IBM

Prior to deploying WalkMe at IBM, our product teams were heavily focused on the digital transformation of our software portfolio. Despite our efforts to nurture our customers, we found that users struggled to get to the “wow moment” and understand the product’s value proposition/differentiation.

On top of that, we had user feedback that clearly identified issues and pain-points with our products. We knew that in order to improve our trial adoption and purchase conversion, we could not rely only on marketing and email nurture; we had to engage customers in the application when they needed the guidance the most.

Digital adoption was critical in orienting new users to products and structuring their user onboarding experience to “show, not tell”. In addition to these features, we had to tackle other challenges such as excessive support tickets. We leveraged WalkMe to streamline the product support experience by making key resources and documentation searchable and providing the user with access to essential links.

In the last 3 months alone, more than 1.5 million users have interacted with IBM WalkMe content and we’ve seen tremendous improvements in both our internal and external business metrics as well as our customer experiences.

Over the past year, our priority has been to develop an all-in-one in-app support tool called AssistMe. By leveraging WalkMe’s APIs and SDK, we have joined walk-thrus and the search integration with IBM platforms such as live chat and support tickets. Now, these crucial capabilities can be accessed in one module, equipped with IBM Carbon design.

In addition to AssistMe, we have fully integrated WalkMe with our Growth Stack in order to visualize the entire product journey, engage the user throughout their lifecycle, and build innovative in-app features. We launched a data services initiative that fed user data from registration into IBM products using a robust profile API. WalkMe was then used to personalize in-app content based on the user’s role, company, or industry. We also used our WalkMe /customer data platform (CDP) integration to leverage WalkMe data beyond the in-product experience. We identified key drop-off points and created action-triggered email campaigns to re-engage users who abandoned a walk-thru or nudge them towards their next onboarding goal.

Through this CDP integration, we can better understand how WalkMe delivers ROI. In terms of our key metrics, we’ve seen a 10% average increase in subscription conversion (and highs of 76%), 25 pt. improvements in both retention and milestone achievement, and 20 pt. improvements in product NPS scores.

WalkMe has been critical in our effort to improve the product experience for our end users. Before, we regularly saw customer feedback describing our products as hard to navigate and difficult to learn. We also found that our products had low NPS scores, with some even in negative territory.

When we started our work with WalkMe, we first focused on these known pain-points to alleviate as much product friction as possible. However, we found that product teams quickly innovated and expanded use of the platform to not only address pain-points, but also add new features such as documentation search and survey integrations with Medallia.

We’ve seen the results from these efforts manifest in the form of improved milestone (moment of truth) achievement (average 10 point. increase) and NPS (average increase of 4 pts. with highs of 25 pts). Leveraging WalkMe Insights (i.e., menu search) has also helped teams to understand user behavior, and provide opportunities to add/improve their WalkMe tours.

WalkMe has had a tremendous impact on our ability to distribute product ownership across the organization and work more effectively together. The biggest advantage WalkMe has provided has been on the bandwidth constraints of our development teams.

WalkMe’s point and click tagging has reduced development team effort by 90% since product managers and designers can track events themselves. Furthermore, WalkMe has empowered design and product management teams to take experience mock-ups and immediately translate them into tangible product enhancements, which can be shared for feedback, tested, deployed, and iterated on, all asynchronous from product release cycles.

IBM leadership has capitalized on this flexibility by organizing teams based on priorities and separating responsibilities to improve productivity. In addition, by removing dependencies on development, those teams are able to focus on core product functionality and innovation.

Our organization’s mission is to increase omni channel revenue through digital enhancements to product portfolios, go-to-market strategies, and business models. In addition, we work to improve IBM’s ways of working by championing agile principles, failing fast, and enhancing the IBM customer’s experience.

We’ve seen excellent growth in our software business metrics because of our WalkMe deployment efforts. Specifically, we’ve seen a 10% average increase in subscription conversion (highs of 76%), 25 pt. upticks in both retention and milestone achievement, and 20 pt. improvements in product NPS scores.

In addition, we’ve created $1M in incremental revenue from WalkMe users on IBM Cloud. Our goal is to not only continue to innovate, but also empower IBM teams to create impactful experiences for our clients. To date, we have deployed WalkMe experiences on more than 50 applications and have had 200 WalkMe builders active in the last 3 months across our organization.

The key to our digital adoption strategy’s success has been demonstrating that WalkMe is not just a point-solution, but rather a platform used to transform product management.

IBM Design recognized the value that WalkMe provided in decoupling experience enhancements from product release cycles. Designers could also add WalkMe to existing skillsets, leading to career growth opportunities. WalkMe adoption has been instrumental in Design that it now leads a company-wide, cross-functional program focused on product experience improvements.

Marketing has also latched on to WalkMe because of the innovative new ways we can retrieve user feedback and boost NPS. Perhaps the most transformative change came through our partnership with IBM Support. While traditionally support operations are focused on cost and issue resolution, we found an opportunity to use the search and resource functionalities to not only improve internal efficiency, but also make our products more intuitive and self-service.

We are ecstatic to see how far IBM teams have leveraged WalkMe. The WM Center of Excellence (est. in 2020) has continued to expand and be utilized by business units to scale the adoption of WalkMe across IBM.

The creative ways product teams have implemented WalkMe has not only been praised internally by executive stakeholders but have also won Spark 2021 and RedDot awards for their work. Additionally, business units that we had originally set up governance models for have matured in their WalkMe skills and adoption; and in-turn have established their own office hours to further champion/drive the adoption of WalkMe within their own BUs.

We’re proud of the innovation that has emerged beyond the out-of-the-box solutions. This includes a holistic collection of custom, IBM-branded WM templates (3 versions + another version coming soon), integration with our customer data platform (personalized WalkMe tours), AssistMe, an in-app support tool; as well as other tools in the Growth Stack.

We have prioritized the creation of an IBM Center of Excellence in order to deliver deployment at scale and build a community to share success stories and best practices. We currently have an internal DAP community of 550 IBMers who are focused on enhancing user experiences across our product portfolio and platforms.

With the success so far with IBM’s software products, we have recently expanded our scope to include improving the IBM ecosystem partner experience. With this expanded mission, we will bring the same level of user-obsession to our ecosystem platforms so that partners can effectively onboard, engage with their customers, and manage their business with IBM.

We are excited to build on top of the integration and feature foundation from the product mission and deliver value to our ecosystem partners.

IBM is a 108 year old, multinational technology company, whose purpose is to be essential. IBM has been at the forefront of many of history’s most influential technologies including the ATM, the magnetic stripe card, and the barcode. IBM is in the midst of a strategic transformation to hybrid cloud, cognitive services, and quantum computing. The IBM Growth Team’s mission is to accelerate IBM’s transformation by leveraging our platforms and best practices to drive acquisition, activation, and expansion.