Accenture boosts continuous change management, data-driven business outcomes, and technology ROI with WalkMe

Leading global professional services company Accenture empowers its 799,000 employees to help more than 9,000 clients across 120 countries improve their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance services through the use of transformative technology. The company’s internal IT organization has an important role in providing the infrastructure, services and innovations that help drive reinvention across all parts of the business. The global IT team recognizes the requirement for a digital adoption approach which can manage constant technology and process changes, enhance employee experience and productivity, and improve the value from its technology investments. As part of a strategic approach which can address this challenge, Accenture deployed WalkMe across more than 60 applications and will continue to expand across more systems and users.

Accenture created an internal WalkMe Center of Excellence and a robust digital adoption strategy – and their efforts have paid significant dividends. Using WalkMe analytics, Accenture can help to streamline workflows, improve data quality and compliance across several systems, and continually enhance its digital adoption strategy. Since implementing WalkMe, Accenture has helped to reduce selected categories of support requests by 40% with WalkMe interventions, helped to accelerate the adoption of business process and capability updates by 45%, and helped to return 25,000 productivity hours to the business each month, giving employees more time to focus on their core work.

WalkMe’s digital adoption capabilities also assisted in data quality, which has a significant impact on specific Accenture business processes. For example, in its contracting workflow, Accenture uses WalkMe to help cross-reference numerous data sources, flag missing contract details, and instantly notify users about missing information, so they can correct the issue before it affects downstream work. Within the first week of deploying WalkMe for its contracting workflow, the firm saw a 54% reduction in the number of contracts with missing cost rate details. Accenture continues to evolve its digital adoption approaches and collaboration with WalkMe in order to embed generative AI capabilities and improve its technology investments across the business.

Accenture operates in a fast-paced environment and seeks to provide employees with leading-edge, high-performance technology. With an expanding global workforce navigating multiple platforms and workflows, the traditional approach of instructor-led training and job aids was no longer scalable or sufficient. Accenture needed to drive ongoing digital adoption and confirm its systems were used to their most potential.

“Our job is to help our employees use technology which can assist to deliver business value and outcomes. We believe every business strategy starts with technology, and for us to get that return on investment, we want to confirm that our employees are using technology in the way it was intended,” said Sarah Dugan, managing director, Global IT Journey & Change Management Center of Excellence at Accenture.

Accenture wanted to deliver guidance to employees throughout the flow of work, help simplify onboarding and adoption of new systems, reduce service ticket volume, and help save time for everyone. “We wanted to help employees to self-resolve and self-serve as much as possible, in order to assist resolving issues more quickly, without having to wait for technical support,” said Scott Yergin, senior manager, Global IT Journey & Change Management Center of Excellence at Accenture.

Additionally, Accenture sought robust analytics which can understand how employees engaged across the tech stack, so they could help enhance employee experience, prevent data integrity issues, and continuously refine their strategies. The company began a search for a digital adoption platform that would help support change management, deliver in-the-moment guidance, and help to provide insights for leadership which can optimize business operations.

Accenture selected WalkMe as its digital adoption platform and established a WalkMe Center of Excellence within its Journey and Change Management Center of Excellence. “We chose WalkMe for its analytics capabilities. WalkMe provides us with insights into how our people are using systems and platforms, which then help us to make data-driven decisions to assist our people make the most of our technology,” Dugan said.

First, Accenture implemented WalkMe on select enterprise-wide applications, including Salesforce®, Workday®, and ServiceNow®. From there, the company added WalkMe to specific custom applications to help employees through role-specific workflows, like staffing or executive ESG reporting. The organization’s deployment now spans 60+ applications and up to 250,000 employees engaging with WalkMe content across departments, business units, and geographies.

WalkMe has become the solution of choice for helping to introduce new technologies. As they rolled out SAP Fieldglass, Accenture used WalkMe to aid in effortlessly transitioning employees to the system and getting them up to speed quickly. “WalkMe provides the opportunity for new users of SAP Fieldglass to get into the application and helps them get up to speed and drive value,” Dugan said. “Before, it may have taken us weeks of enablement and communication. Now, our people are enabled faster and have a significantly improved experience.”

In building its solutions, Accenture focuses on delivering guidance and proactively eliminating friction. For example, Accenture identified the seven most common ticket types and built a digital adoption solution that intervenes when employees begin submitting a ticket. Now, employees see a prompt to confirm if they need help with one of the top issues, and, if so, they’re directed to resources intended to help them independently resolve the issue and focus on serving clients. If an employee needs assistance with something else, WalkMe pre-populates key ticket fields to route tickets correctly and include all necessary details for a quick resolution.

