How ESO finds signal in the noise with AI-powered customer intelligence

While there are many high-pressure jobs in the world, nothing can compare to the work of first responders. Managing emergency situations—whether as a paramedic, fire fighter, or trauma nurse—takes clarity, speed, and precision. To do all  that in crisis situations, they trust emergency management solutions like ESO. 

ESO collects, manages, and analyzes emergency information to help over 1.2 million end-users to protect their communities. “We help first responders stay engaged with patients, from the 911 call until the hospital discharge,” explained MT McCann, ESO’s director of UX. 

Product usability starts with feedback

No two emergency situations are alike, and needs are constantly evolving. ESO relies on user feedback to build the right products for their users, and they ask for input often.

“To make ESO as usable as possible, we try to elicit feedback from users in every state and country we operate in.” 

MT McCann, director of UX

But any product manager (PM) knows just how time-consuming gathering and sorting through feedback is. With Slack messages, spreadsheets, and even sticky notes, feedback sources are disparate and unstructured, making it difficult to find common threads and surface themes.

“It was difficult to process, categorize, and analyze the different avenues of feedback we were getting,” McCann added. “We’d get feedback from internal experts, our trainers (who were with our customers), salespeople, our support and customer success teams—we were getting loads of feedback with various perceptions of priority attached.” 

Surrounded by feedback across 20+ products, McCann’s team was left wondering: “How do we make sense of it all to make better decisions without getting overwhelmed?”

Finding signal in the noise with AI

While ESO was drowning in feedback, they faced two additional hurdles: What feedback should they listen to? And perhaps most importantly, how should they close the loop and prove they’re listening to their users?

Luckily, McCann’s team started putting Pendo Listen’s customer intelligence tools to the test. 

Listen helps ESO tackle three problems at once: Gathering and analyzing feedback, validating product ideas, and transparently keeping our users and stakeholders involved. 

“Analyzing feedback and finding signal in the noise was a big challenge before using Listen.”

MT McCann, director of UX

“We capture feedback in-app via our resource center, which highlights that users can suggest enhancement feedback on the product. This helps us set the expectations that while we can’t act on 100% of feedback, we will communicate how the Product team have triaged the enhancement our users have spent their valuable time sharing with us, and communicate next steps.,” McCann noted. 

“We also explain what to do if users have uncovered a bug or outage. That way, product ideas don’t get lost within major issues.” Her team has also added third-party feedback (e.g. Salesforce enhancement tickets) into Listen for a 360° view of user sentiment. 

Getting right to insights

Listen includes AI-powered feedback summaries that instantly surface trends. For McCann’s team, this means they can sort through “hundreds, thousands of pieces of feedback” in just minutes. “Our PMs can copy and paste feedback summaries into decks to gain internal alignment, and dig deeper where needed.” 

With Listen, understanding customer sentiment isn’t as daunting a task. “We can start to see the patterns emerge. We can see commonality and group things together,” explained McCann. “We’re no longer overlooking blind spots and simply being led by our most vocal customers.”

Building a data-backed roadmap with suggested ideas

ESO’s product team also uses Listen to suggest enhancement ideas from existing data, and validate them in-app. ESO’s product team can send feedback items to Idea Tests to poll their end-users, and send this data to their roadmap without leaving Pendo. 

“Linking feedback items to Suggested Ideas has been a brilliant tool for our PMs because that input might’ve come from a totally different product area,” McCann said. “Only Listen’s AI tools can do that because it pulls from every data source. That would take a human hundreds, thousands of hours to do.”

“With Listen, we’ve brought more customer centricity into our discovery process.

MT McCann, director of UX

Feedback items are also contextualized with product analytics, so McCann’s PMs can review the steps and challenges encountered before our user submitted their feedback.

Making product discovery a team sport

Continuous product discovery extends far beyond the product team, and McCann democratized insights across teams via custom views of feedback items. As a result, customers get faster responses, and PMs are less overwhelmed.

“The ability to work with cross-functional team members, triage, talk about feedback items, and bring them along on the journey is extremely valuable. We want them to be part of that analysis, and empower them to input feedback they also hear during their interactions with our end-users,” McCann added.

Listen also includes idea validation and product roadmapping to support continuous discovery. Feedback items are linked to product usage, so McCann’s PMs can understand what led up to sharing inputs.

With Pendo, ESO has the tools to run a successful product discovery program for years to come.

“We’ve been launching Listen in different parts of our product since 2023, and we’re very excited for the continued benefits for our users and internal colleagues as we adopt future features,” said McCann.