The News: I recently had the chance to catch up with the WalkMe team to learn more about how the company’s digital adoption platform (DAP) is well positioned to remove stumbling blocks and friction points from both a customer experience and employee experience perspective. Senior Solutions Consultant at WalkMe, Leon Ashley, walked me through a demo that focused on the benefits employees receive from being on a DAP platform.
Related Research Note: WalkMe Q1 2023 Revenues up 16% Year-over-Year
WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform Helps Remove EX Friction Points
Analyst Take: WalkMe’s DAP platform offers a comprehensive way to smooth out internal processes, identify usage patterns, and identify cost savings. However, the benefits also extend to employees who are looking for a more seamless digital experience.
Technology Sprawl Causes Company-Wide and Employee Specific Issues
The massive digital transformation that has been occurring, while offering a host of benefits across industries, has also left a wake of issues caused by the substantial amount of software applications being implemented and used (or not used) within organizations.
According to WalkMe, companies with more than 2,000 employees are running over 185 applications and on average, and employees use 27 different applications on a weekly basis. Often, there is not a lot of visibility into what tools the company is using, which can lead to slow adoption and wasted software investment dollars. WalkMe’s Digital Adoption report found that 51% of large enterprises are unaware of the applications deployed in their companies, leading to a roughly $17 million annual investment that is wasted on software that is duplicative or not being used.
Employees who are expecting consumer-grade types of digital interactions in their work lives are often faced with a less-than-optimal and often inconsistent experience when accessing applications across an organization. And these digital pain points often add up to frustrated employees who are not being productive (or happy) in their jobs, or even worse, employee resignations.
Visibility Supports Efficiencies, Increased Usage, and the Removal of Roadblocks
The lack of an organization-wide view is a real roadblock and that is where the usage of a DAP platform can provide solutions not only to the company as a whole but to the individual employee who is simply trying to get their work done.
An employee’s experience is increasingly a digital one. According to Leon, “There are two crucial angles when it comes to considering an employee’s digital experience. First, the management, top-down perspective. Does management understand what employees are using and how they are using it? Also, and just as important, do they have the ability to drive the user experience at an organization level to promote efficiencies, compliance, ROI, and change resilience.
Second is the bottom-up employee perspective. Are employees empowered to get their job done or do they face steep learning curves and time-wasting activities like constantly needing to context switch between applications?”
WalkMe’s solution helps with these issues by laying across a company’s technology stack and uncovering data that that has historically been hard to nail down, such as usage frequency, most time spent on an application, what departments have high or low usage, etc. The ability to drill into user behavior and find what the friction points look like, where users are abandoning a process and what workflows are not working optimally will help employees. Processes that are problematic can be tagged for follow up and action. As an example, even something as seemingly simple as finding and filling out a form can be optimized for employees and analyzed by management to look for issues.
Action Within the Flow of Work
Getting visibility into usage and experience is key to maximizing investment and identifying potential issues. Another critical piece of smoothing out digital interactions is helping to provide the most relevant content to employees as well as providing recommendations and actions in real time.
The demo I had showed how onboarding could be made easier for employees. An onboarding menu can be presented with a list of what needs to be done and some virtual handholding (if needed) as employees make their way through their action items and/or learning materials. WalkMe can understand if it is an employee’s first day, or if it is the first time using an application, and can present content that is most applicable and helpful.
WalkMe’s ActionBot was demonstrated during the briefing as a tool that can help make experiences like this happen. It is similar to a traditional chatbot but can take actions, such as automatically taking you to the appropriate application without needing to log into a portal, and can also auto populate information, drawing from other internal systems. Additionally, employees can find information, automate tasks, and start workflows all from Workstation, which serves as a portal to the company’s entire SaaS ecosystem.
Employee experience is a topic that is getting a lot of attention lately. It is important to keep in mind that EX is not just the big milestones that happen during an employee’s journey with their employer, but it is also the micro-moments, whether they be positive or extremely frustrating. If employees are spending too much time on mundane processes, face laborious training, are unable to find needed information, or get stymied by broken workflows, those micro-moments will steamroll morale and engagement and possibly their desire to work for that company. Tools like digital adoption platforms are important to smooth out that digital employee journey and help employees put their time, skills, and abilities into the jobs they were hired to do.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
