The fragmented funnel
Building community is all about fostering connections. In the context of education, those connection points involve a lot of different user groups—from administrators to students. So much of the edtech experience involves managing access levels and workflows to ensure the right content gets served to the right people, at the right time. Pendo makes it easier.
StrongMind started working with Zendesk Chat in 2019. At first, they intended to only make this suite of help tools accessible to teachers and administrators. But they quickly realized that funneling support requests from the other groups StrongMind serves—including parents and students—through already-busy teachers and admins was overcomplicating the process. “If a student or a parent needed help, it would have to funnel through a teacher or admin,” said Kaly Nasiff, product owner at StrongMind. “So when a student had an issue, they had to reach out to their teacher, and then the teacher had funnel it to our customer success team. [It was like] playing telephone to solve a user issue.”
This fragmented workflow ultimately led to a large influx of tickets that needed to be addressed by StrongMind’s customer success team. “We went from a couple hundred tickets a month in 2019 to over 2,500 tickets a month in 2020,” Nasiff explained. “We realized we needed to offer schools with the highest enrollment access to Zendesk Chat—and we wanted to do it really, really quickly.” Nasiff and her team turned to Pendo in-app guides for help.
Hello, is it help you’re looking for?
Nasiff and her team decided to use a custom code block in Pendo to implement Zendesk Chat within their application. They also leveraged Pendo to create a custom segment to ensure the guide would only appear for the users they wanted to grant Zendesk Chat access to: schools with the highest enrollment.
It was also important for Nasiff and her team to have a permanent version of the guide in their staging environment so they could adjust the configuration of the guide during school hours, while the chat module was available to users. “It’s also really helpful because it allows our developers to see the chat as they’re doing work on the product,” said Nasiff. “It ensures they don’t make any changes that could negatively affect that chat.”
このアプリ内サポート機能のもう1つの重要な側面は、StrongMindのカスタマーサクセスエージェントがオンラインで利用可能な場合にのみ、ユーザーに表示されるようにすることでした。「私たちが追加した大きな点は、『オフライン時に非表示にする』オプションでした」とNasiff氏は言います。「つまり、ガイドは、エージェントがオンラインで対応可能なときにのみ、学生に表示されます。」このカスタマイズは、地域に基づいてStrongMindのカスタマーサクセスの可用性を説明するのにも役立ちました。「StrongMindには2つの異なるタイムゾーンにエージェントがいます」とNassif氏は説明しました。「チャットは、ユーザーがアクセスできる場合にのみ表示する必要がありました。たとえば、東海岸時間でエージェントに連絡する場合、5時になると、アリゾナにいるそのユーザーはチャットにアクセスできなくなります。」
Nassif氏と彼女のチームはこれまでに驚くべき成果を上げています。2020年11月に導入されて以来、Pendoガイドは5,000万回以上の閲覧数を記録し、Pendoガイドが無かったら教師や管理者が提出するはずだった約1,000件のサポートチケットを回避できました。「チャットの平均時間は約11分です」とNassif氏は言います。「そして、私たちのCSAT（顧客満足度）スコアは87.8です。これらのチャットはそれぞれ、1件のチケット、場合によっては複数のチケットに相当し、その分だけ削減されたことになります。このデータは驚異的です。本当に、非常に大きな効果がありました。」
This Pendo guide has also dramatically reduced the amount of time it takes StrongMind’s customer success and support teams to resolve user challenges. They’re now using their Zendesk Chat functionality to create tickets for users (which accounts for roughly 20% of the tickets they receive), which allows StrongMind’s agents to move through requests more quickly and efficiently. This change has reduced their median ticket resolution time from 72.4 hours to just 1.4 hours.
Besides the incredible numbers, Nassif also acknowledged the positive impact leveraging this Pendo guide has had on the learning experience for StrongMind’s users. “For teachers, as students are moving around in their course or they’re in the middle of a live session, they still have access to the chat. We’ve heard that’s helpful,” said Nassif. It’s also proven to be extremely helpful for students—from login issues to ensuring parents have the right levels of access. “It’s been really, really helpful with [eliminating] that kind of ‘telephone’ effect.”
