How Shelterluv Improved Customer Experiences by Switching from Pendo to Userpilot6 min read
Shelterluv is a CRM solution for animal shelters and rescues. The platform enables customers to handle tasks like tracking animal intake, medical history, adoptions, transfers, and other outcomes.
We recently caught up with Matthew Brown, Shelterluv’s Senior Customer Solutions Manager, who is in charge of their support and onboarding department.
The main topic? Shelterluv’s transition from Pendo to Userpilot and how it improved their customer experience.
Dive in to find out what happened.
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TL;DR
- Challenge: Shelterluv found Pendo too complex to use. As a result, they only used a limited set of features like in-app messaging and NPS surveys, which didn’t justify the high price tag.
- Solution: Shelterluv decided to switch to Userpilot due to better value for money, ease of use, and responsive customer support. They use it for in-app messaging, flow analytics, segmentation, and onboarding checklists.
- Results: The switch to Userpilot helped Shelterluv improve customer experience and reduce support workload through better-targeted in-app messaging.
- Userpilot is a superior product growth tool than Pendo. It offers more competitive pricing, a wider range of engagement UI patterns, better experimentation capabilities, real-time analytics updates, and better customer support compared to Pendo. Book the demo to find out more!
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Challenge: Overcoming Pendo’s high cost and product complexity
Shelterluv had a few issues with Pendo.
First, Pendo was too complex to use.
One of the bigest feedback the team had about Pendo was like, we just don’t know how to use it. And it’s hard to figure out. We don’t have the time to just like, sit and read through everything to figure out how to use it.
– Matthew Brown, Senior Customer Solutions Manager at Shelterluv
As a result, they didn’t use it to its full potential. In fact, they used it for in-app messaging and NPS surveys only. And the latter was buggy. Their customer support was also slow, which was another nail in the coffin.
Given the limited usage, the high cost of Pendo’s solution was very difficult to justify, especially after they phased out Pendo for Startups, and the price nearly doubled.
Solution: Transitioning to Userpilot for better value for money and ease of use
Despite concerns about migration from Pendo, Shelterluv decided to switch to Userpilot.
The main reason?
Userpilot offered better value for money and was easier to use.
The migration turned out to be not that complex, and after 1-2 weeks, they had Userpilot up and running.
This was possible thanks to Userpilot’s super responsive customer support team:
Userpilot’s support agent was super responsive to any of the questions that our product manager had and gave her the resources in a way that was easy for her to share with the rest of the team.
– Matthew Brown, Senior Customer Solutions Manager at Shelterluv
Currently, Shelterluv uses Userpilot for:
- In-app messaging.
- Flow analytics.
- Segmentation.
- Onboarding checklists.
They also plan to use Userpilot’s feedback and analytics functionality in the future.
Talking of features… Matthew was impressed by Userpilot’s roadmap and the pace at which Userpilot launched new features. There was nothing like that at Pendo during the 1+ year he used it.
Results: Improved customer communication and reduced support workload
How effective was the Userpilot switch?
Shelterluv managed to improve how they share information with customers. That’s because the in-app messages they created were better targeted and offered customers exactly what they needed.
This improved the customer experience and reduced the workload of the support team. As the communication is more effective, they have fewer tickets to deal with.
In support and onboarding, Userpilot has been a time saver and has reduced the workload of a lot of the agents because we’re able to use in-app messaging to share information at scale.
– Matthew Brown, Senior Customer Solutions Manager at Shelterluv
Userpilot – a superior product growth tool than Pendo
How does Userpilot stack up against Pendo?
For starters, Userpilot’s pricing is more competitive. It offers pretty much the same features at a fraction of Pendo’s cost.
What’s worse, some of Pendo’s features, like the AI-writing assistant or localization, aren’t included in the plans. You need to buy them as add-ons – nothing like that in Userpilot.
When it comes to the engagement layer, Userpilot supports more UI patterns than Pendo. These include modals, tooltips, banners, slideouts, hotspots, and driven actions.
In Pendo, you only get banners, tooltips, and lightboxes (like modals).
Userpilot offers greater experimentation capabilities: you can conduct 3 different kinds of A/B and multivariate tests. They allow you to compare the performance of various onboarding flows and in-app messages. In contrast, Pendo has only basic guide A/B testing features.
Pendo is well-known for its analytics capabilities. However, the product is lacking in a few ways.
For example, Userpilot updates analytics dashboards in real time, while Pendo only refreshes data once per hour. And it can even take an additional 15 minutes to finish updating the data during high-volume periods. This restricts your ability to respond to new developments in time.
Finally, as Matthew mentioned, Userpilot provides better customer support than Pendo.
Userpilot’s Growth and Enterprise customers can get assistance by email, live chat, and phone. And they get a dedicated customer success manager to help them implement the product and maximize its value. Pendo offers only an online helpdesk, live chat, Slack, and scheduled video conferencing support.
Conclusion
Although Pendo is a more established platform than Userpilot, Shelterluv found it lacking in a few key areas.
The product is more expensive and less intuitive to use, which means they couldn’t get its full value. To make matters worse, their support was slow to respond.
Fortunately, they weren’t discouraged by how complex migration from Pendo to Userpilot originally seemed to be and successfully switched to a superior product to offer a better experience to their customers.
Want to follow in their footsteps? Book the demo!
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