Ever wondered about the secret sauce behind seamless digital adoption? Tune in as we unravel this mystery with Adriel Sanchez, Chief Marketing Officer of WalkMe. Adriel takes us behind the scenes of their revolutionary Discovery tool, a solution that identifies friction points in a tech landscape and effortlessly guides users through complex software applications. Hear about how Discovery provides valuable insights into the often-ignored issue of shadow IT and how it allows organizations to optimize software license management and tool consolidation.
In the second half of our engrossing chat, we move the spotlight to enhancing user experience. Adriel shares how WalkMe simplifies the deployment of help to users, making their interaction with applications an absolute breeze. Learn how WalkMe powers tasks subtly, without the users even realizing it, and how it fosters a richer understanding of employees. We end on an exciting note discussing the 'aha' moment clients experience when they realize that they can start benefiting from WalkMe in a matter of weeks, not months.
Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platform
Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon
Ever wondered about the secret sauce behind seamless digital adoption? Tune in as we unravel this mystery with Adriel Sanchez, Chief Marketing Officer of WalkMe. Adriel takes us behind the scenes of their revolutionary Discovery tool, a solution that identifies friction points in a tech landscape and effortlessly guides users through complex software applications. Hear about how Discovery provides valuable insights into the often-ignored issue of shadow IT and how it allows organizations to optimize software license management and tool consolidation.
In the second half of our engrossing chat, we move the spotlight to enhancing user experience. Adriel shares how WalkMe simplifies the deployment of help to users, making their interaction with applications an absolute breeze. Learn how WalkMe powers tasks subtly, without the users even realizing it, and how it fosters a richer understanding of employees. We end on an exciting note discussing the 'aha' moment clients experience when they realize that they can start benefiting from WalkMe in a matter of weeks, not months.
Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platform
Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon
This is William Tinke and you are listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Adriel on from Walk Me and we'll be talking about Discovery by Walk Me, so we'll do introductions here in just a second. Adriel, would you do us a favor and introduce both yourself, walk Me, discovery by Walk Me.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Adriel Sanchez, chief Marketing Officer Walk Me, which is an organization in the software space that is the developer and creator of a category called Digital Adoption Solutions. And when I talk about what Walk Me does, I like to start with the problem that we solved. When you think about the last couple of decades of investment in technology that enterprises have made, we've created a bit of a mess. Right there's this web of technology that we're asking our employees to use to get their jobs done, which, in a lot of cases, using the software, has become the job itself and the workflows that software was intended to help make easier for our employees. It's really complicated things and created a bit of a mess of it.
Speaker 2:So that's the problem that Walk Me helps resolve Help you identify all of the friction points in the tech landscape and then deliver help to people at the point where they need it most, which is the point that they're experiencing a friction. So, to give you an example, you have people who are onboarding into an organization. I don't know how many people believe that the onboarding process has been totally smooth, but when you think about all the technologies you need to onboard with and you think about all the internal processes. That is an example of a workflow that is made significantly easier with a tool like Walk Me that sits on top of the software stack and helps guide people through the major applications they need to go through to get a particular piece of work done.
Speaker 1:Then yeah, here don't do it. Take us into discovery real quick.
Speaker 2:That's where I was going to go. Next, when you think about what you need in order to optimize your kind of experiences for your users on all of these different applications, the first thing you need to understand is what software you're running in the business, who is using that software, and whether they're using it the way that you wanted them to use it. A really interesting stat is that organizations are not even aware of 51% of all of the applications that are running in their organization. That's the shadow IT out there. What Walk Me Discovery does is it, at the click of a button, allows you to see all the software that's running in your organization. Allows you to see, by department down to the individual user level, if you can figure it that way, who's using it, how often they're using it, what types of things they're doing on it, click by click, in the context of the business processes or the workflows that the user is trying to execute with those applications. And it works on one application or it works on many applications.
