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?
Walgreens is on a digital transformation journey, as are many companies. A strategy that we embrace—one often overlooked by large businesses—is to champion the customer experience and promote adoption as a critical component of new technology rollouts. Laura was instrumental in the selection of and championing of WalkMe for Walgreens in 2018, leading the implementation, testing, and rollout on our new cloud-based HR system to ultimte success, almost single-handedly. She continued supporting WalkMe despite moving to a new role, and again single-handedly implemented WalkMe onto our new Compensation system in 2019. Laura has been a digital adoption pioneer within Walgreens, and champions WalkMe in nearly all conversations with business and IT stakeholders. With her leadership and guidance, the WalkMe portfolio at Walgreens has expanded from 1 HR system to 8 applications, and is currently tracking to expand to an additional dozen applications this year. In additional to her regular day-job, she is currently focusing on standing up the WalkMe COE with the goal of a global approach to adoption and change management.
How did you use WalkMe among other strategies to address your challenges?
Laura was recently promoted to a new role leading the global adoption and change management work for the rollout of Microsoft collaboration tools, such as Teams and Office 365, for more than 40,000 global support office team members across a dozen countries. She immediately recognized that in order to be successful, a non-traditional approach needed to be taken. With her guidance, WalkMe was selected to support the digital adoption of these new technologies on a global scale, a feat never before undertaken at Walgreens.
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially in regards to WalkMe, impact or benefit your end-users?
With the rollout of “Ada”, Laura realized that with this branded WalkMe desktop agent (available on all support office computers), end users will have support not only on the applications they use to collaborate with their global peers, but that Ada can also be leveraged as a global communication channel by the Corporate Communication teams. Today, there is no global communications platform outside of email, which as we all know, no one reads. Ada will give us the power to send just-in-time critical messages targeted to individual users and groups with a near guarantee that the messages will be seen and acknowledged
How does your digital adoption strategy, especially in regards to WalkMe, impact or benefit your team?
In a cost-conscious environment, we must look at our spending in a smart way. The WalkMe investment has been proven out by the impact to our teams in three ways: ticket reduction, metrics, and ease of communicating changes. With the rollout of WalkMe on our HR and Compensation systems, we saw an average of 50% ticket reduction once WalkMe was implemented. This decrease gives time back to our HR team to focus on more strategic initiatives for team members. The metrics WalkMe provides gives our HR team feedback on how team members use the systems, so we can react quickly to solve employee issues where they get ‘stuck’. Finally, in the world of cloud-based software, system enhancements come fast and furious, and it is challenging to adequately inform 220k employees on these changes. With WalkMe, we can easily package system release-related changes into new content and deploy just-in-time for team members to be aware of and take action on.
How has your digital adoption strategy, especially in regards to WalkMe, helped your organization better achieve its mission goals / values?
Here at Walgreens we are aware that we don’t need every single team member to learn every possible process within a system. Rather, we just need to ensure that our employees are completing processes efficiently and accurately and having a positive experience while doing so. Walgreens has continued to think with a WalkMe-first approach to new system adoption. We have expanded the use of WalkMe to our HR Applicate Applicant Tracking System with the goal of reducing support tickets by 30-50%, and we are currently rolling out our new Desktop support tool “Ada” to support user adoption of Microsoft Teams and other Office 365 technologies. This, along with our goal to stand up a global WalkMe COE within the next few months, will better help the organization achieve its digitalization, cost transformation and smart spend goals.
How has the success of your digital adoption strategy helped to change the perceptions or attitudes of your stakeholders?
Laura has a great story about the power of WalkMe while working with IT on the deployment of Ada, our WalkMe desktop support tool. After a challenging call with several IT leaders on the purpose and intended support model for Ada, one IT leader called Laura back and asked if he could get a personalized demo of WalkMe to see how it could help his department on the adoption of new IT tools. The demo Laura gave was so powerful that it completely flipped one leader from a digital doubter to a WalkMe champion!
More about Walgreens
Walgreens is a provider of trusted care in communities around the US. Our vision is to be America’s most-loved pharmacy-led health, well-being, and beauty company, and our purpose is to champion the health and well-being of every community in America. Through constant innovation, Walgreens consistently breaks new ground to better meet customers’ needs and improve their health.
