DAP Professional Spotlight: Michael Alene
When the world’s largest biotech company, Roche, needed to migrate more than 15,000 employees to Salesforce Lightning, they decided to utilize WalkMe as their digital adoption solution. Once a UI/UX designer, Michael Alene was working there as a Global CRM Solution User Assistant and helped to successfully manage this migration by customizing the employee user experience through WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform.
After this massive achievement, Michael was prepared to apply his skills and experience to his next project. Now, as a UI and Customer Experience Designer at the Next Generation Enterprise Network Alliance (ngena), Michael is managing the WalkMe platform and leveraging it in order to simplify the user experience for their customers.
Michael is truly passionate about providing the perfect user experience and it shows in the results he is able to bring to his companies. We had the pleasure of interviewing Michael and learned about his journey to become a DAP Professional. Discover the impact DAP professionals can make through Michael’s story below.
1. How did you become a DAP professional? And what problems were in the company that led to the creation of the DAP professional role?
Michael: I became a DAP professional when I joined Roche Diagnostics in Germany as a Global CRM Solutions User Assistant intern. At the time, Roche was migrating its 15,000+ users from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning. As you can imagine, migrating this amount of users into a totally new look and feel needs a huge investment of time and money to train the users and adapt it quickly. For this reason, they needed to make the shift smoother and hassle-free with less training in short time which led Roche to look for a digital adoption platform, and WalkMe was found the ideal solution.
After one year at Roche, I joined ngena as a full-time UI/UX Designer and WalkMe developer which is when I became a full-time DAP professional. The problem at ngena was more or less the same. ngena’s users are spread across the globe, and we were spending too much money and effort training them on a complex system which they were not using on a daily basis, so they were forgetting how to use the systems. In addition, no in-house development of our systems made it hard to get things like tooltips, data validations or other help functions implemented, and it was always taking a long time.
2. How is DAP used at your current company?
Michael: At ngena, we are using WalkMe intensively in two of our external customer facing CRM systems which are used for quoting our products and order capture. Guiding users through complex processes, automating unnecessary user clicks, showing tooltips (SmartTips), form validation, announcing new features—we cover a variety of use-cases with WalkMe. We even use some of the more advanced features like the WebHooks integration to give us a real-time look into user interaction with our applications.
3. What have been the greatest successes in implementation and DAP usage at your company?
Michael: Onboarding new users has become easier than ever. We were able to achieve more than 35% lower support requests related to onboarding/training.
4. What are your biggest challenges as a DAP professional?
Michael: In my opinion, fully understanding the system, and the behavior of users.
5. What excites you the most about being a DAP professional?
Michael: The fact that DAP professionals are there to simplify the user experience and guide anyone that needs help in a certain system excites me.
6. How would you describe being a DAP Professional in 3 words?
Michael: Empath, Creative, Problem-solver.
Become a DAP expert
Interested in learning more about DAP and how you can use it to help your organization? Check out the Digital Adoption Institute:
