in-app guidance capabilities allowed the company to automate that process, delivering those trainings through in-app walkthroughs and tooltips. Guides can be delivered to users contextually, based on the specific task they are trying to accomplish.
Initially, Young’s team built their onboarding flows based on what they considered the most useful and likely paths users would take through the app. But once they started monitoring usage data in Pendo, they realized each customer’s needs varied, and that the process needed to be less linear to ensure every user saw value as quickly as possible.
“We’ve kind of evolved the whole onboarding process to say ‘Let’s not take them from point A all the way to point Z, when really they just needed to get somewhere in the middle to actually start getting some value out of the software,” Young said.
Pendo’s analytics helped Young’s team refine the onboarding process by revealing where users were dropping off. At a minimum, dispatchers have to get to the point of adding their technicians to the system to see value from RevealField, but there is plenty of advanced functionality after that, such as notifying customers when a technician is running behind, and the utility of those can vary by the customer, Young said.
Providing the opportunity to re-launch guides later ensures they get the basics and can still access the other support later.
“We saw from both usage and guide analytics that a lot of times, they were dropping off and not getting to the point of the advanced systems,” he said. “We get them to a point where they can get into the product and start getting that value, then if they want to take the time now to go through and do the advanced stuff they can, or they can go back to it later.”
Revising the onboarding guide flows was able to be done in real-time with Pendo without engineering or development support, Young said. “It’s easy if you make a mistake to go and tweak something,” he said.
Now, during the Covid-19 outbreak, many of Verizon Connect’s customers are facing significant disruption to their operations. Young said Verizon Connect is offering free access to RevealField until the end of September for about 60,000 customers globally to help them stay on their feet.
With Pendo, getting all those users up to speed and ensuring they see value from the software can be performed in a contactless, automated way. Hopefully, in October, those customers will decide to sign on for the longer term.
“We want to get as many of our trial users in and getting value from the product, and then seeing them in four months down the road say this is something that’s made a big difference for my business and I can’t live without it,” Young said.