Salespeople have better things to do with their time than getting bogged down with paperwork. That's why PandaDoc developed their cloud-based software tool: to help remove the burdens typically associated with creating and managing sales documents.
By digitizing and streamlining document processes, PandaDoc helps salespeople close more deals—and close them faster. And for a software company whose raison d'être is to save busy salespeople time, a hiccup-free digital experience is an absolute imperative.
To help them better achieve this goal, PandaDoc turned to Fullstory's experience analytics expertise to gain a more rigorous understanding of their customers' behavior, surface usability issues, and quickly implement optimizations and fixes.
Recently, we met with the Product, Customer Support, and Development teams at PandaDoc in order to discover the specific ways Fullstory helped PandaDoc close the deal on a seamless digital experience.
Observe your users in the wild, not in captivity
Prior to discovering Fullstory, Nathan and his team relied solely on traditional usability testing to observe customer behavior. They continue to run these types of tests because they can produce insights. The problem is they often also produce a bunch of headaches.
Too often, user testing forces us to rely on paid participants rather than actual PandaDoc users, leaving us with doubts about the validity of our findings. And even when we are able to run user testing on our user base instead of artificial participants, the process of getting opt-ins is so expensive and inefficient that it’s challenging to run at scale. —Nathan Lippi, Product Manager for Growth and Insight, PandaDoc
In short, the process causes panda-monium.
Traditional user testing—with its inherent biases and artificiality—can be like watching animals in a zoo. They might play to the crowd. They might be indifferent. Or they might not appear at all, even though you've had their usability test appointment scheduled for weeks and confirmed it with them numerous times.
As useful as observing user testers can be, the observations can feel forced.
Indeed, the only way to get a full, authentic picture of how your users behave is to observe users in their natural habitat. And that's what Fullstory has enabled PandaDoc to do: study the behaviors of their actual customers using the product during real sessions.
A key differentiator that separates PandaDoc from its competitors is its built-in document editor. Through features like one-click uploading, a drag-and-drop interface, reusable proposal templates, and a ready-to-use content library, the editor cuts the time it takes to create fully customizable, highly professional proposals and contracts by up to 65%.
Ensure optimum user onboarding
PandaDoc is in the process of releasing a supercharged version of this editor, and while its core editing features allow for the creation of beautiful, highly flexible documents with fewer clicks, the team was unsure how new users would respond to the not-yet-battle-tested interface.
The PandaDoc team had many questions. They needed answers:
How would users react to the new onboarding flows?
How difficult would it be to discover all the goodies under the hood?
Which parts of the reimagined interfaces would cause confusion for users?
Finally, how could the PandaDoc team make sure the new editor’s value shined through?
Nathan and the product team relied on Fullstory to answer each of these questions. They searched in Fullstory for the segment of actual users who navigated through the new workflow. They replayed user sessions to see, with their own eyes, what was working smoothly and what wasn't. And they used this knowledge to tweak the interface to be more relevant and efficient.
Here's what Nathan had to say about the process: "Before we took the plunge and watched dozens of Fullstory sessions of people using Editor 2.0, we were really confident in our new interface. As we watched Fullstory recordings of users, we realized that there was still more work to do. New users were getting stuck on what seemed to us to be easy tasks. After this discovery, we were able to go in and get some relatively quick wins."
Editor 2.0 is still a work in progress, but all the customer-focused work is paying off. The new editor already has a meaningfully higher NPS score than the previous editor, and the team only expects this score to grow—with continued help from Fullstory, of course. —Nathan Lippi
By acting on the real user insights uncovered from Fullstory, the PandaDoc team insured the success of their new Editor 2.0, resulting in higher NPS scores and happier customers.
Get all the other giant-sized benefits: Customer support, debugging, and QA testing
PandaDoc has also used Fullstory to transform the way they solve digital experience issues through customer support, debugging, and QA testing. Every time a customer contacts PandaDoc with an issue, a support professional can pull up the replay of their session to see exactly what they were in the midst of doing and precisely where things went wrong.
Katya Barsuk, Head of Support at PandaDoc, calls Fullstory "invaluable:"
Our support team has found Fullstory to be invaluable. Knowing the exact nature of the issue that customers experienced without having to bombard them with questions makes resolutions so much faster and more pleasant for everyone. —Katya Barsuk, Head of Support, PandaDoc
Similarly, PandaDoc developers are no longer stuck receiving bug reports with details so scarce it might take days or weeks to fill in the gaps. Instead, through an integration with Sentry, when an error occurs the development team gets notified in Slack. Then, each error report links directly to the session replay showing in absolute detail what the issue looked like to the customer who experienced it.
The combination of the visual information from replay, along with session metadata such as UserAgent data, viewport, and more, ensures PandaDoc developers get everything they need to replicate bugs and resolve tickets in less time than it takes a giant panda to work up an appetite. PandaDoc developer Dmitry Volokh shares:
The Fullstory + Sentry integration has significantly sped up bug investigation —at times by a factor of 10. —Dmitry Volokh, Developer, PandaDoc
Tanya Aulachynskaya, Product Lead, Core Unit is just as enthusiastic about the ways that Fullstory can improve QA testing. "Every time we roll out a mission-critical update, we 'canary test' it with a small percentage of customers, and we watch Fullstory closely, looking for bugs.
“So far, in 100% of these QA tests we've found an important bug that would have otherwise gone straight into production and caused meaningful problems for our customers.”
Plan a game night
One of the best ways to get the maximum value out of Fullstory is to make watching sessions a spectator sport. Gather your coworkers for a night (or day) of analyzing user sessions (as if watching game film), observing customer interactions, and bonding over wins and winces.
Recently, PandaDoc team members did exactly that. Assembled in their Belarus office, they replayed hundreds of Fullstory sessions on a Saturday they dubbed “Customer Empathy Day.”
As they watched sessions, the team learned, celebrated, and winced together: They shared the joy of seeing things go right, and, conversely, the disappointment when users struggled. And perhaps most importantly, they left with valuable insights and action items, notably regarding their mobile sign-up process, the kind of insights they can use to improve their product immediately.
Vik Kuushynau, Head of Product at PandaDoc, said this about the Game Film experience:
The fact that Fullstory allows our team to see how our customers use the platform is very meaningful. Moving forward, this Game Film meeting is going to continue to be a valuable part of how we raise organizational awareness of our users’ needs. —Vik Kuushynau, Head of Product, PandaDoc
Make the digital customer experience your product team’s competitive advantage
We're proud to help PandaDoc take their digital customer experience to the next level, and we want to thank the product team for sharing the amazing results they've experienced with Fullstory so far.
Discover how Fullstory can help your organization: Get a demo of the platform today.
