May 2025 Meetups

May 1: Driving Engagement & Insights with Pendo: A Nelnet Success Story

Nelnet Team Introductions and Context

• Rebecca Turner introduced the Nelnet team: herself, Liz Feller, Heather Tipton, and Vlad.
• Shared Nelnet's mission and services.
• Explained that their knowledge base is called "Hub Help."
• Noted use of Pendo across 14 NBS products since March 2023.

Use Case: Launching Hub Help AI with Pendo

• Liz Feller described Pendo’s core capabilities: in-app guidance, feedback collection, and detailed analytics.
• Highlighted their April 2025 launch of "Hub Help AI":
  • Used Pendo in-app guides to increase adoption and explain the AI toggle.
  • Measured adoption through feature clicks and guide views.
  • 172 users activated the AI toggle; 47 provided feedback.

Enhancing Feedback Collection with Pendo

• Negative feedback triggered Pendo follow-ups to gather more context (e.g., incomplete report names).
• Rebecca Turner explained the importance of guiding users to ask better questions of AI.
• Liz Feller shared that Pendo enables tracking user paths and understanding the feedback context.

Building Personalized and Contextual Support

• Custom Resource Centers built for different user segments.
• Rebecca Turner highlighted how tooltip guides and conditional rules (inspired by Matt Adlai-Gail) improve the search experience.
• Use of Pendo to add authoring tooltips for CXone editors (e.g., Dekiscript badges).

Analytics and Measurement with Pendo

• Liz Feller shared dashboard examples tracking:
  • Engagement by feature and role.
  • Growth in new users/accounts.
  • Power user behavior.
• Visual tools (Paths and Funnels) revealed surprising behavior:
  • 93% of users initiate searches from within articles (suboptimal behavior).
  • Editors search differently from other users.

AI Feature Insights and Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Compared user interaction with and without the AI toggle.
• Monitored feedback by audience segments (internal vs. external, new vs. seasoned users).
• Used Pendo's built-in NPS tool with customization per audience type.

Open Q&A and Participant Reflections

• Katherine Wedgewood, Emily Reed, and others asked about contextual help metrics, feedback management, and technical integration.
• Nelnet uses Power Automate + Asana to triage and assign feedback.
• Heather Tipton shared a 77% year-over-year increase in feedback after pinning feedback buttons with Pendo guides.

Technical Details: Pendo Implementation

• Liz Feller explained Pendo licensing is based on monthly active users and feature selection.
• Integration with CXone was seamless.
• All 8000+ pages tagged through internal “tagging parties.”
• Shared tips and guides with Matt Adlai-Gail about feedback integration and tagging best practices.

Final Reflections and Community Sharing

• Matt Adlai-Gail highlighted GenAI as a breakthrough for content navigation and ticket deflection.
• Nelnet anticipates significant impact once GenAI rolls out to external users in Q3.
• Ongoing collaboration and sharing of tooltips, usage stats, and AI prompts encouraged across community.

May 8: Expert Product Team New Releases & Roadmap

Join our Product team as they unveil Expert’s new product releases and roadmap! Discover upcoming features, enhancements, and initiatives designed to empower and enrich your experience with our product. Gain valuable insights into our vision, priorities, and timelines directly from our product leaders. This interactive session will also include a Q&A segment to address your important feature questions. Don’t miss this opportunity to see the future product vision coming to Expert!

May 22: Coffee Hour with Experts - Content for Self-Service

Highlights of this customer meetup:

Identifying Good Public-Facing Content

• A quiz-style poll asked which article title was most suitable for a public knowledge base.
• Kalyn Howard (Westerra) quickly flagged jargon like “SOP 147B” as confusing, reinforcing the importance of using customer-friendly language.
• Cody Sackett (Expert) highlighted the need to “walk away from internal shorthand” and consider the customer’s first-time experience.

Why Self-Service? Shared Benefits

• Kalyn Howard (Westerra): Helps eliminate unnecessary customer calls and trips, improving convenience.
• Jeannette Loya (Public Storage): It’s cost-effective and supports call deflection goals.
• Aliya Nadeeva (Model N): Moving repetitive support ticket answers to the knowledge base reduced costs and increased efficiency.

Naming and Navigation Practices

• Aliya Nadeeva(Model N): Balanced internal search needs with customer clarity by keeping ticket IDs in URLs but giving articles clear, friendly titles.
• Cody Sackett (Expert): Praised this dual-approach strategy as a great way to support both internal and external users.

Common Challenges

• Jeannette Loya (Public Storage): Executive hesitation when self-service content could reduce revenue (e.g., instructions to cancel services).
• Kalyn Howard (Westerra): Governance is tricky—balancing internal content ownership with new public-facing needs.
• Heather Tipton (Nelnet): Highlighted the shift needed to support mobile-first design for family and student users.
• Cody Sackett (Expert): Reframed these issues as structural and content governance challenges that come with expanding audiences.

Screenshots, Permissions, and Conditional Content

• Kalyn Howard (Westerra) and Kelle McConnell (Netsmart): Shared strategies to separate public and internal content or use conditional text to serve both in one place.
• Aliya Nadeeva (Model N): Asked if CSS-hidden transcript content would be searchable by GenSearch (it is).
• Cody Sackett (Expert): Confirmed GenSearch respects permission settings—hidden content or gated internal sections won’t be surfaced to customers.

Decision-Making Frameworks

• Jeannette Loya (Public Storage): Balancing content that deflects calls vs. content that supports customer retention.
• Katherine Wedgewood (Liaison): Reversed the decision logic—teams must justify why content shouldn’t be public. Uses 80/20 rule: only keep internal if it's relevant to the minority of edge cases.

Governance and Future Planning

• Kalyn Howard (Westerra): Planning a “members-only” content space and stressed the need for long-term governance strategies.
• Kelle McConnell (Netsmart): Internal leadership often dictates what can be made public, limiting API use or web exposure.

AI, GenSearch, and Content Optimization

• Cody Sackett (Expert): Demonstrated how the AI Editor tool can simplify technical articles for public consumption (e.g., rewriting a coffee SOP for beginners).
• Aliya Nadeeva (Model N) and Kalyn Howard (Westerra): Asked about permissioning and GenSearch logic—how to tune visibility for different audiences.
• Cody (Expert) clarified that GenSearch respects permission levels and can be tested with structured prompts or customized article rewrites.

 AI Writing Philosophy

• Kalyn Howard (Westerra): Advocated for writing for humans first, teaching AI to follow that structure—“AI is a toddler, it needs to learn.”
• Ariel Antelo (Netsmart): Reinforced consistency and FAQ-based formats as key to training AI for effective answers.
• Also promoted using short videos over multiple screenshots for easier updates.

Closing Thoughts

• Cody Sackett (Expert) Emphasized that strong IA (information architecture) and simplified, structured content benefits both users and AI systems.
• Sharon Huey (Expert): Encouraged everyone to keep working with their CSMs and invited them to upcoming meetups on GenSearch and APIs.