If you're here right now, something isn’t quite right within your tech stack. Maybe your customer churn is too high. Maybe your workforce is less productive, despite massive AI investments. Or perhaps you’ve poured money into your roadmap, with no revenue growth. 

As AI makes shipping software faster and easier than ever, there’s a growing gap between what you were promised and the value software actually delivers. Poor software experiences aren’t just annoying, they’re business risks that cost you time, money, and trust. 

The numbers aren’t pretty: Employees waste an average of 4 hours each week toggling between disjointed, redundant point solutions. And a single negative software interaction can drive customers to competitors.

But it’s not all gloom and doom. Today’s (and tomorrow’s) AI and agentic systems have untapped potential to transform how we work and live. We need to ensure we’re realizing those promises through software experience management (SXM).

In this vendor-neutral buyer's guide, you'll learn how to: 

• Build a powerful business case that ties budget to real-world outcomes
• Prepare your tech stack and company for an SXM Platform
• Evaluate, vet, and experiment with different software experience solutions

SXM is the practice of analyzing software usage data and then acting on it for self-healing and optimized digital experiences.

Unlike traditional product and software development lifecycles, which focus on individual touchpoints or isolated metrics, SXM takes a holistic view of your software experience ecosystem, giving you the tools to analyze and act on your SaaS and Agentic data.

You've been practicing software experience management for years, but you probably called it something different. Maybe you knew it as digital adoption, product experience, or experience management. Different names, scattered tools, same goal: making software work better for your users.

Now, there's a clearer way forward. SXM brings these fragmented efforts under one strategic umbrella. But where do you actually stand today?

Take our 5-question SXM maturity assessment to find out. Your results will show you exactly where to focus as you read this guide (plus, where you're already winning).

Before researching and shortlisting vendors, you need to build a solid foundation for your investment. 

Before you can select and roll out the right software experience solution, you need to understand where you are today:

• Take an inventory of your existing software and applications. This includes shadow IT that departments have adopted independently, plus all legacy systems, third-party integrations, mobile apps, and custom-built internal apps.
• Measure current UX and adoption metrics. What do users love and keep coming back to? What goes untouched and ignored? Can you map these investments to a user’s pain points and needs?
• Analyze your third-party data. Look at CRM data, support ticket volume, and user feedback scattered across internal systems like Slack, Zendesk, and Salesforce.
• Identify gaps in visibility. Do you know what users are doing in each app? Do you know where they’re getting stuck, and what’s delivering the most value? Can you fix these UX issues, communicate with users, and connect data sources?

2. Build your business case

Software experiences can lead to positive, measurable business outcomes—increasing revenue and retention, cutting costs, and mitigating risk. But more often than not, you hear about the impact of bad software experiences. Compliance risks, lost lawsuits, customer churn, employee turnover, you name it. (Remember when Sonos rolled out an app redesign that drove a $10-$30m revenue loss?) 

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Because you can tie software investments to real business outcomes, it’s easier to prove the value of (and get buy-in for) SXM investments. 

Explaining the pain you’re facing—like wasting millions on bad R&D investments—spurs urgency. It’s also important to speak in the language of your business: leadership cares less about improving UX, but they do care about revenue impact and risk. 

Increasing revenue

The best place to grow and nurture user relationships is where they’re already engaged: inside your software. Pairing behavioral data (like feature adoption and user retention) with contextual, personalized communications increases upsell revenue, strengthens engagement, and aligns your roadmap investments with expansion opportunities. 

To grow revenue, SXM helps increase conversions, retention, and expansion while helping you benefit from indirect gains in engagement and retention. Many use cases roll up to this business outcome, from increasing adoption and engagement to improving product-led growth. 

Cutting costs

Organizations can invest 15-20% of their total budget on technology and still see disappointing returns because of poor user experiences. SXM prevents this by spotting underperforming tech investments and figuring out how to right the ship. 

SXM can also reduce support and training costs, increase operational efficiency and productivity, and optimize product development and maintenance. Common use cases include reducing roadmap waste, lowering support costs, and removing onboarding and adoption costs. 

Reducing risk

When software is difficult to use, users find workarounds, abandon features, or avoid the system entirely for point solutions—aka “Shadow IT.” SXM solves this by ensuring that your software investments meet end-user goals and giving you full visibility into the digital solutions with which you’re sharing information.

This is often a lesser business priority for enterprises, but is still relevant (especially for businesses in highly regulated industries, like healthcare).

By building your business case around these outcomes, your stakeholders can see and understand a solution's ROI and potential business value.

3. Build your dream internal buying team

As part of your evaluation, consult with domain experts both internal (e.g., head of customer support) and external (e.g., value consultant) to help you understand what success looks like and how best to measure it.

