Here’s a scene I keep watching on calls. A CSM needs to show a customer how their team is actually using the product. So they export a CSV, pull it into a spreadsheet, build a few charts by hand, and paste screenshots into a deck. Half a day, gone. Meanwhile the company is paying real money for Pendo, which was built to answer exactly that question.
When I ask why they don’t just use Pendo, the answer is almost always some version of “oh, that’s the product team’s tool.”
I want to get ahead of that, because it’s costing you more than you think. Before we fix anything, a few things need to be said:
You did not buy Pendo for the product team. You bought it for the business. Product teams use it to decide what to build. Customer Success owns the renewal. If usage data never reaches the people responsible for keeping customers, you bought an analytics platform for the half of the business that doesn’t carry a retention number.
And your CS team isn’t lazy or stubborn. In most cases, nobody built anything for them. The dashboards that exist show feature adoption across the whole user base, which is useful for a roadmap and nearly useless for a renewal call. Handing a CSM a global adoption dashboard is like handing someone a map of the whole country when they asked for directions to lunch. They don’t care about aggregate trends. They care about their fifteen accounts, and specifically the three that have gone quiet.
So the data sits there. Trusted by no one, checked by no one, and renewal conversations keep running on gut feel. Let’s fix that in three steps.
Ask yourself: can a CSM on your team see their own book of business in Pendo in one click? If the answer is no, start here.
Build account-level dashboards filterable by CSM. Not a global adoption view. A “here are your customers, here’s who’s healthy, here’s who’s slipping” view. This is the fix that teams we work with respond to fastest, because it’s the first time the tool answers a question they actually have.
Resist the urge to put twenty metrics on it. Sit down with the CS team and agree on five to seven numbers that genuinely signal health. Active users against licensed seats. Usage of the two or three features that correlate with customers sticking around. A trend line, not just a snapshot. Here’s the test for every metric: if it wouldn’t change what a CSM does this week, it doesn’t make the cut.
One more thing that sounds obvious and gets skipped constantly: train them. A 45-minute working session where CSMs bring real accounts and real questions does more for adoption than any amount of dashboard polish.
Now ask: how many tools does a CSM have to open to prep for one renewal call?
CSMs live in their CRM, their inbox, and their calendar. Asking them to log into one more tool and remember to check it weekly is asking a lot from people who are already stretched. So don’t. Get a handful of those health metrics out of Pendo and into the CRM, whether that’s Salesforce, HubSpot, or something else.
Once usage data lives on the account record, things change. A CSM prepping for a call sees product usage next to contract value and open tickets without switching tabs. You can build alerts, so a meaningful drop in activity creates a task instead of waiting for someone to notice it. One team we work with is replacing a stack of static usage reports with exactly this kind of workflow, because the real request behind every report ask was never “show me a chart.” It was “tell me which customers are drifting so I can do something about it.”
A report someone has to remember to read will decay. A task, an alert, or a field on a record they already look at will survive.
Last question: when a customer gives your CSM product feedback, where does it go?
In most Pendo setups, everything lands in one undifferentiated pile. A single “contact us” button routes it all to support, enhancement requests clog the ticket queue, and product ideas die in a system built for troubleshooting.
Separate the streams inside Pendo. Support issues go to the ticketing system. Enhancement requests go to a product backlog. This cuts real volume out of the support queue, and it gives your CSMs an honest answer to “what happened to my feedback,” which is a small thing that builds a surprising amount of customer trust.
None of this works if the underlying data is a mess. I’ve watched it happen: if visitor and account IDs are shaky or tagging is scattered, fix that first, because the fastest way to lose a CS team forever is to show them a health score they catch being wrong. You only get one shot at that first impression.
But if the foundation is solid, this is some of the highest-return work you can do with a tool you’re already paying for. See if you can get one real usage metric in front of one CSM this week and watch what they do with it.
And if your CS team is still exporting CSVs to answer basic usage questions, I’m happy to talk through what this could look like for you. I offer a free 30-minute Pendo strategy session, no pitch, just a working conversation about your setup and where the quickest wins are.
If CS keeps missing adoption signals, our step-by-step guide to getting your team to use Pendo lays out the exact rollout steps.
In most cases nobody built anything for them. The dashboards that exist show feature adoption across the whole user base, which is built for roadmap decisions rather than renewal conversations. A CSM does not need aggregate trends. They need to see their own accounts, and specifically the ones that have gone quiet.
Agree on five to seven numbers that signal health rather than twenty that signal activity. Active users against licensed seats, usage of the two or three features that correlate with customers sticking around, and a trend line instead of a snapshot. The test for any metric: if it would not change what a CSM does this week, leave it off.
Yes. CSMs work in their CRM, inbox and calendar, so usage data belongs on the account record next to contract value and open tickets. Once it lives there you can build alerts, so a meaningful drop in activity creates a task instead of waiting for someone to notice it.
The data foundation. If visitor and account IDs are unreliable or tagging is scattered, fix that first. The fastest way to lose a CS team is to show them a health score they catch being wrong.
Related reading: crafting CSAT prompts that get honest answers and building a voice of customer report.