“WalkMe allows our users to be more self-sufficient, it’s helped our support teams by reducing the workload for fulfillers and helped them to focus on higher priority items, and it’s given our change teams the data and the analytics to continually improve our digital adoption strategies,” said Kim Arceci, senior manager, Global IT Journey & Change Management Center of Excellence at Accenture. “Where we’ve implemented WalkMe on our ticketing system, we’ve seen a 40% deflection of tickets – and that means that our people are going back to work faster.”

Additionally, the team uses digital adoption solutions to connect platforms and simplify workflows that span multiple platforms. “We use WalkMe for true robust process completion and value,” said Dugan. “We’re able to have a workflow where the end user may not even realize that they’re going into different systems. WalkMe really helps employees complete the process from beginning to end.”

Accenture taps into WalkMe analytics to help identify where users drop off in processes, how long they take to complete tasks, and where they may get stuck. By analyzing these insights, the company can assist in implementing targeted interventions and continuously improve its digital adoption strategy. “WalkMe Analytics helps us pinpoint where interventions are needed, so we focus on areas that will have most impact,” said Yergin.

The company is also using WalkMe to help employees understand how and when to engage with GenAI technology and drive adoption. For example, they use WalkMe to help drive use of targeted GenAI solutions by bringing together the context aware capabilities of WalkMe, with the GenAI capabilities that applications currently have, making AI technology more accessible for everyone.

With its digital adoption strategy, Accenture unlocks more than 25,000 employee hours each month, has seen a 40% decrease in specific support ticket categories with its WalkMe solutions, and boasts a 45% faster adoption of new platform and process updates. WalkMe supplies Accenture with access to high quality, accurate data it needs to make decisions and helps make it easier for team members to easily navigate multiple systems and focus on serving clients.

Moreover, the Change Management team can build custom WalkMe support solutions for end users up to 80% faster than it would take to develop custom code in the application. “With WalkMe, we have the agility and flexibility which can build end user support solutions for many use cases in a faster way,” Yergin said. “We can test potential solutions and get feedback right away to make sure we move forward with the right solution – and get it into production in a week or even days.”

As a technology-first organization, WalkMe is important to Accenture’s change management strategy – and the team is able to share its established practices in client engagements.

Accenture’s innovative use of digital adoption has been acknowledged by a Gold Brandon Hall Technology Excellence Award in 2023 and a Silver Brandon Hall HCM Excellence Award in 2024.

As new opportunities arise, Accenture continues to find ways to use WalkMe to help increase efficiency and efficacy across its global workforce, including incorporating WalkMe into its AI strategy. “We see a future where we’re using WalkMe across the enterprise,” said Dugan. “The opportunity to use WalkMe(X) to bring Gen AI into all of our platforms and into the hands of our people is an area we are currently exploring and excited about the potential.”

Accenture’s approach to digital adoption is anchored by a WalkMe Center of Excellence (CoE) within its Global IT Journey and Change Management organization. The WalkMe CoE acts as a strategic advisor for assisting to drive process and technology adoption across the enterprise. This small, core team collaborates with change practitioners and application owners in different business units. These individuals complete training through the WalkMe Digital Adoption Institute and are assigned a “Builder Buddy”, so they’re equipped to help create and maintain custom WalkMe content tailored to their teams’ needs.

“Our goal is to deliver the preferred experience to our end users. To do that, we need to provide our subject matter experts and project teams in each business unit with everything they need to deliver that user experience in a simple, scalable way. As we established our Center of Excellence, we worked closely with WalkMe to get effective practices and resources and make sure we were starting from a solid foundation that we could adapt to suit our needs,” said Matt Csaki, senior manager, Global IT Journey & Change Management Center of Excellence at Accenture.

To help foster collaboration and share insights, the WalkMe CoE offers regular office hours and dedicated Microsoft Teams channels where builders can discuss challenges and share wins, as well as an internal WalkMe portal equipped with demos of sample WalkMe solutions to help teams understand the art of the possible. By empowering change practitioners to work closely with their respective teams while aligning with the CoE’s strategic vision, Accenture has created a scalable model for digital adoption that supports rapid deployment, continuous improvement, and widespread innovation across the organization.

“Our WalkMe Center of Excellence and our Community of Practice is a game changer in what we’re able to do, the results we’re able to see, and how we execute change management to optimize our technology,” said Csaki.