- Low product adoption: Our users who have purchased a subscription to the product are not actively using it or taking advantage of all the features and benefits it offers. This could impact the product's revenue potential, as users who do not actively use the product may not renew their subscriptions. This can ultimately lead to a decrease in the product's overall profitability. Also, it can signal a lack of interest or satisfaction with the product, which can damage the brand's reputation and reduce customer loyalty. When customers feel that a product is not meeting their needs or providing value, they may choose to switch to a competitor's product or service. With research, we found that many users are unaware of the features that we offer in the app. We also know through support calls, that many users are getting stuck and need help using our tools.
- Customers need guidance: Constant Contact caters to small business owners who often wear many hats and have limited time and resources to dedicate to marketing efforts. These customers are not marketing experts, which means that they may lack the knowledge or experience required to create effective marketing campaigns.
- Excessive amount of support calls: Support calls can be time-consuming, frustrating, and inconvenient to our users. It can also lead to a strain on customer support resources and can be costly for the business. Excessive support calls can be an indication that there are issues with the product, such as poor usability or confusing features, which can ultimately lead to customer dissatisfaction and even churn.

Why I advocated for Pendo
- Product tours: enables businesses to create interactive product tours that guide users through new features and functionality within the application.
- User analytics: provides businesses with detailed analytics on how users are interacting with their application, including which features are most commonly used, how often users engage with the application, and where they might be experiencing issues or errors.
- Product feedback: enables businesses to collect feedback from users within the product, which can be used to identify areas for improvement and prioritize development efforts.
- In-app messaging: allows businesses to deliver targeted messages to users within the application, based on their behavior and preferences. This can be used to provide guidance, highlight new features, or encourage users to complete specific actions.
- Product adoption: enables businesses to track how often users are adopting new features and functionality within the application, and use that information to optimize product development and user engagement strategies.
- User segmentation: allows businesses to segment users based on their behavior and preferences, which can be used to personalize the user experience and deliver targeted messaging and guidance
Our UXR team conducted user testing on our apps (Sharpspring and Constant Contact) to identify pain points and areas for improvement for our top feature flows. We also identified the common questions that are being asked to support and documented them in the backlog to address the underlying UX issues. Based on the results of the test and data, we were able to begin auditing our apps. We collected screenshots of the flows and annotated areas that we believed were working well and areas that needed improvement.

1. In app guidance
Due to outdated tools in Sharpspring, some important features are not delivering an efficient user experience. While we work on updating these tools, I started developing Pendo guides to assist users who were getting stuck navigating through the flows and resorting to customer support.

Key Takeaway
Data indicated that users tend to avoid guides with too many steps, so I minimized the number of steps as much as possible and focused solely on addressing the primary pain points where users have been experiencing difficulties.

This guide was important because users needed an SMS lead generation page (landing page) in order to gather consent from their existing customers and the process is long and can be confusing.
In this guide, I added a video to give the users an option to view what steps they would have to perform to create an SMS lead generation landing page.

Key Takeaway
Data proved that users spent time watching the videos I embedded into the guides, and those guides performed better than those without videos.
2. Feature Awareness
I created a guide to inform our user of the features that they have unlocked by upgrading their subscription. Since many users were not aware of all the tools we offer, or were having difficulty locating them, I created a guide that showcases some important features of our product. This guide contains videos on how to use the tools and where they can find them. My goal was to educate users and increase their familiarity with the available tools, which I believed would ultimately improve their overall experience with our product or service.

I created another guide to inform our user of the features by having them choose a goal: optimize there campaigns or grow a healthy email list. Each goal showcases some important features of our product depending on which goal they chose. Each step contains videos on how to use the tools and where they can find them. My goal was to educate users and increase their familiarity with the available tools, while also trying to learn which goal performed better.

I created a guide to inform users about our new feature: SMS. The guide outlines all the key features and capabilities of our SMS tool, highlighting the unique benefits that our product offers. To test the effectiveness of our guide, I created two different versions of the guide, each focusing on different features of our SMS tool. My plan is to compare the results of the two guides to determine which guide performs best. By doing so, I hope to gain insights into what SMS features resonates best with our users, and to ultimately improve the effectiveness of our messaging and communication around this new feature.

I have utilized Pendo pop-up guides to keep our users informed about events, product updates, notifications, discounts, and other important information. These pop-up guides are targeted and segmented, allowing us to deliver customized messages to specific user groups.
In addition to pop-up guides, I also created a reviews guide to increase our reviews on Shopify and Appsumo. This guide not only encourages users to leave a review, but also helps us to understand how seamless the experience is when connecting an integration.
By gathering feedback from users who have left reviews, we can identify pain points and areas for improvement, ultimately enhancing the user experience and increasing the number of positive reviews we receive.

2. Resource Center
I noticed that many people were closing pop-ups for onboarding guides. To address this issue, I came up with the idea of creating a resource center where all the onboarding guides would be available for users. By doing this, users would not be forced to view the guide at that moment, and they could access it whenever they were ready or needed help.
My goal was to make the onboarding guides more accessible and less intrusive, which I believed would improve the overall user experience.

The adoption of our features were low because many users were unaware of all the tools available in Constant Contact. To address this, I created guides that would highlight various features in our app and demonstrate how to use them and where to find them.
Our data indicated that if users did not try out the tools within the first couple of months of their subscription, they were unlikely to ever use them. To improve user onboarding, we recognized that most users did not know where to begin, so I developed guides to encourage them where they should start and which tool they should use.
Additionally, we discovered that many users upgraded their subscription for a particular feature without being aware of all the other features they had unlocked. I aimed to increase awareness of our tools and their benefits to help users get the most out of their subscription.
We also encountered issues with poor user experience leading to users getting stuck and having to call support. To address this, we collected users most frequent questions from support calls and developed guides to help users navigate the app without having to rely on support. We also noted these issues in our backlog to improve the overall user experience in the future.
Finally, to prevent customer attrition to our competitors, we needed to inform our users about the tools we have available and the ways they can benefit from using them. By educating our users on the full range of our offerings, we aimed to increase customer retention and loyalty.