On the Road With WalkMe: Insights From 6 Digital Adoption Leaders

Not-to-miss highlights from WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Roadshow

Today, business leaders are facing a new set of challenges, requiring them to adjust their strategies and widen their perspectives. In a constantly evolving business landscape, leaders must be vigilantly attuned to the technological disruptions that introduce new competition on a near-daily basis. They must choose and successfully integrate the digital tools that can drive their business goals forward. And more than ever, leaders are becoming accountable for safeguarding key workforce metrics, like engagement, productivity, and the overall employee experience. The thread that ties all of these objectives together is digital adoption, or the ability of technology users to maximize the full scope of a tool’s capabilities. These are the topics we covered at one of our most exciting series of events, the WalkMe Digital Adoption Roadshow.

3 days, 3 cities, 100+ digital adoption leaders

The Digital Adoption Roadshow is a traveling one-day event that convenes digital adoption leaders from our customer companies spanning all industries and verticals. The events create a unique forum for company leaders to share the ideas, thought leadership, and innovative digital adoption strategies that have enabled them to achieve their digital transformation goals and enhance the employee experience. We’re probably a little biased, but we think these discussions have been a huge success. So far, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting events in San Francisco, New York, and London. There are two more events coming up in Chicago on October 9, 2019, and Boston on October 29, 2019. If you are looking to explore digital adoption strategies for your organization, sign up to join us. Want a taste of what you’ll get at the upcoming events? Here are highlights from San Francisco and New York.

San Francisco

Sixty people from 35 companies gathered in San Francisco in August for a customer panel, executive fireside chat, and of course, networking.

A next-gen approach to employee training

One standout speaker from the customer panel is Kumud Kokal, the Director of Enterprise Applications & Insights at the online clothing retailer, Stitch Fix. The company deployed WalkMe to provide a more effective employee training and onboarding experience for Workday®, Greenhouse, and Oracle. “When’s the last time you attended a training session on how to use Facebook or Instagram?” he asked the panel. “You won’t see that. The applications we interact with on a daily basis are self-explanatory, but the trouble begins when we step foot into the workplace and are expected to be proficient on applications that are anything but intuitive.” Helping your workforce achieve true digital adoption demands changing your perspective. First, it means acknowledging that workplace tools are not intuitive, and second, it requires stepping into the shoes of the users. Third, it means providing training that actually works. “From a user engagement perspective, I feel like most people don’t go to work thinking about completing specific processes in an application,” said Kumud. “They just know what they have to do. WalkMe is smart enough to pick up where they are in the process and help them complete it.” Steven Cox, Global Sales Operation Leader & Transformation Strategist, from leading data services company NetApp, also shared this perspective. NetApp used WalkMe to help them migrate from Salesforce to SAP CRM, as well as on their front-end quoting tool.   Knowing a CRM migration would be a challenge, Steven incorporated WalkMe into UAT test cases, which then allowed them to easily deploy at go-live to streamline the experience for their sellers.  Instead of confusion around a new system and processes, employees could stay focused on their main priorities.

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Streamlining communication and business processes

On top of training, customers on the panel discussed the value of WalkMe for helping employees more efficiently complete core processes on platforms that aren’t always the most user-friendly. “Meeting our digital transformation goals got a whole lot easier after implementing WalkMe,” Chad Anderson, VP & CIO of Del Monte Foods, said during the executive fireside chat. Del Monte Foods uses WalkMe on SAP SRM to make the app more navigable and processes more streamlined. “With varying technology adoption rates, WalkMe offers us the visibility to reduce roadblocks, increase employee engagement, and ultimately improve how we do business,” he said. Shawna Branter, eLearning Developer & Design Lead at Principal Financial Group, focused on WalkMe’s ability to help the company disseminate important messages across the organization. “Communication in the workplace is oversaturated,” she said. “Employees aren’t even checking their emails. What we did was add [WalkMe] Shoutouts to reach a lot more of them by notifying them in the application.” Now, when Principal Financial employees use Salesforce, they are primed to see informative, custom-designed messages that can be used as reminders, prompts, or other tools to guide certain user behaviors.

New York City

The New York City Roadshow event took place in September. Fifty digital adoption leaders from 28 companies attended, and the discussions were inspiring.

True digital adoption is true empowerment

The pursuit of digital adoption is all about helping people excel. When users can maximize all features and capabilities of their digital tools, when they can complete processes with ease and efficiency, they are positioned to not only thrive in their role, but to help the company realize its goals. That’s why it’s imperative to keep the human user at the center of your digital adoption strategy. Aimee Pasia, Senior HRIS Analyst at Quest Diagnostics, put it this way. “At the heart, it starts with our employees. Our goal is to get our software to partner together and work efficiently with our people.” However, this can be challenging. Mindy Lieberman, VP of Enterprise System, Peloton Interactive, gave the audience some advice to help them on their journey: “The most important barrier [to digital adoption] is lack of focus. There’s always more to do than people to do it. The essence of strategy is what you decide not to do. And the agreement to stick around until you do it properly until you move along to the next shiny object.”

Why is Digital Adoption Still a Thing?

For the real world, you need real-time support

Traditional methods of training are no longer adequate for the rapidly changing and highly developed contemporary workplace. Employees — those who are “in the trenches” of digital technology — have known this for years. As business leaders increasingly prioritize digital transformation initiatives in their business strategies, the need for a robust digital adoption strategy has become more and more obvious. Contextual guidance and real-time support are integral to this. Matt O’Malley, Product Manager at SEI Investments, discussed how his firm uses WalkMe to help onboard and train financial advisors with contextual guidance and real-time communication. On top of better engagement and preparedness among financial advisors, O’Malley emphasized the solution’s ability to save SEI tremendous hours of development time, training efforts, and support calls. “We all work for ‘agile’ companies… so we know agile doesn’t always mean agile,” said Matt. “For that kind of stuff, WalkMe is a lifesaver.”

More illuminating conversations to come

We can’t wait for our upcoming Roadshow events in Chicago and Boston, and we hope you can join us! Digital adoption is gaining momentum, and seizing opportunities to learn about how to put it to action can give you a major leg up. Matt O’Malley put it best, so we’ll let him close it out: “I’m pretty passionate about digital adoption. It’s a movement — and it’s growing.”