Speaker 2:This is especially important right now because of the amount of pressure that software budgets are under. Everybody's looking at profitable growth. Everybody's looking at how do I create sustainable business moving forward? It isn't growth at any cost anymore. Something like Walk Me Discovery is really well, because it gives organizations the visibility they need to make better choices about what to do with inefficiencies once they find them. Are you going to redistribute licenses? Are you going to consolidate tools? Are you going to perhaps reduce licenses or change license types based on what you found? This is the kind of data that Walk Me Discovery enables you with.
Speaker 1:So what I love about Walk Me In General is I spent 2009 to about 2016 studying user adoption in the HR and recruiting work tech space and I worked for the but it was consulting. I was helping people. After the bell rang, you sold something great. How do you get people to use it? So consumption, usage, adoption, et cetera.
Speaker 1:And really what I learned through that whole and I was a consultant so what I learned through that whole process is that it kind of comes down to three things change management, communication, training, et cetera. But what I also learned is that a lot of the business cases that are made by practitioners, they the math's flawed, because almost all of them are assumptions, are used or use the assumption that they're going to get 100% adoption and so that math, that payoff if there is an ROI, that ROI is flawed and so that was stark to understand that and then be able to communicate that with clients and things like that. But what I love about what y'all have done with the market, I think y'all started if I remember right, you started in sales and marketing or sales and came over and you're helping all the work tech folks. What I love about it again, they can see if it's, I'm just going to use brand names because it doesn't matter phenom or workday or whoever it is.
Speaker 1:They can see usage, like the company can see usage, they can see it by the client, they can see it in meta, they can see what features are being used, not used, et cetera, but it's hard for them to then translate that into action. So even if you're a super admin of Paycore, you can see usage, but what do you can't do anything with it, like there's no action. And what I love about we saw each other at Unleash and you had me do the Walk Me Challenge and what I loved about it because it's browser based is it actually helped me. It was like a virtual assistant, kind of walking me through and making me smarter. Okay, I don't know the answer to that Click. Oh, there you go. And then of course it's in that application, but it's, like I want to say, in the overlay.
Speaker 1:That's probably not the right way of thinking of it, but I just love what y'all built, because I studied that space for so long and there was nothing, not even nothing in that space. And y'all, you've come along and fixed a very real problem for all enterprise software, not just the spaces, not just work tech, where I care about that a lot because that's the space I'm in. But for all enterprise fintech, edtech, like all of them have the same problem they buy things and then they don't use all the features and functionality and all that stuff. So I love what you've built. I love that we met. I love that you made me go through the walk. I love that you made me go through the walk.
Speaker 2:And you brought up a couple points. That is really resonating with our customers when we're going out and talking to them. The first is yeah, you're right, you can get data about application usage in other places, but it's different kind of application usage data. It might be login data, it might be information on time spent on a page, but it doesn't give you the richness that you get from a browser-based understanding of where people are clicking the slide of an application and what is the thing that they were trying to do when they were accessing that application.
Speaker 2:What application did they access just before that and just after that? And the other thing that you said that our customers are really reacting to also is what do I do with all that information? That's the power of Walkme is that Walkme Discovery is just the first step. Now we give you all of the tools to actually address the problem, because one of the things that you can do, if you find out that you said there's an assumption that the ROI, that the business case is built off of that you're going to get 100% adoption. Let's say that you find that you have 10% adoption and you believe this is a mission-critical application, one of the things that you can do is drive the adoption of that application from 10% to 80%. How are you going to do that? You can walkme's digital adoption capabilities to do that. It's all built in the same system. You have now bought into a platform that can help you with the adoption challenge, in addition to the richness of information, to make choices about how you manage licenses.
Speaker 1:So one of the things I think when folks listen to this, they're going to wonder okay, another piece of technology, another login, another integration, this, that another? And I believe, as you talk to me about it, it's like we can integrate, but we don't, because we're browser-based, we don't have to integrate, if I have that right. Is that like, how do you handle when people give you, they throw up that? In fact, I had this is actually a different conference but a practitioner come up to me and I was having lunch because we didn't get to talk to you for that. Yeah, what's up? So I just want less tech.
