How to optimize for efficiency and reduce support costs with Pendo guides and analytics

The companies that emerged as market leaders after the last economic downturn were those that optimized for efficiency, not those that just cut back on resources, according to Harvard Business Review.

In these changing, challenging business times, reducing support ticket and call loads and improving response times are one way to achieve that. In our recent webinar, “Optimize for efficiency, reduce support costs,” Pendo Senior Sales Engineer John Barber demonstrated how you can use Pendo’s analytics to inform your in-app messaging efforts and deliver relevant support and guidance to the right set of eyes, at the right time:

Find the answers to your questions about app usage: Before you can start deploying in-app guides to help your users go from confusion to competence, you’ve got to be able to answer the basic questions about how they’re actually using your app. 

Those include:

• Are people using your product over time?
• Are they coming back to the platform to use certain features?
• Are people navigating the way it was designed, or are they finding their own ways through?
• What are people doing right before they seek out help?
• What can we do to better onboard them and aid their journey?

Find the friction, and fix it: 

Pendo offers numerous ways to figure out where users are getting stuck. Paths and funnels can show you exactly how users navigate from one point in the app, like the home page, to another, such as clicking on a help button. You’ll be able to trace exactly what path users took, and what caused them to seek out support.

LabCorp was able to uncover friction points in its user portal with Pendo paths and funnels, then use that insight to make two subtle engineering fixes. That’s seen their support ticket backlog drop by 99%.

When you need to get a more granular look at how certain subsets of users are getting hung up, then you can turn to Pendo’s ability to segment users into cohorts. Tools like Data Explorer can which users clicked on a help button after using one specific feature and what their role is, for example. Then, you can target in-app guides to just those users who exhibit that behavior and help them past the trouble spot.

 Practice proactive support with in-app messaging: 

There are many points along the user journey that provide opportunities to interact with users before they run into problems and reduce the load on your support teams. Building an effective onboarding process and in-app guidance system can head off many of the most common “How do I do this?” support questions. Support tickets asking for help when writing search queries using different operators, for instance, can be headed off entirely by placing a hover-over tooltip guide right at the end of the search bar. WebPT used this strategy to cut their support requests in half. 

Resource Centers put knowledge at a user’s fingertips: 

Pendo’s Resource Center can be used to provide on-demand information to users, including how-to guides, support articles, and announcements. A curated selection of guides for new users with information about their progress through an onboarding series can gamify the experience for the user, or you can integrate your Zendesk Knowledge Base into the Resource Center to let users search for support articles right in the app.