What Is Pendo And How Can It Improve Your Product Experience?

Jerry Wallis
15 min read
Pendo logo with analytics on laptop screen behind

Product analytics can be a tricky business endeavour to navigate. With so many metrics to track and so much data to sift through, it can be challenging to know where to start and what information is essential. That’s where Pendo comes in – it’s a tool that makes it easy to track and analyse your users’ behaviour, so you can understand how they interact with your product and make data-driven decisions to improve it.

So, what is Pendo? It’s a powerful yet relatively easy-to-use platform that helps you gain visibility into how users interact with your product. It allows you to track user engagement and behaviour, such as which features are being used and which aren’t, and provides actionable insights that can help you improve the overall product experience. With Pendo, you’ll also see the most popular features on your app, the most viewed pages, and which actions are being taken most frequently.

But the platform isn’t just a one-trick pony. It also provides powerful tools that help you segment your users, so you can see how different groups of people interact with your product. This allows you to identify patterns and trends in user behaviour, so you can optimise your product to meet the needs of different users.

With Pendo, you’ll also be able to create targeted in-app messages and surveys to gather feedback from users directly. It also allows you to A/B test different features or pages of your product so that you can make better-informed decisions on your app moving forward.

In this post, we’ll dive deep into the world of product analytics and explore how Pendo can help you gain valuable insights into how your users interact with your product.

In short, this powerful tool can help you gain valuable insights into how your users interact with your product, so you can make data-driven decisions to improve it. So, make sure to read our blog post to learn more about Pendo and improve your product today!

What Is Pendo? 🤷‍♂️

Pendo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that helps businesses improve product adoption, usage, and satisfaction by providing in-app guidance, communications, and analytics. The platform offers a range of features, including creating in-app guidance tours, sending in-app messages and surveys, and gathering usage data and customer feedback.

This platform is different from other competing solutions as it combines analytics, in-app guides, and user feedback within a single all-in-one product offering developers an innovative approach to augment application experiences.

You can implement Pendo in your software application to:

  • Improve onboarding and implement in-app digital guidance features
  • Reduce costs associated with managing support tickets
  • Increase customer satisfaction and user engagement
  • Retain more customers by reducing customer turnover
  • Gather user insights to improve the overall product experience and business processes

What Can You Do With Pendo? 🎯

This platform offers businesses a wide range of benefits, allowing them to gain insights into how their products are being used and provide users with in-app guidance and assistance. 

📢 In-App Messages & Guides

One of the critical features of this platform is its ability to provide helpful step-by-step tours and tutorials that help guide users through the different features of a product. This can benefit businesses looking to increase user adoption rates and satisfaction, making it easier for customers to use their products more efficiently.

Additionally, Pendo allows companies to send targeted in-app messages and surveys to get feedback from specific users on how they use the product. 

Example of an onboarding in-app guide in Pendo
Create

With Pendo, your in-app messages and guides will look right at home – seamlessly integrating with the native appearance of your application by default. Moreover, crafting an experience tailored to your customers is made more accessible thanks to customisable templates and a WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that allows for precise and catered design changes! And better still, no coding or updates are necessary when deploying guides on mobile apps – you can just use their easy step-by-step wizard.

Target

In terms of targeting, you can design in-app messages and directions tailored to usage, feedback or demographics. For example, you can send a specific in-app message to only administrators who last used a feature in the last month.

Deploy

Pendo offers many ways to tailor your messages and guides – from the attention-grabbing pop-up to showing feature highlights with a tooltip. With it, you can get users involved beyond just the app through mobile push notifications. There’s something for every situation -whether you need global announcements or subtle reminders.

Analysis

Lastly, the platform allows you to gauge the reach and effectiveness of your in-app messaging efforts. For example, product owners can see the number of targeted users who have viewed new messages or announcements and how new guides have driven user engagement. In addition, with multi-step guides, you’ll get usage data on each step and other relevant metrics, such as completion rate.

📊 Product Analytics

Another advantage of Pendo is its powerful analytics capabilities. Companies can gain valuable insights about how their product is used by tracking usage data such as feature adoption rates, user engagement levels, and more. The platform also provides detailed feedback from customers and cohorts, which can help businesses improve their products to increase engagement levels and better meet customer needs. Companies can use this data to optimise pricing models or understand essential features for their customers. 

In addition, businesses can use the platform’s A/B testing capabilities to quickly test new features or changes without having to roll out an entire release cycle across all users. This gives companies greater control over how they make decisions regarding their products and allows them to deliver new experiences faster than ever before. 

