The Challenge
Poor in-product experience leads to customer abandonment
IBM has pioneered multiple influential technologies over its century-plus history, including the ATM, magnetic stripe card, and the barcode. Today, it is a leading cloud platform and cognitive solutions company. “In recent years, IBM has been at the forefront of digital transformation,” says Nilanjan Adhya, IBM’s Chief Digital Officer. “We’ve been helping our customers adopt digital technologies, and in the process, we’ve been adopting digital technologies as well.”
Due to the complex nature of B2B products, IBM needed a strategy to support customers through every stage of their experience. A number of products across IBM’s digital portfolio showed high user abandonment rates, rooted in early experiences with the products that left users disengaged.
Adhya and his team recognized that this gap in IBM’s digital offerings was having an effect on subscription rates and sales. He also knew a digital adoption strategy was critical to engage users, help them reach milestones, and improve customer acquisition.
“We knew that if we helped users reach ‘wow moments,’ those users would be much likelier to understand our product’s value and differentiation, and ultimately subscribe,” Adhya says.
The Solution
In-app guidance to engage users, improve adoption
IBM’s first focus with WalkMe was to streamline the user experience. WalkMe functions as an invisible overlay for 25+ IBM products, allowing product teams to quickly deploy in-app guidance and other content to onboard users quickly and painlessly. “WalkMe leads users through setup and onboarding. They become better users and reach the outcomes they want to reach more quickly,” says Adhya. “WalkMe also delivers centralized in-product support, enabling users to quickly find the answers they need.”
Adhya’s team used WalkMe to aggregate all relevant support resources within their applications, and created Smart Walk-Thrus
(step-by-step on-screen guidance) of core product features that were difficult to achieve through documentation alone.
IBM also integrated WalkMe with Segment, a customer data and analytics platform. This enabled IBM to centralize and connect data across its digital platforms, to better understand and analyze its users, and to build personalized in-app user experiences. “We now have a comprehensive view of the customer journey, as well as information about usage and user behaviors,” Adhya says. “It allows our teams to help users better adopt products throughout the customer lifecycle.”
Our WalkMe and Segment integration allowed IBM to identify milestones for predefined user behaviors that are important parts of the user journey. The team found that a user who engages with WalkMe is 300% more likely to achieve a milestone than a user who had no in-application engagement. Similarly, a user that engages with WalkMe is also 300% more likely to return to the application 7 days after their initial log in than a user that did not.
The Benefits
Immediate impact: 6X higher retention, 4X better conversion rates
Implementing WalkMe has led to significant, measurable improvements in IBM’s digital product experience with 25 live instances of WalkMe and another 15 implementations in progress. Prior to WalkMe, IBM products had few in-app nurturing experiences. Now, IBM provides users with intuitive guidance and critical resources, ensuring each user has the support they need to reach their goals within the product. In addition, by integrating surveys directly into the experience, the IBM team was able to centralize feedback data and increase engagement.
“The impact of WalkMe was immediate,” says Adhya. “First and foremost, we were able to improve user adoption early on, resulting in 6X higher user retention and 4X better conversion rates from trials to subscriptions.”
“We enabled faster onboarding of our products, but we also enabled them to get support right at the point in the product where they need it,” says Adhya. Over 1,000 users used WalkMe to troubleshoot, instead of filing a support ticket, in just the first 2 weeks after deployment.
WalkMe has also benefited the IBM team’s day-to-day. No longer dependent on developer and product release cycles to make in-app experience changes, teams can now use WalkMe to make changes within a few hours—changes that previously took months of development and QA.
Integrating with Segment successfully gave them access to previously unobtainable user insights across the user journey. “For the first time, we are able to gather data around how our products are being consumed, and what was getting used,” says Adhya. As opposed to analyzing data across multiple systems, IBM can collect insights from just two powerful platforms. Adhya attributes a 96% improvement in efficiency of the development team to this improved data collection, saving around ~5 months of time that developers could spend on higher value projects.
Our WalkMe and Segment integration allowed IBM to identify milestones for predefined user behaviors that are important parts of the user journey. The team found that a user who engages with WalkMe is 300% more likely to achieve a milestone than a user who had no in-application engagement. Similarly, a user that engages with WalkMe is also 300% more likely to return to the application 7 days after their initial log in than a user that did not. “Overall, WalkMe has helped us improve product usage, consumption, and retention by 300%,” Adhya says. “Furthermore, it has helped us reach 80% digital offering revenue growth, which was 2X our target.”