What was the business problem(s) that your organization / project was facing, and why did you choose a digital adoption strategy to help you solve it?
Before WalkMe, many products across our digital portfolio had high user abandonment rates. Looking into our existing product data, it was clear that this retention issue was rooted in lackluster early experiences with our products that left users disengaged, or even worse, lost. Upon examination of our product “milestone” data, it was clear that users who did not reach product milestones were even less likely to return to the trial (4% vs. 25% retention at Day 7). From this analysis, we knew our offerings had a significant gap in delivering powerful user experiences. We chose a digital adoption strategy since our mission was to not only help users reach milestones, but more importantly, get our users engaged. We knew that if we helped users reach “wow moments”, those users would be much likelier to understand the product’s value and differentiation, reach “productive use”, and ultimately subscribe. It was evident that WalkMe and a broader digital adoption strategy would be critical in delivering the overarching experience that would help us to drive customer acquisition, activation and expansion.
How did you use WalkMe among other strategies to address your challenges?
While our core challenges were poor in-product experiences (leading to abandonment and retention issues), we knew WalkMe’s technology could impact our business in a variety of ways. As a result, we used WalkMe in tandem with our other digital platforms – not only building in-app content, but also streamlining the user experience. While product teams quickly deployed content for user onboarding and centralized in-product support, we also worked collaboratively with WalkMe to build a new and powerful integration with Segment, our customer data platform. Through this integration, we are able to centralize data across WalkMe, product engagement, as well as our e-commerce and customer engagement platforms. Not only does this provide comprehensive view of our client’s journeys, this WalkMe integration also allows us to pass WalkMe data to key tools so we can nurture and support our clients throughout the customer lifecycle via e-nurture campaigns or CSM support. In addition, we also worked with WalkMe to build another integration with Medallia to provide additional flexibility in the design and placement of our surveys while simultaneously centralizing all our customer feedback data. WalkMe on its own has already produced a significant impact through deployments (~6X higher retention rate, 4X higher conversion to subscription rate), but we will continue to unlock even more potential by incorporating WalkMe into our one, unified Growth Platform.
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially in regards to WalkMe, impact or benefit your end-users?
Deploying WalkMe has led to enormous improvements in product experience. Prior to WalkMe, our products had severely outdated, if any, in-app nurturing experiences. With WalkMe we’ve been able to provide users with a curated in-product experience underpinned by intuitive guidance and critical resources when they are needed (resulting in 6X higher user retention). For one offering, before WalkMe, there was no in-portal help or documentation at all. By using WalkMe, this team aggregated all relevant support resources within the application and also created walk-thrus of core product features that were difficult to achieve through documentation alone. This helped ~1000 users find relevant documentation and walk-thrus instead of submitting support tickets in the first 2 weeks of publishing. Another offering has utilized WalkMe Visions to enhance context when addressing support tickets which has led to a large reduction in end user wait times for issue resolution.
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially in regards to WalkMe, impact or benefit your team?
WalkMe has had an incredible impact on the way our teams work and enhance our product experiences. Most notably, WalkMe has removed our teams’ dependence on developer and product release cycles to make in-app experience changes. Change that took months of development and QA in the past, can be completed with WalkMe in a few hours. One team tagged 300+ user events within 1 week; a similar effort with other tools took 5+ months previously. On an ongoing basis, WalkMe helps our teams to adopt Agile practices by clearly defining in-app experiments, iterating, and making robust, data driven decisions that promote purposeful improvements. In addition, WalkMe’s centralized administration has allowed us to incorporate streamlined management of our integrations, as well as pre-defined data privacy settings. Furthermore, thanks to WalkMe’s shared template library we will soon release a fully customized, enterprise-ready set of WalkMe templates to ~200 offerings
How has your digital adoption strategy, especially in regards to WalkMe, helped your organization better achieve its mission goals / values?
Adopting Agile practices is an enormous focus for our organization. WalkMe helps us to work collaboratively across multi-functional teams (PM, design, analytics, support), “fail fast”, and continue to iterate through data-driven decisions. Not only has WalkMe helped us accelerate our progress implementing tracking and onboarding guidance in the entirety of our digital portfolio, it has also helped us to improve product usage, consumption, and retention by 300%. Furthermore, it has helped us reach 80% digital offering revenue growth, which was 2X our target.
How has the success of your digital adoption strategy helped to change the perceptions or attitudes of your stakeholders?
As IBM continues its transformation and further fortifies its digital business, we constantly stress to our stakeholders in business units that positive product experiences (particularly early in the client lifecycle) are essential. With WalkMe, in combination with our other digital tools and platforms, we continue to demonstrate that digital is more than any one thing. Digital adoption runs the gamut of strategically and delightfully providing our clients with the best product experience possible. Through the deployment of our entire digital platform, we have shown our stakeholders repeatedly how incremental digital adoption and experience improvements can translate to enormous top-line growth. We have convinced our stakeholders that digital is more than just a revenue channel, but rather a comprehensive experience of how our clients consume our products.
More about IBM
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 cloud and cognitive services. The IBM Digital Growth & Commerce team’s mission is to accelerate IBM’s transformation by leveraging our platforms and best practices to drive acquisition, activation, and expansion.