Pendo’s Product Analytics Dashboard
Pendo’s Product Analytics Dashboard

Overall, Pendo provides a comprehensive suite of tools that allow businesses to gain insight into their product performance and help them create better user experiences. The platform makes it easy for organisations to monitor usage trends and identify areas where improvements need to be made, enabling companies to make informed decisions about the direction of their products with confidence.

Why Pendo Makes Sense For Most Businesses? 🤩

🚩 All-In-One Solution

Pendo combines product analytics, in-app guidance, and feedback into a single package, becoming a one-of-a-kind solution that can power up your application processes and help you provide enhanced customer experiences.

🏆 Successful Case Studies & Sterling Reputation

This platform is used worldwide by companies of all scales and sizes for a diverse range of purposes. For instance, LabCorp uses Pendo to enhance their onboarding and customer support and ticketing processes. In contrast, Okta incorporates Pendo to optimise its launch process for new features and services – thereby bolstering product adoption.

👨‍💻 Low-Code Easy Implementation Process

Pendo is designed to be an easy-to-use platform that can be used by anyone within an organisation, regardless of their technical expertise. 

The platform offers a range of low-code solutions that allow users to create in-app guidance tours, send in-app messages and surveys, and gather usage data and feedback without requiring extensive programming knowledge.

By providing easy-to-use, low-code solutions, Pendo aims to democratise product data and make it accessible to anyone within an organisation. This can be particularly useful for businesses looking to empower their teams to make data-driven decisions and drive product innovation.

A key benefit of the platform’s easy-to-use solutions is that they can help ensure that product data is used and acted upon throughout an organisation. As a result, Pendo’s solutions can help drive better decision-making and the product’s success by making it easy for anyone to access and understand product data.

📈 Valuable Insights – Qualitative & Quantitative Data

Pendo offers superb analytics capabilities that provide businesses with comprehensive data about how their users feel and behave within their products. 

The platform offers a range of features that allow businesses to gather qualitative and quantitative data, which can help provide a complete understanding of user behaviour and attitudes.

One of the critical ways that Pendo gathers data is through the use of in-app surveys and feedback forms. These tools allow businesses to ask specific questions of their users and gather their responses, which can help gather insights about user attitudes and preferences. 

Pendo also allows businesses to send targeted in-app messages to specific groups of users, which can help gather more detailed feedback on particular features or aspects of the product. In addition to gathering qualitative data through surveys and feedback, Pendo provides detailed usage data and analytics. This includes information about how users interact with different features of the product, how long they spend in the app, and how often they use it. 

By combining this quantitative data with the qualitative data gathered through surveys and feedback, businesses can get a complete picture of how their users feel and behave with the product.

How Is Pendo Different From Other Analytics Solutions? 🤼

Pendo is primarily focused on helping businesses understand and optimise the user experience within their product. As a result, it differs from other analytics platforms in its versatility and overall usability over anything else.

📲 Auxiliary Features

One of the critical ways that Pendo is different from other analytics solutions is its focus on in-app guidance and assistance. While other analytics platforms may offer similar features, such as the ability to gather usage data and feedback, Pendo emphasises helping businesses create and deliver in-app tours, tutorials, and messages to users. 

This can be particularly useful for businesses looking to onboard new users or improve the usability of their products. Another way that Pendo differs from other analytics solutions is its emphasis on targeted communications. 

☁️ In-App Messaging

Pendo allows businesses to send in-app messages and surveys to specific groups of users, which can help gather feedback and insights about user behaviour. 

This can be more targeted and effective than simply gathering general usage data. It allows businesses to get a more detailed understanding of how specific groups of users are interacting with their products.

🖇️ Additional Integrations

Pendo offers a range of integrations with other tools and platforms, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation systems, which can be helpful for businesses looking to integrate their product analytics with their overall customer data and marketing efforts.

While Pendo shares some similarities with other analytics solutions, it differentiates itself with a focus on in-app guidance and targeted communications and a range of integrations with other tools and platforms

These features make it a handy tool for businesses looking to improve the user experience within their product and better understand the needs and behaviours of their customers.

Try Out Pendo And Level Up Your Customer Experience Game! 🎉

Pendo can be tested in the following three ways.

👨‍🏫 Free Demo

To sign up for a fully customised free demo, you’ll have to fill out the form on the Pendo website below to submit a request for a personalised demo with the Pendo sales team.

Schedule a demo with Pendo

🚌 Free Tour

Through the free product tour, you can explore how the Pendo interface works, get an in-depth interactive experience, and understand how the platform can help your business grow and improve your customer experience. In addition, the product tours library has numerous self-guided tours for you to try out, covering the product’s core features for your customers and employees.

