How Pendo’s Summer Release reimagines onboarding, support, and expansion in the SaaS + AI era
To deploy software that truly works and delivers results in the age of AI, companies need to return to the core of what makes good software, good.
Smarter onboarding by helping users reach value. Scaling support by helping users help themselves. Increasing product revenue by optimizing feature discovery. And deploying AI without making your company vulnerable to risk.
Here’s how Pendo’s Summer 2025 Release is reimagining these strategies for your AI-first world.
1. Onboarding that delivers value, fast
The cost of poor onboarding has never been higher. 80% of users have uninstalled an app simply because they didn’t understand how to use it. Worse, onboarding is the third-largest driver of churn—only after poor product fit and lack of engagement.
Whether you’re buying or selling software, onboarding is your first (and often only) opportunity to show users the value of your software. And with the Pendo Summer Release, you can give your onboarding a major upgrade—powered by Pendo Web Analytics, Pendo Embedded Guides, and Pendo Orchestrate.
Let’s walk through how a fictional company, AcmeTravel, used these tools to reimagine their onboarding experience:
It starts with Web Analytics, which finally gives Acme a view into the part of the journey that was once invisible: pre-signup behavior. When a user searches for “Munich business trip” and lands on AcmeTravel’s marketing page, Acme can now track that journey all the way through signup and into product activation. It’s full-funnel visibility—from anonymous visitor to engaged user.
But what happens when users sign up…and stall?
Acme noticed drop-offs after users logged in. So, they turned to Orchestrate to re-engage users with a smart journey. With new branching logic, Orchestrate can detect whether a user filled out their profile, clicked through a guide, or booked a trip—and delivers tailored outreach accordingly. Think onboarding emails via Marketo, Hubspot, or Pendo, triggered by what users do, who they are, or what content they engage with.
Once users re-enter the product, they’re greeted by Embedded Guides featuring a persistent, in-app task list: “Complete your profile,” “Book your first trip.” It blends seamlessly into the AcmeTravel dashboard, keeping users focused and making next steps obvious—without interrupting the experience.
Creating that guide? Easier than ever. Just describe what you need in natural language—“an onboarding tour for new users,”—and let the Pendo Guides Agent do the rest. It drafts the layout, content, and flow. You stay in control, with AI handling the heavy lifting.
Acme didn’t just fix their onboarding—they reinvented it. And they’re not alone. Companies like Demandbase are already using these new tools to accelerate time to value for new users and drive better business outcomes from day one.
2. Scaling user support
Great onboarding is only the beginning. Keeping users happy—and keeping support costs down—is just as critical. Yet nearly half of all software licenses go unused, costing companies $21 million annually in wasted subscriptions. On the other hand, every $1 invested in user experience (UX) delivers $100 in return (a 9,900% ROI).
The latest Pendo innovations help you scale support in smarter, more cost-effective ways. Let’s go back to AcmeTravel. After streamlining their onboarding flow, usage skyrocketed—but so did support tickets. Their teams needed a better way to understand what was going wrong and how to fix it at the source.
They started by launching a CSAT survey with Pendo Sentiment to benchmark customer satisfaction. Then they turned to the Pendo Listen Feedback Agent, an AI-powered teammate that surfaces support issues automatically. With one prompt, they uncovered a spike in bugs related to flight rescheduling—validated across both Pendo data and Zendesk tickets.
To investigate further, Acme used Pendo Session Replay to watch real users struggle with a broken reschedule button. Frustration was clear. With Pendo’s new Create an issue with AI feature, the team clipped the replay, summarized the bug, and filed it—no extra tools or context-switching required.
After rolling out a fix, they deployed another lightweight CSAT survey. The results? Satisfaction jumped from the mid-40s to over 80%, and support tickets related to that issue dropped by nearly half.
This is modern support at scale: Benchmarking satisfaction in minutes. AI-powered detection and prioritization. Automating Jira ticket generation from Session Replay. And measuring outcomes, all in one platform.
3. Driving expansion and growth
Most teams forget or ignore that customers are your biggest source of growth. In fact, highly engaged customers tend to make purchases 90% more frequently, spend 60% more per transaction and have 3x the annual value compared to other customers. So why aren’t you giving them the attention they deserve?
With this release, Pendo makes expansion proactive, targeted, and measurable.
When AcmeTravel prepared to launch a new feature—automatic flight rebooking—they didn’t just blast users with promos. They started by gauging interest using an Embedded Guide with a poll: “Would you use automatic flight rebooking?”
Then, using Pendo Experiments, they A/B tested two versions of their in-app messaging:
- “Re-book your flight when canceled automatically”
- “Skip the scramble with Automatic Rebooking”
The system automatically tracked conversion rates and declared a winner—allowing Acme to confidently scale the best-performing message.
On launch day, they used Pendo Form Validation to clean up demo requests. With no engineering work, Pendo ensured only valid emails and titles were accepted—preserving data quality and improving conversion.
And once the feature was live? The team didn’t wait on analysts to tell them how it was performing. They simply asked the upcoming conversational Analytics Agent: “How has adoption been trending for Auto Receipts since last week?”
The Agent responded instantly with context, retention metrics, and usage trends—no dashboards to build or SQL required.
Finally, with Pendo Data Sync to Snowflake, Acme pushed product data into their BI tools so RevOps and finance teams could track the impact on revenue in Looker.
Expansion doesn’t have to be guesswork or grunt work. With Pendo, you can:
- Build interest with Embedded Guides
- Optimize messaging with Experiments
- Launch cleanly with Form Validation
- Analyze outcomes with AskPendo
- Prove revenue impact with Data Sync
When software is used, loved, and drives impact, it’s not by chance. It’s built on a foundation of purposeful intelligence.
The Pendo Summer 2025 Release is all about giving you this intelligent foundation—deeply understanding your users, driving revenue growth from within your product, and protecting your business from risk. Check it out now.
