Thermo Fisher Scientific boosts productivity, improves adoption of Workday® and Salesforce® thanks to WalkMe

Thousands of Thermo Fisher Scientific employees rely on powerful platforms like Salesforce® and Workday® every day—but many do not use the full potential of the advanced software. Thermo Fisher turned to WalkMe for an all-in-one digital adoption tool to ensure consistent training, efficient onboarding, and increased productivity.

Thanks to WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform, Thermo Fisher sees:

• 20% reduction in Salesforce®-related support tickets
• 70% engagement during Workday® onboarding
• 83% of users rely on WalkMe for ongoing training and support
• Eliminated monthly live training sessions
• 2000% improvement in data accuracy

Thermo Fisher Scientific is a fast-growing provider of innovative technologies to health care, life sciences, and related industries. With over 70,000 global employees, the company needed a tool that would ensure efficient and consistent onboarding and training in multiple languages. The company also wanted to improve employee adoption of, and ongoing engagement with, two advanced platforms: Salesforce® and Workday®.

As part of its digital adoption and change management strategy, Thermo Fisher implemented WalkMe for both of these key applications. Employees now have access to customized in-app guidance and real-time instruction. As a result, Thermo Fisher reports more streamlined onboarding processes and a reduction in support tickets and processing errors. Furthermore, WalkMe ShoutOuts and SmartTips have revolutionized how Thermo Fisher is able to communicate with users from within the applications.

Thermo Fisher Scientific relies on a small and efficient IT team to support a large group of employees. To allow the IT team to focus on strategic issues, however, the company needed a way to drive user adoption of its digital tools—to boost productivity while reducing repetitive, process-related questions. This was particularly true in relation to Salesforce®, which more than 3,000 Thermo Fisher employees use daily. The company’s traditional training resources, an ad hoc collection of hands-on tutorials, webinars, and static work instructions, weren’t scalable.

“We wanted to make sure users fully understand the processes they were expected to do daily,” says Michele Giacomuzzi, Thermo Fisher CRM training and engagement specialist. “Our end goal was to reduce the amount of support tickets, whether they came through email, a phone call, or via a case module on Salesforce®.”

The company also needed a tool to improve its change management strategy in regards to communicating new Salesforce® features or updates. Email and other traditional internal communications often went unread.

“We want our employees to have a resource at their fingertips in case a process has changed, or they forget how to do a process, or don’t know how to initiate a process,” Giacomuzzi says.

As a final pain point, many Salesforce® users were inconsistent in how they named their sales opportunities, contributing to an unorganized database. Ensuring all users adhere to a standard naming convention would lead to better data control, customer management, and more effective sales follow-up.

Thermo Fisher turned to WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform to simplify training and communication directly within Salesforce®. WalkMe functions as an invisible overlay on top of the Salesforce® platform, offering real-time communication and assistance exactly at the point of need.

Working with WalkMe, Thermo Fisher built more than 40 customized Smart Walk-Thrus to guide users step-by-step through Salesforce® processes. Now, when Giacomuzzi and her team want to highlight new Salesforce® features or updates, they use strategically placed SmartTips (tooltips for guidance or validation) or ShoutOuts (custom text balloons) to draw users’ attention to the information they need, exactly when they need it.

“WalkMe’s on-screen support allows us to preempt or predict questions and concerns, instead of reacting to them,” says Giacomuzzi. “That encourages users to engage directly with Salesforce®, and increases their comfort level with the platform.”

Thermo Fisher employed WalkMe’s validation feature to verify that all new sales opportunities are named according to the set conventions. Real-time feedback ensures incorrect names cannot be entered and the user is informed on what the correct process is. “The interactive guidance simplifies and clarifies the processes for creating, naming, and editing information about opportunities,” Giacomuzzi says. “Now users don’t have to reach out to their colleagues or to the CRM team for support.”

Thermo Fisher reports that its Salesforce® users have embraced WalkMe with an engagement rate of 90%. Furthermore, since implementing WalkMe, Thermo Fisher has seen a 20% reduction in support tickets from Salesforce® users.

“WalkMe gives users the confidence to go and find answers to their questions themselves, reducing the amount of tickets that come in,” Giacomuzzi says. WalkMe’s in-app resources have replaced many time-consuming in-person training sessions, she adds, saving CRM team members between 3 and 4 hours each a week. “That’s time the support team can spend on more important things,” she points out.

Employees, too, are more productive: using on-screen self-help support saves users 2 to 3 hours a day, compared to using traditional job aids, webinars, or workshops.

WalkMe has also transformed the internal communication with sales reps. “Some of the users didn’t even know that so many changes were going on,” says Giacomuzzi. “But when WalkMe showed up on their screen, bringing the functionality right in front of them, they knew exactly what the updates were and how they were relevant.”

The validation feature that helps users spot inconsistencies or incorrect names at the point of entry prevented more than 3,000 entry errors within the first 6 months of use. “The SmartTip on the opportunity naming convention has been used more times than any other process or concept that we’ve built,” Giacomuzzi says. “Corrections are now made immediately, saving us a lot of time and frustration”.

