Enterprises eager to embrace digital transformation often begin their journey by introducing technology and tools that facilitate digital disruption. While moving away from outdated tools and adopting new software that meets every outlined business requirement and functionality is essential, it’s also important for companies to consider how they can optimize the implementation of new technology and enable employees to quickly adapt to continuous changes.
For some, this is done through traditional how-to tutorials and lectures. Unfortunately, however, these methods do not only put a huge strain on manpower, labor, and resources, they could also lead to a loss in efficiency.
Whatfix, a game changing Performance Support platform, aims to help enterprises accelerate software product adoption and user performance by transforming the way they onboard, train, and support people onto new platforms or enterprise applications.
Sourceforge recently caught up with Khadim Batti, Whatfix CEO and co-founder, to talk about digital transformation, how enterprises should tackle user adoption challenges, and how the Whatfix Performance Support Platform enables organizations to obtain the maximum ROI for their digital investments.
Q: Please share with our readers a brief background on Whatfix. What solutions do you offer and what types of organizations can benefit the most from your products?
Khadim Batti, Whatfix CEO and Co-Founder
A: Whatfix is a leading Performance Support platform founded in 2014 that caters to Enterprises, SMBs and SaaS companies.
Whatfix enables the end-to-end management of a user’s product adoption lifecycle within any web application, increasing their performance and productivity on the app without any external training and learning intervention.
Whatfix also empowers organizations to create a real-time knowledge base with interactive walkthroughs. These walkthroughs provide handheld support for the applications in their stack that is always available to the users.
Whatfix offers two versions primarily:
Whatfix Enterprise – primarily used by Fortune Global companies, Enterprises, SMBs and SaaS businesses to:
- Improve their Product Adoption
- Ease their User Onboarding
- Optimize their Employee Training
- Enhance their Customer Support
- Streamline their Change Management
Whatfix Community – the world’s largest repository of interactive walkthroughs. With thousands of members, the community showcases users from diverse backgrounds. Whatfix community is currently used by Startups, Bloggers, Web-app owners, Teachers, Learning and Developments executives, Students and others.
Q: Digital transformation involves the strategic and creative use of technology to improve business processes, boost worker productivity, and elevate the customer experience. While technology should, ideally, make tasks faster and easier for employees, it doesn’t always succeed. What do you think are the most common factors that cause employee performance to drop (despite a company’s significant investment in new technologies)?
A: The assumption that digital adoption/product adoption is an automatic process in itself is the biggest factor contributing to the failure of digital transformation initiatives.
It’s true that technology makes tasks faster and easier for employees and that’s the whole purpose. But for that to happen, employees need to be able to effectively use the whole range of software products at their disposal. The whole phase between the first time an application is introduced to a user and the time when the user is able to effectively use the application is the product adoption phase, which again has multiple stages.
User performance would most commonly drop because this product adoption phase is not really tackled in organizations. Organizations, instead have formal classroom training sessions before employees start using products and they can raise support tickets if they have issues while using it. There is a no instruction on the real-time use of the products. This reactive approach leads to a drop in productivity because the training is misdirected and misplaced.
Application users need to be effectively onboarded, trained and supported in real-time on the application so that their learning and understanding of the application is experiential and lasting.
Q: In your opinion, what do companies need to do to achieve user adoption goals for their enterprise software application?
A: There’s a big difference between making a simple product & making a product simple. User adoption is the key factor that determines how both of them are perceived.
To make sure that the User Adoption goals are aligned, you must objectively look at it in stages on the basis of the user’s interaction. Here’s how we break it down.
1. User onboarding:
The user uses/sees the application for the first time. He/she may not understand how to use the application and may have minimal idea of its capabilities.
- User onboarding process could begin with the user being guided on the application, its User Interface explained through a product tour, or through a video.
- A checklist or tasklist of all the recurring tasks the user will have to do on the application.
- A handheld user onboarding process that explains how the application should be used by the user on a day-to-day basis.
2. Consistent training and Feature Adoption
For enterprise software applications, we can attest this section to Employee Training. Traditionally, employee training is done through tried and tested methods like classroom based instructor led training, online training through video calls, webinars, etc, LMS based eLearning and through basic instruction manuals. A major pitfall for all these methods is that they are mostly a one-time thing.
Employee training is moreover a consistent process. This is a fact that many companies oversee and hence see the dip in user adoption as well as in productivity. This can also be attributed when there are new feature releases which may have a learning curve.
With Whatfix, we help companies fashion a consistent training with always available interactive walkthroughs.
3. Proactive support
Many believe that user adoption ends once the user is onboard an application/product. But the truth is that user adoption is a continuous process. And support is a major part of keeping it consistent.
In most enterprises, the support provided to the users is reactive. But to ensure effective user adoption, the support must be moreover proactive. This could be ensured by creating a self-serving support mechanism that allows the users to help themselves contextually in real-time rather than reach out to support executives or verbal/video information.
4. Retention
We consider this as the last stage of a User Adoption Lifecycle. This stage is met when the requirement of the customer is met to its maximum extent possible. This is where users are generally converted to advocates/champions of the application/product.
Q: What do you mean by Performance Support? What does it involve and how is it similar to or different from training?