SXM initiatives typically impact multiple departments and require cross-functional collaboration. A successful buying committee normally includes: 

• Product leadership: They're thinking about how this tool impacts user outcomes, growth, and product velocity—and they'll have strong opinions you want to hear upfront.
• IT leadership: The person who'll make this thing work. They're asking the hard questions about security, integrations, and whether your shiny new tool will play nice with their existing tech stack.
• Finance/procurement: They want ROI projections and cost comparisons and will negotiate on price.
• End-users: The people who'll actually use the software daily, and one of your most important stakeholders.
• Executive sponsor: Someone with enough say to break ties and approve the budget. They care about business impact, not features.
• Legal/compliance: They ensure you won't get in regulatory trouble (or accidentally give away your firstborn in the terms of service).
• Operations: The person who understands how this software fits into the bigger workflow picture.
• Revenue/marketing leadership: SXM solutions aren’t just relevant for product and IT. Revenue and marketing leadership can use this to engage with users, improve upsell and cross-sell, proactively identify customer churn, and strengthen lead scoring. 

The bigger the purchase, the more people will mysteriously appear in meetings, claiming they "need to be involved." Keep the core buying group tight, but make sure you've mapped out all the real decision-makers and influencers early.

4. Begin evaluating vendors and create your shortlist

Research, research, research. With a definitive list of your organization’s requirements in a software experience solution, use the vendor evaluation checklist below to compile a shortlist of reputable SXM vendors with proven track records.

Behavioral and web analytics

• Track user sessions in real-time across web, desktop, and mobile applications
• Map complete user journey paths across software workflows and applications
• Measure feature adoption to understand which capabilities are used, ignored, or abandoned
• Segment users based on behavior, role, department, or custom criteria
• Analyze funnels to identify where users drop off in critical processes
• Automatically detect friction to identify bugs and issues
• Measure task completion rate for critical business processes
• Track time-to-value for new user onboarding and feature adoption

User engagement

• Deliver contextual tooltips and in-app support based on behavioral data
• Build interactive walkthroughs and tours for onboarding and feature discovery
• Personalize suggestions based on user context and current task
• Offer multi-step workflow guidance for complex processes
• Unify in-app and out-of-app messaging, like email and guides, into one journey
• Build in-app resource centers with support resources and videos
• Personalize content delivery based on user role and experience level
• Embed guides directly within your UI without coding

Feedback management and product discovery

• Collect NPS, CSAT, CES, and long-form feedback in context
• Track sentiment trends over time
• Validate product ideas before you build them
• Send feedback data right to your roadmap
• Close the loop between user frustration and product decisions

従業員体験 

• Monitor software usage insights across the full software stack
• Identify underused, overlapping, or redundant tools 
• Help IT and procurement rationalize spend

AI and agent readiness

• Use AI to predict user needs and automate routine tasks
• Predict and surface friction points before they impact users
• Generate content or recommendations with AI
• Ensure AI is trained on behavioral data and grounded in real usage patterns
• Offer built-in agentic capabilities to help you automate and scale up repeatable tasks
• Analytics around agent performance (first and third-party) to monitor and optimize agentic systems
• Use real user behavior to train predictive models on churn, retention, etc

Admin and scalability

• Ensure integrations with your current systems and workflows
• Look for APIs and event-based workflows
• Choose tools that integrate and consolidate your tech stack
• Look for native integrations with CRM, analytics, ITSM, dev tools, and communication systems
• Prioritize solutions that can scale up with your Monthly Active Users (MAUs)
• Manage users in bulk
• Export data outside of the UI into your data warehouse

Security and manageability

• Confirm support for both customer- and employee-facing systems
• Require SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA compliance
• Demand encryption at rest and in transit
• Use access controls and audit logs for data protection
• Prioritize in-platform collaboration with peers and teams

After you’ve vetted solutions, it’s time to get hands-on and shortlist your favorite vendors.

Use these three approaches to separate real solutions from smooth-talking sales pitches. A little due diligence now beats a lot of regret later.

Every enterprise needs a solution that addresses the full spectrum of software experience challenges, from initial user onboarding through long-term engagement to value realization. But too many platforms force you to choose: Do you want to see what users are doing, hear what they’re thinking, or guide them towards value? 

You shouldn’t have to sacrifice or compromise. You deserve one platform that manages the entire software experience lifecycle. That’s the promise and the power of SXM. It solves the problem many are still wrestling with: fragmented solutions that focus on a piece of the puzzle rather than the whole picture.

As you evaluate potential solutions, you’ll probably see bits and pieces of what you need, scattered across product experience and digital adoption platforms (DAPs). But you can get everything you need in a software experience management solution:

Use this list of questions to vet vendors on your shortlist. 