Speaker 1:I'm like the irony is that we're at an HR tech conference, so why are you here? A, b, but I got it, I understood what she was saying and she was. What she was saying is. It's just, it's confusing, there's too much. I don't really know what I have to your point earlier. I don't know what people are using. Okay, I don't have any insight or visibility into that stuff. I can't change it, even if I did, and it's not like I need one more thing. So the question is, when you get I mean your sales team in particular they're getting that objection. How do you coach them into responding to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an interesting question because the problem is framed as we have created a mess of all of this technology and there's too much of it and it's not well integrated. It's like the series of really smart decisions that collectively, have created a big mess right. Each of these decisions, taking on their own, are like, yeah, we should have done that, but what has been ignored is the experience for the user and the way that we talk about it is that, yes, it's an additional application, but the user doesn't see it. It isn't an additional application, it is embedded in the flow of the work of the user. So, yes, there is a builder or someone in your organization that is going to be managing the Walkme ecosystem Absolutely, but they're going to be deploying help to users that many times the user isn't even going to know it's Walkme.
Speaker 2:You experienced the Walkme challenge. You were getting help within the applications that we were asking you to execute tasks on and if you didn't know that you were standing in front of a sign that said the Walkme challenge, you may not have even known that it was Walkme that was powering that. So you're creating the conditions for really beautiful people, first experiences for your users and you're actually simplifying the process. So in a lot of ways, consolidation of tools is hard. It is hard to take these things out. One of the things that Walkme allows you to do is simplify the experience without necessarily having to go through that mass consolidation, because you're just guiding people through each step of the process across one application or many.
Speaker 1:So another thing that you can brought up as well, that it's really important for us to explore, is, again, the integration piece not being integrated. Again, the user is not going to even really not know. I guess they could figure it out, but they don't really have to. As you brought up, a point early on is like using software at work isn't necessarily a part of the job. It isn't the main part of any almost anyone's job, unless that's their job job. But if you're a director of demand, jen, yeah, you use software, but then there's a bunch of other stuff where you're not using software and so the usage of that software you want to get the most bang for your buck.
Speaker 1:You don't want people to figure their way out and try every time. It's brand new. They have to figure out things out every time they go into it. And what I love about, again, like performance management, that's once a quarter, once a year, once a month, whatever it is. The knock on that has always been people forget, like they've logged in and the next time they log in it's like I have to relearn all of the stuff that I. And again, it's not their job, and that's the one to ask you about that because it's like, and this using software at work is tools to help work, it's tools to make you help your job and all that other stuff. But by and large, you're not paid to do that, you're not paid to use that software.
Speaker 2:You know the situation that you're like. We are clients come to us for a few different application problems. One of the problems is the one you're describing, which is it isn't that the application itself is difficult to use. It's just that it's not used very often. So it could be the most beautiful experience in the world.
Speaker 2:It's just that, like when you think about things like performance prices, when you look at things like onboarding an employee, when you look at things like exiting an employee, when you look at things like doing your benefits, these are things that an employee or a manager are doing a handful of times a year, and they're doing it in the middle of 1700 other things that they're working on. So, no matter how you slice it, there's going to be friction. There's going to be friction in that process. How do you identify where that friction is and just eliminate it? Because what you're paying that manager to do is assess an employee in a performance review. You're not paying them to figure out how to input that into a system. What you want is the richness of the assessment. You don't want, like, the richness of understanding how to input the assessment into a screen.
Speaker 1:I love that. Let me ask you a couple of bicep questions real quick. What's your favorite part and occasionally, when you get to show people the software right what's your favorite part of showing especially discovery in a demo environment? You know there's an aha moment when you get around to this point. What is that for you?
