The Inefficiency Report asked 100+ leaders at large global enterprises where they are experiencing the most waste, and how they use their product to save costs, grow efficiently, and prepare their companies for the impending downturn. 

The key areas of inefficiency include painfully manual and resource-draining practices around support, a lack of data to prioritise development efforts, difficulty onboarding new customers or employees at scale, poor understanding of user needs and behaviours, and high and unpredictable rates of churn.

Organisations adopting a product-led approach to addressing these challenges have realised efficiencies including a 15% cut in support calls and tickets, a third more qualified sales leads, and a 5% reduction in customer churn. 

Spencer Earp, EMEA MD at Pendo, said: “Right now, it’s more important than ever for companies to prioritise efficiency, trim excess waste and spend, keep the customers they already have, and make sure internal teams are focused on the right – ideally revenue-generating – things.”

“The harsh reality is that inefficient organisations will struggle to survive – but the good news is that most businesses already have what they need to make it through and outlast these difficult circumstances. They just need to look inward and learn how to leverage their secret weapon: their product.”

Key areas of inefficiency:

1. Businesses can’t handle the volume of support calls and tickets – manually triaging every question results in countless hours of wasted time and people resources

Businesses using their products to help customers self-serve the answers they need are seeing a 15% reduction in tickets and calls.

2. They struggle to onboard new customers or employees at scale

Wasting time and energy on user set up and routine processes that could be automated and scaled. Investing in a more user-intuitive product and in-app guides can reduce onboarding time by 27%. 

3. They waste time trying to decipher user needs and behaviours

Lacking data-driven usage and behavioural insights—slowing innovation and causing low adoption. Those that tap into user behaviours to ‘trim the fat’ to focus on key product features can boost total active users by 28%.

4. They experience high and unpredictable rates of customer or employee churn

Reactively addressing risks and challenges – resulting in customer or employee dissatisfaction. Product-led organisations are seeing a 5% reduction in customer churn.

5. They ‘spin their wheels’ on what to build next

Missing the data needed to ruthlessly prioritise roadmaps and focus resources.

Better leveraging data can cut time spent road mapping by 30%, and speed up the customer and employee feedback loop by the same amount. 

6. They are confusing users with out-of-context communication

Relying on external channels like emails to engage with users – leaving them frustrated and undereducated.

In-app communications are better engaging users and sharing the most timely, relevant updates with them in real-time, inspiring the relevant action. 

7. They are overly reliant on sales to drive growth and expansion

Wasting sales and marketing teams’ time and talent on routine prospecting and lead-warming. Offering self-guided tours, freemium offers and trials enables the product to do the qualifying, generating nearly a third more qualified leads. 

8. They have no cohesive way to manage and act on user feedback

Lacking a single, unified source of truth for feedback – making it impossible to act on at scale. Streamlining feedback into one tool, that users can input in real-time and while in-app, makes insights shared more relevant and simpler for IT teams to action. 

9. They struggle to demonstrate value and drive adoption

Missing contextual, in-app guidance – leaving users unaware of or unsure how to use key features. Making the product as simple as possible to get to grips with gets users up to speed quickly and encourages use of features more quickly – as well as identifying where isn’t adding value. 

10. They have no strategy for migrating users to new tools or ways of working

Lacking a cohesive change management and digital transformation strategy – leading to low adoption.

Product analytics helps ensure the products your building or buying fit with what stakeholders actually want, saving time in trying to streamline after launch.