A: Every department within every organization uses one or multiple software applications to automate tasks. How optimally employees are able to use these applications gives the ROI of each application. The Performance Support System helps businesses obtain the maximum ROI on every application by empowering employees to use them to the maximum potential.
Say for instance, on an average, only 20% or so of a SaaS product’s features are used which means there is a lot of untapped potential out there. A Performance Support platform will help organizations improve their user performance and productivity on applications providing a real-time just-in-time help mechanism without the need for any external human intervention.
Now, performance and productivity are two aspects here. Performance increases because the platform is able to teach employees how to complete a workflow right within the application. So, the user is learning and doing simultaneously eliminating the need for formal training and human support intervention. Secondly, productivity increases because the Performance Support platform is leading users to learn about features and functionalities of the application hitherto unknown to them. This way, they are able to exploit the product more and get more tasks done.
As for the second part of the question, the eventual goal of both Performance Support and training is the same which is to get users to optimally use software applications. But Performance Support is superior to training because the latter only teaches employees how to get certain things or workflows completed. But performance support goes beyond that helping employees learn and apply that learning at the same time. In a way, training is just about one time learning but Performance Support is about experiential and continuous learning and application of that knowledge. Quite obviously, the efficiency of Performance Support in achieving the goal is much higher.
Q: Whatfix offers a game-changing Performance Support platform that helps deliver an optimal user performance. Can you please tell us a bit more about your platform? Who is it for and what are its common use cases?
A: Albeit, being a Performance Support Platform, Whatfix is widely used by businesses to tackle one of the commonly faced problems – Improving Product Adoption.
At the core, Whatfix helps in creation of real-time interactive walkthroughs which are used extensively across multiple use cases by businesses. The interactive walkthroughs handholds and guides users through an optimal path to complete a task in an application from the start to successful completion. Available at all times, these walkthroughs help the users “learn by doing” which helps in longer knowledge retention and understanding.
Whatfix’s Performance support platform caters multiple use cases like:
- User Onboarding
- Employee Training
- Change Management
- Customer Support &
- Technical Documentation
Whatfix is used commonly by:
- Enterprises on sophisticated softwares like CRM (like Salesforce, Oracle), ERP (like MS Dynamics), ITSM (like ServiceNow), HCM (like SAP SuccessFactors, Workday) and others
- SMBs on complex web applications and other homegrown apps
- Startups on websites and other web apps
- Individuals on personal websites, blogs
Q: How does Whatfix compare to other similar solutions in the market? What are its key features?
A: Being one of the leading players in the market, Whatfix is a performance support platform applicable for enterprise softwares like CRM, HCM, ERP, ITSM, etc., and other SMBs with websites which are highly complex. Most of the similar solutions do not extensively serve such a huge market and are focussed either on the customer support or user onboarding aspects.
As for key features, Whatfix is popular for:
- Ease of use and hassle-free creation of interactive walkthroughs
- Multiple formats that is auto-generated on creation of the walkthroughs to files like annotated video, slideshow, pdf, smart URL and embeddable article
- Smart widgets which can be deployed to cater to multiple use cases
- SCORM compliance for LMSs to create eLearning courses for employee training
- Quick integrations with desk platforms, LMSs, video platforms and analytics
Q: Whatfix is available in two versions: community and the enterprise model. Tell us more about these options.
A: Whatfix has two versions. One is the paid enterprise version while the other is the open-to-all Community version.
The Enterprise version is suited to organizations who are looking for solutions to onboard, train and support either internal or external users on any web-based application or website. For external users or customers, organizations can easily inject a single line of code to deploy Whatfix. Organization using third party platforms internally would need to use the custom Whatfix extension.
The Community version, on the other hand, allows anyone to deploy Performance Support but obviously it is open to view or modification for anyone who uses the free extension. The Enterprises version of Whatfix is much more advanced and has more functionalities than the Community version.
Q: What performance support trends are you seeing on the horizon? And how is Whatfix addressing these head-on? Any plans to go open source?
A: Well, the biggest trend that we are noticing is that as organizations are moving to the cloud and introducing more and more complex SaaS applications into their stack, they are also realizing the pressing need to get the best returns on these investments. Since the environment is pretty flexible, they are continuously assessing the ROI realized on every piece of technology within their organization. Even software vendors like Salesforce and ServiceNow realize this. That’s why they are adding Performance Support hardcoded into their applications although it’s very basic and inflexible. Not just them, a lot of big enterprises are doing this at a small scale.
We expect that these trends will amplify in the near future and the number of enterprises who realize that they need to provide Performance Support to both their internal and external users will only increase exponentially. However, every organization has a unique version of the product adoption challenge.
We don’t have any plans to go open source. We have an open version of our product which anyone can freely use and it’s being used by hundreds of thousands everyday.
About Whatfix
Whatfix, one of the fastest growing SaaS companies worldwide, offers a leading Performance Support platform designed to help organizations accelerate product adoption. The platform enables companies to onboard, train, and provide support to their software application users through innovative and interactive walkthroughs. Whatfix is trusted by several Fortune 500 enterprises worldwide to manage the end-to-end product adoption lifecycle of their users; thereby improving productivity and performance.