How PetDesk is shifting their engagement strategy to meet customers’ needs

In today’s climate, business priorities are shifting and individual consumers are changing their spending habits. If you’re a software provider, this means your customers’ needs are probably shifting as well. This makes customer retention more important than ever — how do you ensure your product goes from “nice to have” to a must-have? 

In a recent webinar, we were joined by Shona Fenner, who works in product management and customer success at PetDesk. Since COVID-19, PetDesk — a communication platform for veterinary practices — has experienced changes in user needs (vets are deemed as essential businesses, but are not operating “as usual”) as well as product usage (they experienced a 10x increase in volume of communications in their app).

Here’s a look into some of the ways the PetDesk team is using Pendo to adapt their customer engagement strategy to their users’ evolving needs.

The power of product data

When you need to adapt to customers’ needs quickly, one of the best places to go is your product. With product data, you can take a data-driven approach to customer retention and understand how users’ needs are changing based on how they are interacting with your app. Quantitative usage data is even more powerful when you can pair it with real-time feedback from your customers.

When usage spiked in PetDesk’s app, that signaled to the team that changes were needed to better serve their customers. They used data from Pendo to better understand what users were doing in the product, so they could work to ensure that experience was more streamlined.

Understanding user journeys with Paths

With Paths, PetDesk was able to get a deeper look into user journeys and, more importantly, identify any areas of product friction that needed to be addressed. Once they knew where users were dropping off after navigating to their Inbox feature, they were better able to direct users to functionality to help them with key actions like messaging clients.

Communicating updates inside the app

As the PetDesk team rolled out feature updates and new features altogether, they needed a way to get the word out to their customers. They leveraged in-app messages for feature announcements, which allowed them to reach customers when this information was the most relevant — while they were already in the product.

Additionally, PetDesk targeted these in-app communications to specific groups of users, for example for a feature update, they segmented to target those who hadn’t engaged with the feature in the last 60 days. Since things were changing so quickly, they were also able to be agile with segmentation and update their segments based on the needs of that specific day.

Digging into user retention

Since retention is top of mind, it’s important to be able to understand if users exhibit continuous usage, or if they’re dropping off. With Pendo’s Retention tool, the PetDesk team can easily see if users are coming back to the product. You can even drill down to specific pages or features, for example by examining retention for the features you know correlate with long-term success in the product.

Measurement: what’s working?

Shona noted that one of the most important steps is measuring the effectiveness of their efforts. PetDesk measures both guide-specific metrics (i.e. number of views) as well as how those guides are impacting usage (first time visitors, returning visitors, etc.). With Data Explorer, they’re able to see how in-app guides impact feature adoption, which is helpful in understanding if users are taking the right actions and using features that will drive the most value.

If you want to see the full webinar, you can watch the recording here: