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?
Colleagues in Sage are exposed to a huge number of systems on a daily basis. We have separate systems for booking holidays, completing performance reviews, logging IT tickets, interacting with customers and a lot more. They each have a different look and feel and not everyone needs to use them all of the time. By time you need to revisit a system, you can easily forget what you need to do to achieve the result you need. And this list just keeps growing. Sage is ever changing and the demand on colleagues to learn and use new systems or process has increased. We needed to find a way to consistently support colleagues in that journey and help them feel comfortable in their ability. WalkMe provided the perfect solution to engage our users, increase user adoption and drive colleague success. Branded internally as In-App Support powered by WalkMe, we wanted a name that did what it said on the tin and helped our colleagues instantly understand it’s purpose. With WalkMe going live on 2 of the largest and most visible systems used at Sage, interest in using WalkMe built up quickly and there was a sudden desire to build content for more apps within Sage. With so many builders now learning to create content there was a need to bring order and consistency to our approach to ensure we had a familiar and sustainable framework for implementation. It was then we decided we needed to build a centre of excellence with defined processes and standards for all builders to follow.
How did you use WalkMe among other strategies to address your challenges?
Recognising that we could achieve more with expert support and guidance, Sage consciously built a strong relationship with WalkMe. We invited WalkMe to run a three-day workshop with our content builders from across the business. Here we reviewed each other’s work and shared our lessons learned. WalkMe also shared their feedback and further insights into best practice, helping us define a baseline for content design and quality. This shaped our WalkMe Content Creators Standards Guide and Framework, which outlines the steps each new product must take to deploy and maintain content. We built a content builder community and agreed upon a Sage style guide to give colleagues a consistent look and feel regardless of which app they use WalkMe in. We set up weekly content builder meetings to continue sharing our best practice and lessons learned, while troubleshooting solutions to each other’s problems. We also set up 2-weekly calls with WalkMe to dig deeper into any issues we were unable to resolve. This partnership has made a huge impact to our ability to deliver engaging and intuitive content to our colleagues. Creating the framework also gave us a simple and structured onboarding process for every new app. This enables our new content builders to quickly get up to speed with the Editor and our approach to efficiently deliver exciting new content to colleagues. Since introducing the framework we’ve seen a dramatic increase in our ability to work at velocity and scale.
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially in regards to WalkMe, impact or benefit your end-users?
Our Standards and framework have brought familiarity to each app we’ve deployed to. We made fundamental changes to our culture, driving self-service through the use of walkthroughs, smart-tips and resources. We have now delivered the benefits of WalkMe to 11 products in the last 10 months, with 7 more products going live in the next 3 months. One example is Sage People, our HR system where colleagues maintain their performance reviews. WalkMe helped us achieve a saving of 4 hours per colleague in favour of on-demand support. It was a huge success as we saw a 40% reduction in IT support tickets linked to usability. To get a sense of scale and how well it was embraced, 87.2% of colleagues who interacted with WalkMe were repeat users who called on it again and again to help navigate the system and find answers to their questions. We also delivered automation in Salesforce to cut tedious clicks every day processes, removing an average of 7.2m clicks and 185 hours of effort a month.
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially in regards to WalkMe, impact or benefit your team?
Business Operations works to implement changes across Sage, from new systems to changes in process. User engagement, training and communication are huge parts of the success of any new endeavour and WalkMe has now become a key part of how we work. By giving colleagues confidence in in-app support, we can reduce training up-front and free up people’s time. Another key measure of a project’s success is it’s adoption by end users. Through WalkMe we’ve unlocked an entirely new world of analytics through detailed Insights. By seeing what our colleagues are searching for and which part of a walkthrough they may give up, we can now better understand their pain points without even having to ask them. The data we receive from WalkMe Insights arms us with knowledge we’d never had before. It’s now an invaluable tool for driving continuous improvement and efficiency savings across the business, which we can reinvest into value-add activities with our customers.
How has your digital adoption strategy, especially in regards to WalkMe, helped your organization better achieve its mission goals / values?
Sage is committed to colleague success, and what better way to drive success than to make their everyday tasks simpler? Introducing WalkMe across the platforms that colleagues rely on has enabled us to guide them through complex processes, empower colleagues in their roles and increase colleague satisfaction. Providing information, updates and guidance directly to colleagues where they need it most without the need to search through training documents or old emails drives progress and confidence. WalkMe has also brought an entirely new way of us deploying important information to colleagues, such as warnings or instructions to complete mandatory tasks. Overall, Sage has achieved over £834,546 in productivity savings since introducing WalkMe and with more platforms benefitting from In-App Support over the coming months, that figure will quickly rise.
How has the success of your digital adoption strategy helped to change the perceptions or attitudes of your stakeholders?
Our stakeholders include everyone from product owners who may benefit from WalkMe being deployed to their systems, to the colleagues who will consume the content. To create further visibility of WalkMe and its benefits we launched our very own internal marketing campaign. We built a microsite to demo the benefits and invite our colleagues to submit their ideas and feedback. We commissioned a video to highlight the benefits of WalkMe. Finally, we created merchandise such as WalkMe hoodies, waterbottles and notepads to create extra visibility around the business. We’ve now created a network of advocates who champion WalkMe and it’s many uses. Certain parts of the business have even recruited full time resources to create and maintain their content. It’s clear that WalkMe has been fully embraced by the business and will continue to grow and be an integral part of the Sage ecosystem as we deliver new and exciting technologies to our colleagues and customers.
More about Sage
Sage is the market leader for integrated accounting, payroll, and payment systems, supporting the ambition of the world’s entrepreneurs. Like many of the businesses we serve, Sage began as a small business and has grown beyond what seemed imaginable. Today over 13,000 colleagues now support millions of entrepreneurs across 23 countries as they power the global economy. We help drive today’s business builders with a new generation of solutions to manage everything from money to people.
