Pendo

Papercrane

Pendo measures adoption. Renewals get decided in a spreadsheet.

Renewal dates, ARR, and ticket history live in Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk. Papercrane's AI agent reads Pendo usage beside your CRM and help desk and builds customer health as a live hosted dashboard that opens without a Pendo seat.

See the renewal brief

Connect in about a minute with a key you create in your Pendo settings. Free to connect and ask. Paid plans start when you publish a dashboard. See pricing

Pendo's help center already designed this dashboard

Pendo's guide for CS teams scores health on usage breadth, depth, and frequency, names renewal dates, ARR, and tickets as data that starts somewhere else, and then says:

"Download the reports as a CSV to manipulate columns, sort, and filter."

Pendo help center, Improve customer health and retention

The dashboard is specified; the build step is a spreadsheet, every quarter, by you.

The brief before the renewal call

One account, read fully: what Pendo knows about their usage, next to what your CRM and help desk know about the relationship. The agent writes one of these for every account in your book and keeps them current.

Renewal brief

Example account

Northstar Logistics · renews January 14 · $86,000 ARR

Salesforce

41 of 63 seats active this month, down from 55 in the spring

Pendo

4 of 7 core features used in the last 30 days

Pendo

Reporting module: untouched since June

Pendo

6 open tickets, two about the reporting module

Zendesk

The renewal conversation is about the reporting module.

your dashboard

Health scores compress this into one number. The brief keeps the evidence, so the CSM walks into the call knowing which module to talk about.

Start with Pendo alone: the usage half of the brief works on day one, and the CRM and ticket lines join when you connect those sources, or from the renewals spreadsheet you already keep.

Three asks, one export ritual

The renewal ask.

CS wants to know which of next quarter's renewals are actually using the product. Today that is an account report export and a lookup against the CRM's renewal report.

The launch ask.

Product wants to know if the March feature landed, by segment and by revenue. Pendo can chart the clicks; the segment and the revenue live in other systems.

The board slide ask.

Leadership wants adoption and revenue on the same slide. Today it is screenshots pasted the night before, stale on arrival.

Each of these is one question to the agent, and the answer is a dashboard that stays current instead of a file you rebuild next quarter.

Ask what you've been exporting to find out

Which accounts renewing in the next 90 days have falling usage?

joins your CRM

Which features do our top 20 accounts by ARR actually use?

joins your CRM

Did the accounts that churned last year look different in Pendo the quarter before they left?

joins your CRM

Do the accounts filing the most tickets also show falling logins?

joins your help desk

Which paid features sit below 10% adoption across the book?

Did the onboarding guide change week two feature use, or just get viewed?

Every answer comes back as a chart on a live dashboard, not a CSV you still have to do something with.

1. Create a key in your Pendo settings

2. Ask a question

3. The agent plans the queries, reads Pendo beside your CRM and help desk, and builds a hosted dashboard

4. It stays live, and when a refresh breaks, the error routes back to the agent for repair

Read access only, straight from Pendo. Papercrane never writes into Pendo and never shows anything to your users; your guides and data stay exactly as they are.

Did the guide work, or just get viewed?

Pendo counts a guide's views, completions, and clicks; its own onboarding guidance says those tell only part of the story. The agent reads guide engagement against the feature the guide was pushing and answers whether behavior actually changed.

The gap between the spreadsheet and the platform

The quarterly spreadsheet.

The export, the lookup against the renewal report, the chart rebuilt in slides. Free, except for the afternoon it takes, four times a year.

The CS platform implementation.

Gainsight class tools do this join properly, at $50K to $250K a year plus an implementation, on top of what Pendo already costs. Worth it for a large CS org running playbooks; a long way around for reporting.

When you don't need us

If your questions live inside the product, funnels, paths, retention curves for the product team, Pendo's Data Explorer and its Leo AI answer them where the data already sits; you're paying for that, use it. If your CS org needs playbooks, task queues, and automated outreach, that is a customer success platform like Gainsight, and we are not one. Papercrane earns its place when the answer needs Pendo and the CRM and the help desk at once, and when it has to live on a dashboard someone without a Pendo seat can open.