Order in the (feedback) court
It’s every product manager’s dream to find a loyal user base that’s as passionate about the product as they are. But with a large and active community comes a lot of ideas. Pendo helps you channel customers’ enthusiasm to make more informed product decisions, and empowers you to capture and act on their feedback at scale.
Filevine’s customers have always been enthusiastic about the platform’s capabilities. But the Filevine team didn’t have an easy way to collect all their feedback or analyze it at scale. “Our users are very passionate about our software—which we love—but it means they have so many hopes and dreams and goals and visions for what they’d love to see it do,” explained Mary Lyon, director of product feedback at Filevine. “We were really struggling to keep up with that feedback, and it did actually go into a ‘black hole’ when they were trying to share it with us en masse.”
Lyon and her team knew they needed a solution that could help them draw insights from both the qualitative feedback they were receiving and the quantitative usage and behavioral data they were collecting. “We needed a way for our users to directly give feedback to the product team in an organized way that could have metrics tied to it, so we could compare it with all our other analytics and make better decisions,” said Lyon.
The Filevine team chose Pendo Feedback as the anchor for their user feedback program—in particular for Pendo’s platform approach that would help them correlate qualitative and quantitative insights, prioritize and take action, and close the loop with customers.
From “objection!” to operational efficiency
The Filevine team started seeing immediate benefits from Pendo Feedback, notably in customer trust and satisfaction. “Our customers knew that their ideas weren’t going into a black hole,” Lyon shared. “They knew that we were listening and acting upon what they were sharing with us.”
She also noted that having a single source of truth for user feedback has drastically increased the product and research teams’ productivity and ability to make fast, data-informed decisions—without adding new processes, staff, or manual communications with customers. “It’s not only reduced the marginal costs of our research team, but has actually sped up the time to production for our product development team,” Lyon explained. “Prior to utilizing Pendo Feedback, it took us anywhere from 40 to 50 hours to find out if a problem was affecting all of our customers or figure out if they would get value from a feature. Now we’re able to just run a Pendo report and quickly see how many users voted on the same item or commented with their use cases. It’s cut our research time down significantly,” she said.
As a Pendo Design Partner, Lyon noted that she and her team have also seen a lot of value from Pendo Feedback’s machine learning-powered topic extraction capabilities. “Once we opened up the pathway for users to give us feedback so easily, it increased how much they were sharing—which is a great problem to have,” Lyon explained. She noted that while this influx of feedback has been extremely valuable for Filevine’s product team, it also means there’s a lot more data to sort through. “Being able to rely on technology to help with that, where machine learning can help identify any trends or topics we may have missed, helps us identify areas where we can make the greatest impact for our users.”
In addition to serving as the company’s single source of truth for user feedback data, Pendo Feedback has helped inspire a more collaborative mindset around feedback and product development across the entire organization. “We have a weekly meeting called ‘The Pendo Water Cooler’ where people across different teams and functions can get together to collaborate and talk about what we’re seeing [in the feedback data],” Lyon explained. Roadmaps have played a role in this cultural shift, too, and have even helped empower and reduce stress on Filevine’s customer-facing teams. “Having our roadmap be internally available helps our teams stay up to date with what our customers want or what our product owners are planning,” Lyon said.
Automating closed loop communications through Pendo Feedback has also led to a dramatic reduction in operational costs. Before Pendo Feedback, Filevine’s customer success managers had to manually email each customer to respond to their feature requests. “Reducing that operational cost—because we’re now able to directly correspond with them through the feedback tool—has been huge for us,” Lyon explained.
In the last year alone, Pendo Feedback has saved Filevine over 1,600 hours in support time and helped the product team source over 2,000 new product ideas from users—all without requiring a dramatic overhaul of existing workflows. “We didn’t have to put in new processes or new staff. We’ve actually been able to save money across different departments because of Pendo Feedback,” Lyon said. “It’s been huge for us.”