Explore how Pendo works with their product tours

🕵️ Free Trial

Finally, the free trial option allows you to start with Pendo Free. You can use this version to understand how your users behave and feel about your product with the analytics and improve and personalise your customer’s in-app experience with Guides and tutorials. 

Through the free trial, you’ll be able to install Pendo Free into your application in a few minutes and start tracking customer data and building helpful user guides.

💸 Pendo Free Is A Great Place To Start!

Pendo Free is a robust, complete platform that can be used with web and mobile applications. Each Pendo Free subscription includes the following:

  • One web, one Android, and one iOS application key
  • No-code analytics and in-app guides
  • Full access to the Pendo community and resource centre

Best of all, there’s no time limit and no credit card required, and it’s free for up to 500 monthly active users. So to start, all you’ll have to do is create a free account and upgrade later accordingly.

Potential Downsides Of Using Pendo

Businesses should consider a few potential downsides to using Pendo before deciding whether it is the right platform for them. 

💰 Cost

Pendo’s pricing is based on the number of users and the features used, which can be expensive for larger businesses. This can concern companies looking for affordable analytics and product engagement solutions.

🧩 Complexity

Some users have found Pendo to be a complex platform that requires a significant investment of time and resources to set up and use effectively. This can be a disadvantage for businesses looking for a simple, straightforward solution.

Some users have also found the platform challenging to use, with a learning curve that can be steep for those unfamiliar with SaaS tools.

🔐 Reliability

Some users have reported issues with Pendo’s reliability, including data loss or the platform going offline. This can be frustrating for businesses that rely on the platform for critical insights and guidance.

✍️ Limited Customisation

Pendo’s in-app guidance and communications tools may offer less customisation than some businesses would like. For example, it may not be possible to fully customise the look and feel of in-app tours or messages to match the product’s branding. 

Some users have also raised concerns regarding limited configurability and customisation in personalisation for product managers who track and manage multiple software modules.

Get Started With Pendo – Pricing & SignUp 💳

Pendo uses a custom pricing model based on monthly active users. However, the platform is still flexible enough to allow you to scale as your user base grows; thus, it is suitable for businesses of all scales. 

📝 Plans To Get Started

For smaller businesses, Pendo offers Free and Starter plans to help get started with the platform.

The Free plan includes up to 500 monthly users and two core product features – product analytics and in-app guides. 

The Starter plan is suitable for businesses with up to 2,000 monthly active users. You’ll also be getting the aforementioned core features and an additional feature in the Net Promoter Score(NPS) – a helpful metric for measuring customer loyalty and overall user satisfaction. The Starter plan will set you back around AUD 10,142 per year. 

↗️ Plans To Scale

Pendo has two scale-driven plans for businesses to choose from to find the best option for their specific needs. They are the Growth and Portfolio plans.

The Growth plan is best suited for companies with a single product/application, while the Portfolio plan is a better fit for businesses with multiple products. In addition, the Growth plan offers advanced analytics and in-app guide features. Still, it lacks other features, such as cross-app reporting and portfolio management, exclusively available on the Portfolio plan.

Both are fully customised plans, which means the monthly expense will depend primarily on the number of monthly active users on your account.

Laptop with analytics on screen for search term what is Pendo?

Takeaways – Powerful Product Analytics With Pendo 😎

To summarise, Pendo is a commercial product analytics and user experience platform that helps companies understand and improve how users interact with their products. It offers a range of features, including in-app guidance, feature adoption tracking, user segmentation, and customer feedback tools. 

Pendo is not a free product; pricing is based on the specific features and number of users a company wants to track. So while yes, it has a free version, there is only so much you can do with it; upgrading to a paid version will be necessary if you want to use the platform entirely.

It is a good option if you’re looking for a comprehensive product analytics platform and are willing to pay for the features that Pendo offers. However, if you are looking for a free solution, other options may be more suitable for your needs.

Pendo can be helpful for businesses looking to improve product adoption, usage, and satisfaction by providing in-app guidance, communications, and analytics. That said, there may be better fits for some, as it can be expensive and require a significant investment in time and resources to set up and use effectively. 

As with any software platform, it’s essential to carefully consider your needs and whether Pendo is the right solution for you before committing to a purchase.

At the end of the day, if you’re looking for an effective way to optimise your product performance and improve your product experience, Pendo could be the right solution. Unsure of how and why? Book a discovery call with us today to see how this platform can help you get the most out of your product data and deliver brilliance in customer experience!

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Published On

January 13, 2023