Overview

The Bandwidth Customer Experience Team had long been using Pendo’s in-application guide functionality to surface guides to our users on more confusing topics and functions that were in the Bandwidth Dashboard interface (and still do today!). But users would often send in support tickets for our support team to guide them through a process that already had a guide tied to it.

Talking with a few customers and members of our support team, it became clear that the guides were extremely useful when the users saw them, but triggering guides was confusing and inconsistent across the board.

“Sometimes I don’t want to read a guide the moment it pops up, so I just close out. But I would love to be able to re-launch that guide when I had more time to actually go through it” - Ralph Newman

The CX (customer experience) team and I decided it would be useful to leverage Pendo’s Resource Center product has a hub for our users to go to when they wanted guidance on one of the many features.

Problem

How might we (Bandwidth's Customer Experience Team) provide users training and support resources in a centralized location?

There were a few requirements that the new Resource Center had to meet in order to get the seal of UX approval. All Resource Center components must appear to be native within the Bandwidth Dashboard application. Style the Resource Center in a way that would mimic the current design system. Meet WCAG AA 2.0 accessibility standards.

Key Results

The goal of this project was to reduce the number of customer support tickets submitted asking for guidance about portal functionality that already had an existing tutorial. We compared number of these tickets submitted after the completion of the project to determine if fewer customers were requesting support, indicating customers were more successful in accessing the guides to resolving their questions.

Journey

I worked with the CX (customer experience) team to help create a system in which new and returning users would be able to access guides to features that they may not understand or just might have forgotten how to use.

I began by researching what tools we had available to use and talking with the CX team about how they wanted to approach the solution to this problem.

The conclusion was Pendo would be used to surface guides. We (Bandwidth) had already been using Pendo analytics services for a while so it was a natural decision to make use of a feature we were paying for but hadn’t actually used. Additionally, Pendo has the ability to contain guides in a “Resource Center”. This would allow us to give users the ability to view and review a guide whenever they wanted.

While members of the CX team focused on guide content (I’m not a writer), I began more research on how we could surface these guides to users. I did more research on how other companies had implemented similar solutions and began to create some early mockups of what ours could look like.

Some early concepts of the “Bandwidth Learning Lab” were made to show just how much we could accomplish using the resource center feature. Not only could we provide the guides that were needed to solve the problem, but we could also provide support directly from the learning lab itself. Potentially further reducing the number of support tickets that would be received.

As higher fidelity iterations were made and presented to the CX team to review, I began some user testing with my mockups so I could see how the learning lab changed the way that users would interact with support if they had the option to chat live within their web browser.

The results were clear and unsurprising (to me at least). Users much preferred having the option to connect with support over a live chat service rather than picking up the phone and calling a support rep. Unfortunately the CX and support teams didn’t have the capacity to restructure their operations to support live chat, so we didn’t ultimately follow through with the feature in final designs.

Once all stakeholders agreed on the content and features to be included in the learning lab, I tightened up the design for final approval.

Pendo did not have the ability to easily style their resource center product. This meant that we had to get creative with styling the resource center.

It ended up falling on me to find some loopholes in the Pendo system to be able to implement the CSS of the design that I had created. Pendo reps pointed me in the direction of the files I needed to find and edit, and I did the rest.

After it was all said and done, we ended up hitting the key result. Our work had successfully reduced the number of support tickets that we received while also providing users with some new options for getting in touch with support (even though live chat wasn’t one of them).

Our rep at Pendo was impressed by how we were able to completley customize their product to fit our use case. They asked me and a CX team member to give a presentation at one of their webinars on how we were able to accomplish this task by only using the limited number of tools the resource center product had to offer.

You can check out the full presentation by clicking the button below!

Challenges

Many of the challenges from this project were from factors outside of my control dictating what had to be done. But not when it came to the design of the learning lab. Having overwhelming data that showed our users craved live chat and not implementing that feature was pretty devastating for me.

It felt like such an easy win for everyone involved (I talked with internal support reps who wanted to spend less time on the phone). But I had to let go of that concept for that project and just continue to advocate for its value.

The resource center product from Pendo having limited customizability was also a huge obstacle to overcome. There was a good chunk of time where we thought we would have to buy a new tool all together to actually accomplish our mission. Only after doing some deep diving with Pendo support for weeks did we actually realize that our design could be implemented......just extremely painfully.