Speaker 2:There hasn't been a single customer that you've shown Walkme Discovery to that hasn't said something along the lines of oh my God, we were going to build this ourselves and it was going to take us a year. This is the most common feedback that we're getting. We work with some of the largest organizations in the world and they have been wholly unsatisfied with the solutions out in the market. To give them this level of richness of information and to hear them say that we can deliver that to them within weeks and it's just. You can see, like the bells ring oh my gosh, I can get to work. I can get the data that I need to get to work, like in weeks, and I don't have to wait nine months. That, to me, is just to see that aha moment. That is just. They're almost like skeptical that it actually is real. You know to be.
Speaker 1:We have to actually put it in and show it to oh yeah, I can see two things have how fast can we get started, and also that they don't have to depend on it to build it, you know, so I could see a relief on one level. Oh, my God, thank God don't have to do that. And oh, by the way, how can we talk? Can we get it started? Can we get it live Monday, like I could see that also happening, which isn't a which isn't a bad problem to have, of course, because folks aren't maybe adept at purchasing digital adoption platforms. What are questions that buy side, questions that they, if you could script them, that they should ask of walk me. So if you could just write down the questions and say this is what you should be asking our sales team, what would those things be look?
Speaker 2:The first is your IT department is going to want to know what level of scalability and security and compliance and governance we have. So I want you asking I want you to take us to task on that. We've just completed Fed ramp certification, so we have now been certified at the highest level of security, governance and clients. We are the only enterprise grade solution in the market. I want you to take a task on that.
Speaker 2:The other thing I want to ask you about is what is the ecosystem that you work with it, because oftentimes, especially in the size of company that we're working in not looking at, walk me in a silo it's typically part of some larger talk about upgrade of an infrastructure or some digital transformation project or some, and you're working with the largest GS side in the world, which we had relationships with, very strong relationships. So ask us how we can plug into those bigger projects with the large systems integrators or large partners that you're already working with.
Speaker 2:And number three ask us about our ability to scale some more and more use cases, as you need. So what we often find is that people will come in and want us to solve a very specific and important but a relatively narrow problem. Take us to task on what's the next problem that we can solve for you and the next problem after that, and how we can tell your colleagues in other departments what are the problems that we can solve for them, Because I think that when you start to really get your arms around the power of walking, you start to understand the depth and breadth of the problems that we can solve for your organization. Love it, Okay. Last question because you all have so many different customer stories, you might have to use your most recent favorite customer story.
Speaker 1:You don't have to use brand names or any of that type stuff. That stuff doesn't matter to me, but it's where someone might have even been skeptical and they tried it out and it just changed their life. Give us a couple of those stories.
Speaker 2:A couple of ones that I really resonate for me is there's a major CPG company that is a customer of ours, that we've started small with them many years ago but it expanded to solve many, many, much bigger and bigger problems and telling a funny story about a procurement system change in some European country that as a consequence of it, they literally couldn't get their products on the shelves, couldn't get potato chips on the shelves.
Speaker 2:People were missing their potato chips and that was because of the software change created some supply change, disruption, and it all had to do with how the software was being used and it all had to do with individuals really not understanding how to use the new system, and that's where Walt me came in to help and now they're not suffering from those issues. That's a story that I love. Another story that I love is a major retailer was their POS systems were on green screens and the employees as you dated its green screens are. They love the green screens. They loved them because they just knew all the shortcuts, like they've been working there a long time and they just knew how to get worked up.
Speaker 2:And what I love about this story is like resistance to change. No matter what Like people are just resistant to change, even if the new experience is going to be far superior. They're just resistant to change. So what walked me and the experience they were putting in to replace the green screens was like far superior, far superior, much more capabilities. They used walk me to help manage that change. And I just love that story because it helped ease people from one interface to a very different kind of interface. But it just shows you how entrenched people can be and the way that they get their jobs done and no matter what you're getting them new and how much shinier and how much richer it is. You have to manage through that change and at the end of the day, that's what a lot of customers are relying on us for is to help them manage through that change.
Speaker 1:Rob's Mike walks off stage. Hey, daryl, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I love what you do and a huge fan, so just thank you for carving out time for us.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:And thanks everyone for listening to the podcast. Until next time.