AI has revolutionized how software is built. It’s becoming faster than ever to bring features to market. This not only multiplies the number of features but also amplifies customer interactions, generating a wealth of feedback for product teams. But too much of a good thing presents a challenge for even the best product teams. Every product team knows the struggle of translating a mountain of siloed feedback into actionable insights.
That’s why we’re excited to bring you Pendo Listen — the newest offering in Pendo One to help product teams convert raw feedback into more meaningful insights, faster.
The journey to Pendo Listen
In the early days of Pendo, I knew our first 100 customers personally—their names, roles, and how they used our platform. As Pendo expanded, so did the challenges of maintaining a deep connection with our growing user base. Our product teams found themselves buried under endless hours of sorting through customer requests, a daunting task that seemed to expand continuously. The real challenge lay not just in collecting feedback, but in truly listening to and understanding it, then turning these insights into actionable steps at scale.
We tackled this head-on by dedicating a team in Sheffield to change how product teams interact with user feedback. Their mission? Eliminate the traditional triaging process and enable orgs to truly listen to their customers. Inspired by an early Salesforce campaign, we even have a sign in our office symbolizing the “death of triaging.”
Our approach was to leverage the latest AI to sift through vast amounts of data, prioritizing and categorizing feedback to make it easier to capture the core of what customers truly need. We aimed not only to assist product managers in managing requests more efficiently but also to empower them with a platform where they could better leverage user feedback by contextualizing it with both visual and usage data. This gives product managers the evidence they need to make high quality decisions and best allocate valuable R&D resources.
Embracing the art of listening
There’s a vital difference between hearing your customers and listening to them. Hearing is passive—merely acknowledging the words being said. Listening, however, is active—it involves understanding the emotions and intentions behind the feedback. Pendo Listen embodies this distinction. It integrates behavioral user data, intelligent prioritization, and actionable workflows, enabling businesses to not only capture the voice of the customer but to delve into the nuanced symphony of their needs and desires.
With Listen’s workflows and automation, you can tackle three major objectives with one tool:
- Collect and analyze customer feedback: Listen gathers feedback everywhere, from within your product to Zendesk support tickets to surveys like NPS. Then, Listen automatically organizes and summarizes your data to give you a holistic view into what your users are asking for.
- Test product ideas: With Listen, you can run product ideas by relevant users to prioritize initiatives, back your decisions with hard proof, and build a product that your users actually want.
- Align stakeholders around your vision: Keep your C-suite, customers, and investors up-to-date on product initiatives by updating Roadmaps and third-party tools like Jira. Then, easily share updates with users that shared feedback or participated in Idea Tests with segmentation and In-app Guides.
Let’s take a deeper look into how Listen’s core features help you better understand your customers.
Capturing, analyzing, and contextualizing feedback
It’s not enough to simply collect user feedback. To act on qualitative data, you need to know who it’s from, their roles, their organization, their activity level, and how they’re navigating through your product. To give you a complete view of your customer, the Pendo One platform captures and analyzes all of your product’s qualitative, quantitative, and visual data.
Capture in-app user feedback
With Pendo Listen, you can gather feedback broadly, like a universal “give feedback” button in a persistent location across your app. Or, you can get granular by asking users to share their thoughts about one specific feature.
Add input from external sources
Your sales and customer success (CS) teams may want to submit feedback on behalf of customers. With Listen, you can submit customer input via a form within Pendo, or let your internal teams submit feedback to Listen via third-party tools like Salesforce and Zendesk.
If you’re already starting with a spreadsheet of raw qualitative data, you can upload input via .CSV files.
Analyze qualitative data at scale
Product teams have spent hours sorting through feedback, manually assigning themes, and pulling insights. With Listen and Pendo AI, you can finally skip the tedious work of reading and summarizing qualitative data. Pendo Listen can give you a high-level overview into insights, or create curated, granular views into your areas of focus, high-value accounts, and more.
Know what ideas to prioritize
Pendo Listen’s Validate tool helps you gather pointed feedback around your product initiatives, so you know what will resonate most with your customer base.
Test ideas and rank priorities
Once you’ve centralized your data and identified themes from Feedback, you can present in-app Idea Tests, or polls, to gauge how users react to concepts and features.
Unlike traditional feedback methods, which only collect input, Listen lets you share concepts, prototypes, or mockups directly within your application. This lets users engage with the proposed features in a realistic context and provide richer insights than simple text-based feedback.
Get to know specific user segments
Use segments to target specific users (like your high-value accounts) to understand their opinions and preferences. That way, you can invest in features that resonate with your customers, add value to your application, and improve your bottom line.
Bring everyone along for the ride
Pendo Listen lets you build products your users will love, because you’ll be building with them, every step of the way.
Once you’ve decided what to prioritize and build, you can easily promote ideas to a Pendo Roadmap to track your initiatives, sync to Jira to keep developers aligned, and use in-app and e-mail communication to inform your users throughout the process.
Align everyone around product decisions
We built the Roadmaps feature of Listen to help you visualize and share your product vision, at scale. With Roadmaps, you can align internal and external users around product plans and tie in insights—all to communicate product decisions and back them up.
Connect Roadmaps with Jira
Using Listen and Jira? You can streamline your product development process by integrating your product strategy and engineering execution tools. Once you decide what to build in Pendo, you can give engineers valuable customer context by sending items to Jira where you create Epics, Stories, Bugs, and more. Then, when developers see a feature pushed from Pendo in Jira, they have easy access to the original user feedback and business justification behind the feature.
Create workarounds for a quick fix
Sometimes feedback can be addressed with a short-term action (maybe a Pendo tooltip to clear up confusion 😉). But more often than not, resolving feedback requires time to ship enhancements and new features. Listen helps you keep users informed with workarounds—which act as temporary solutions or to address identified issues. Workarounds help communicate stop-gap solutions to your team and users and can alleviate frustration while you develop a long-term solution.
Once that solution is ready for prime time, you can announce the good news by targeting users that submitted feedback via Pendo In-app Guides. Bring internal users and customers along on your product development journey—keeping everyone informed and excited about what you’re building.
Listen helps your connection with customers become (and stay) strong, so you can avoid investing in products and features that will ultimately go unused and unloved. Take the guesswork out of building products and sign up for your custom demo of Pendo Listen today.