Implementation and onboarding

• Tell me about a challenging implementation. What went sideways, and how did you fix it? What did you learn?
• What's your average time-to-value? When do customers begin to see real results? Ask for ROI calculators, Total Economic Impact (TEI) reports, benchmarks, and customer stories for companies in your industry.

Data and integrations

• What happens to our data if we decide to leave? Can you walk me through a recent off-boarding? What fields/data were left behind, and how long did it take?
• How do you integrate with our existing tools (CRM, CDP, BI)? Can you demo a two-way sync and show live data flows?
• What’s your data-retention policy and warehouse-direct export cadence? Can I query raw event-level data in my analytics warehouse?

Engagement and automation

• How do you support multi-channel campaigns (in-app + email)? Can you show me a customer journey built across at least two channels?
• What communications templates or no-code journey builders do you offer to automate lifecycle messaging?

コラボレーション

• Which teams beyond Product—like RevOps, CS, Marketing—use your platform? Can you share an example dashboard or quarterly business review template for non-PM stakeholders?
• What built-in apps or collaboration features (Slack, Teams) exist to share real-time NPS or adoption insights across our org?

Roadmap and future development

• How do you handle feature requests? What's your product roadmap input process?
• How are roadmaps determined? Can you show me your public (or semi-public) roadmap, and explain how customer votes map to delivery timelines?
• What’s your customer advisory process or council? How often do you co-innovate with key customers?

After all this, it’s time to send your Request for Proposal (RFP) to your top vendor. Use Pendo's vendor-neutral RFP template to jumpstart the process:

You’ve researched vendors, explored solutions, built your shortlist, and sent out RFPs. It’s time to set your investments up for success with a detailed plan outlining your process, timeline, and responsibilities. 

Most implementations fail because of unrealistic timelines, not bad technology. Think about your implementation as a 90-day sprint, broken out into five stages: 

Weeks 1-2: Laying a strong foundation

Kick this off with stakeholder alignment, technical discovery, and data architecture planning. IT should set up integrations, while your team defines success metrics and user segments.  

When defining success metrics, ask yourself: 

• How will you know if your SXM platform is working? We recommend establishing a few North Star metrics, such as feature adoption, onboarding completion, user retention, and stickiness. Use benchmarks to understand what’s “good” for companies of your size or in your industry. 
• What should you measure at 30, 60, and 90 days? In addition to your north star metrics, there will be more minute KPIs you can understand and contextualize, as you gather more data. As you get further into your deployment, consider measuring guide engagement rate, NPS/eNPS, and time in the app. 

Weeks 3-4: Setting up your software

During this stage, deploy tracking across key user journeys, configure dashboards, and run initial data validation. 

This is when you should start seeing those first beautiful data points roll in, and it’s also a great time to start experimenting with in-app guides. Dig into funnels and user journeys, watch session replays, build an onboarding flow, and learn your way around the software. 

Weeks 5-6: Begin your pilot program

In month two, launch your SXM solution with your core user group and gather feedback. This should include product managers, product marketing managers, product operations, and, depending on your goals, members from customer experience, support, or other customer-facing teams. Everyone should know their role and understand how the pilot will impact their work.

Weeks 7-8: Scale and optimize 

Roll out to broader teams, refine analytics models, and build custom reports. User adoption campaigns kick into high gear because the best platform is useless if nobody uses it.

At this point, you should have enough data to get a solid understanding of in-app behavior. Look at behavioral data like activation, adoption, retention, time to value, and ease of use, then compare those numbers against your original success metrics defined in the first two weeks of implementation. 

Weeks 9-12: Activate the platform and establish a Center of Excellence

By month three, you should make data-driven product decisions that move the needle on business outcomes. Build cross-channel user journeys, A/B test your guides, start closing the loop on some user feedback, and continue to dig into your behavioral insights, every day.  

Complete organization-wide deployment and establish governance protocols, like building a Center of Excellence (CoE). An effective COE develops a structure for consistent, scalable, and effective use of your software investments that help drive your organization’s company-wide initiatives. Your vendor should have documentation around building a CoE. 

Your users are already telling you what they need through their behavior. Now, you have everything required to listen, learn, and act on those insights at scale.

In this age of AI, complexity, and scale, software experience is a strategic advantage. Providing it’s the right, positive, good kind of software experience. 

SXM is how you shift software from a cost center to a source of value. Because the right platform empowers your teams to improve outcomes continuously, not just ship features. 

Focus your attention and evaluation on a platform that connects insight to action. A platform that works across silos and can scale with your business to meet your ambitions.