“Most importantly, instead of waiting on IT to conceptualize a fix, build it, and deploy it, which could take months, I am able to build out a WalkMe solution in a matter of hours” says Giacomuzzi. “This was critical during the global pandemic. We were able to deploy a simple yet elegant solution to encourage reps to use a specific naming convention when creating COVID related opportunities, resulting in a 2000% increase in documentation of those opportunities”. WalkMe gives Thermo Fisher the ability to act and react quickly, creating more effective solutions to empower their organization, at times where it’s most important for their business.

Looking ahead, Thermo Fisher plans to expand its use of WalkMe for Salesforce® to other groups across the organization. WalkMe will also be key in its upcoming migration to Salesforce® Lightning.

With over 70,000 employees globally, Thermo Fisher Scientific needed to think strategically about how to roll out their new HR software, Workday®. The HR Technology Services team knew it would be a cumbersome task to create training documentation for their different processes, translate it into 10 different languages, and update it with every Workday® version release or internal process change. Additionally, Thermo Fisher wanted to provide a personalized, just-in-time training experience to their employees, regardless of the employee’s location or access to live training and help.

To support a seamless migration to Workday®, the HR Technology Services team created role-specific onboarding guides using a combination of WalkMe apps, like Onboarding Tasks, Walk-Thrus, Launchers, and Segmentation. These tailored guides helped each employee navigate the system and complete their tasks with minimal confusion or disruption.

Even after Workday® was implemented, these guides continue to add value as the organization grows. Thermo Fisher frequently acquires new companies and must onboard up to 10,000 new employees at a time to their organization and systems. These WalkMe onboarding guides help to manage new users and new processes at scale, and are easy to maintain even as the Workday® UX changes.

But WalkMe isn’t only about training for Thermo Fisher. They also love WalkMe’s ability to draw users’ attention to important information within the application and push people towards the right behaviors.

In one example, employees struggled to complete the Job Requisition Request process on their first attempt. By using a WalkMe Survey to collect real-time user feedback, the team learned that users started the process without possessing the necessary information required to complete it.

The team created an automatic ShoutOut that played at the onset of the process, which listed everything needed in advance and helped guide the users in how to retrieve that information. Once collected, the user could efficiently complete the process in one sitting.

Lastly, WalkMe helps the Thermo Fisher team overcome certain product limitations and tailor content for specific audiences. One example of this is related to challenges with custom fields, which can’t be translated into supported languages and can’t be marked as mandatory.

With WalkMe, Thermo Fisher created Launchers that translate the custom fields into the 10 supported languages, and then segmented those Launchers to display to the user in the native language instead of the default text. They also added a red asterisk to mandatory custom fields, giving the user a visual cue to complete. Solutions like this help to ensure that all users can efficiently complete their processes, reducing user confusion and support requests.

The Thermo Fisher team uses WalkMe Insights’ robust analytics to measure their ability to provide scalable, real-time training and support to users globally. In the last year alone, 46,000 Thermo Fisher employees interacted with almost 555,000 WalkMe items. 70% of new users to Workday® engage with their personalized WalkMe onboarding experience, and 83% of users continue to engage with WalkMe on a recurring basis for training and support.

WalkMe Insights also allows Thermo Fisher to get more granular with the data, to see how specific solutions are impacting user behaviors. For example, since deploying the automatic Job Requisition Request ShoutOut, an average of 5,800 employees per quarter benefit from its contextual messaging to complete the process on first attempt. Additionally, the solutions they built to overcome custom field product limitations benefit over 6,100 employees globally, empowering users to accurately fill out forms without any confusion.

Updating content after a Workday® version release is easier than ever. From previous professional experience working with Workday®, the HR Technology Services team members knew that new version releases usually a required a 6-month period to update all training documentation. With WalkMe, the team’s need to update documentation and screenshots is basically eliminated. This saves the team a tremendous amount of time and energy, allows them to focus on more important initiatives, and ensures that end-users don’t go without accurate and up-to-date help.

Additionally, using WalkMe’s automation capabilities, the team was able to automate processes to save their end users millions of useless clicks, helping users to complete processes faster and more accurately. For example, when requesting a job requisition, users would often submit the job requisition but forget to complete the next step of the process of editing additional data. The result was an increase in incomplete processes that required escalation to support.By using WalkMe to automatically click the user through to the next steps, they were able to increase process completion rate to 100%, accelerate time to complete the process by 5%, and reduce support tickets submitted by 10%. By automating this one process, along with other key workflows, Thermo Fisher saved the organization thousands of hours in inefficient support and wasted productivity.

Most importantly, the experience Thermo Fisher creates with WalkMe empowers the company to create a systematic, proactive approach to change management. Whether it’s introducing new users, new processes, or UI changes in Workday®, WalkMe has enabled Thermo Fisher to effectively and efficiently lead employees through organizational change.