DAP for IBM: How IBM Takes Customer Experience to the Next Level with WalkMe
IBM is no stranger to the demands of the ever-evolving digital landscape.
As leaders on the technology front, IBM approached their digital transformation meticulously and with one focus: driving the very best customer experience.
As Chief Digital Officer and VP of Digital Transformation for IBM, Nilanjan (Neel) Adhya has a vast amount of knowledge about how to foster a digital experience that keeps customers happy. Neel has partnered with WalkMe to ensure that their products enable and empower users to experience value easily and seamlessly.
The main goal of implementing WalkMe was to improve the IBM user experience. Neel leads the digital adoption platform initiative and will be joining other industry leaders this March at WalkMe Realize to share his experience and best practices.
Here’s a sneak peek of IBM’s digital adoption solution for customer experience from Neel’s perspective.
A product that empowers customers
Neel and his IBM team are focused on driving constant end-to-end improvement in the customer experience of their products and services from their smallest use-cases to their massive enterprise customers.
The customer experience has been enhanced by integrating in-app guidance and direction at key moments, allowing users to accomplish key outcomes.
“With WalkMe, we have been able to get our customers to quickly accomplish what they need to do without having to learn the product or go through extensive documentation,” Neel says, “This has significantly accelerated time-to-value for our customers and improved outcomes overall.”
Empathy for the user is the ultimate guide
Neel explains a unique and surprising approach to creating the best user experience: empathy. The IBM team brings together a varied collage of roles including offering managers, product engineers, marketers, customer success reps and designers.
As a team with multiple areas of focus and expertise, they review products and map out friction points in need of improvement. Together they build empathy for their users and create goals to enable users to complete their tasks as pleasantly and quickly as possible.
“We believe that when cross-functional teams collectively empathize with the user they invariably come up with a superior solution,” Neel explains.
Once they have goals, the appropriate teams can assess how to best guide their users.
Connect and collaborate to expedite the process
Neel shares that one of the most important benefits of having a DAP (Digital Adoption Platform) is how quickly solutions can be implemented.
“One of the biggest benefits is the speed of execution and time to value. The team can go from an idea to implementation in a matter of days—versus having to go through a multi-week or multi-month process,” Neel says, “This supports our agile and experimental approach to digital adoption and transformation.”
The IBM team has created a system to further utilize the WalkMe solutions: a pattern library. With a pattern library, they can reuse solutions that have worked before and engage the broader IBM community to crowdsource new solutions. This allows them to access issues and solutions that other teams within IBM have already faced and solved, but also gives them access to the wider WalkMe community.
The ability to connect and collaborate with other Digital Adoption Platform users gives everyone more collective information to utilize and benefit from. Neel explains that this element of WalkMe “dramatically accelerates scaling.”
Results that you can measure
Implementing WalkMe successfully has been a collaborative effort between the following IBM teams: digital transformation, offering management, and design. The buy-in of all organizational stakeholders is essential to implementing a Digital Adoption Platform. The initiative takes cooperation and collaboration, but the results should make the effort clearly worthwhile.
So how much of an impact has a DAP had on IBM products?
“We have seen a 300% increase in consumption and retention in our users with WalkMe guidance in the product.”
Word to the wise
To those who are undergoing their own digital adoption journey for their customers, Neel emphasizes the importance of starting with defining the desired user experience.
“Starting with the desired experience and not the platform enables teams to empathize with the user and focus on what ultimately matters, helping customers achieve outcomes.”
Neel and his team stay agile, flexible, and understand that there will always be room for improvement. The key to constantly maintaining the best user experience is to always analyze, assess, and refine.
He explains, “Very rarely is the first solution the best solution and teams need to be willing to look at the data and make necessary refinements. Digital adoption is about making fast iterations and continuous improvements.”
We are so excited that Neel will be attending and speaking at WalkMe Realize: The Digital Adoption Event. His insights and experiences range 20 years of leading transformation initiatives for one of the world’s top technology companies.