Who said print is dead?
When it comes to bringing creative ideas to life, the last thing you want is to feel stuck before you even get started. That’s where having a mastery of your tools of the trade comes in handy. Pendo helps software users—with all degrees of proficiency—gain confidence in the technology they rely on so they can get up and running quickly and stay focused on the work they love doing.
When Sawgrass started working on their new social selling platform over a year ago, they knew they needed to prioritize digital adoption and put a strategy in place to help their users be as successful as possible with their software. “As a company that’s been in business for many years, we knew that educating our customers in the right moments was very important,” explained Rhonda Gwin, customer engagement and technical training manager at Sawgrass. “We wanted a way to figure out how our customers were interacting with the software, where they were falling off, and be able to handle onboarding.”
Gwin and her team decided to use Pendo In-app Guides throughout this new product—and in other products in their portfolio—to proactively address potential areas of friction and help users easily navigate new processes, before ever submitting a support ticket.
Send me on my way
Gwin noted that one of the most important features of Sawgrass’ new social selling platform is the ability to add custom backgrounds to product mockups—a particularly useful tactic for customers who use Sawgrass to create products to sell in their own online stores. To drive usage of the feature—and proactively mitigate confusion around how to use it—Gwin and her team decided to use Pendo to create an in-app guide with basic “how-to” information about the feature. She also opted to include a short explainer video demonstrating how to use it. “These guides really cut down on support tickets and gave our customers the information they need to be most successful with their own stores,” she explained.
Pendo was also vital in helping the Sawgrass team successfully launch the new product on time. “The day before the launch, we realized that there was still an issue with customizing products in the mobile version of the app,” said Gwin. “We knew there would be a lot of people coming into the product through mobile, so we needed a way to quickly say, ‘For the best experience, we’d like to see you move to the desktop app.’ That’s where Pendo really saved us.”
With Pendo, Gwin and her team were able to deploy an in-app guide directing users who were looking to customize products to the desktop app while the product team continued to troubleshoot the bug. “4,000 people saw that in-app guide immediately,” Gwin noted. “We were able to direct users to the best experience [for their goals]. And the really great part is we didn’t get any support chats or support tickets from it.”
Since launching the new product, the Sawgrass team has been leveraging Pendo Analytics to understand how users are engaging with the product so they can continually iterate and improve the experience. “We’re now able to look at funnels and paths and say, ‘This is where our customers entered [the product] and this is what they looked at first.’ That helps us know whether they want personalized or ready-to-go art. And it helps us push them in the right direction as far as what products to offer.” Gwin noted.
Gwin indicated that she and her team are using Pendo to continue to anticipate customer needs, much like they did at launch. “We’re learning and building as we go. We put a lot of the [initial] guides in places in the product where we felt customers might have problems. But now we’re also able to use surveys and polls within Pendo to help determine where they may have questions. This helps us stay very in touch with our customers,” Gwin explained.
The Sawgrass team is also leveraging tooltips throughout their more established desktop app, Printmate, to provide ongoing guidance to users as they engage with key features of the product. For example, Gwin created a tooltip featuring a short explanation and sample image to demonstrate the app’s primary color modes in-context. “We’re changing things [in the product] as we go. But by adding Pendo—in this case to demonstrate our two color modes and [include] pictures—we can give in-the-moment advice and help the customer right at that moment, which we would usually have to do through a support ticket,” said Gwin.
Finally, Gwin noted that one of the biggest draws of Pendo was its accessibility for non-technical users, as well as the support she’s received from her Pendo account team. “One of the things that’s been very helpful for us is having the support of the Pendo team,” she said. “The team has been beside us the whole way . . . working closely with us and cheering for us. It’s been nice to have the Pendo team supporting us as we launch into this new area.”
