The Domino Effect of Great Training: 6 Case Studies From Top Companies

WalkMe Team
By WalkMe Team
Updated May 2, 2023
Imagine you’re lining up a trail of dominoes. If you stand each one apart at just the right distance, one will knock down the next, from start to finish. But if one domino is out of place, or if it’s missing entirely, the chain reaction you’ve created halts. You don’t reach your end goal. The same idea applies to employee training and onboarding. If there’s a snag in the process, you hit a roadblock — learning stops there.new employee onboarding Whether you are launching a new software system or onboarding new employees to an existing platform, you need a formal onboarding strategy to achieve your desired outcomes: productivity, efficiency, and accuracy. You need each “domino” piece of your onboarding process to be perfectly aligned.

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Enterprise organizations understand that the states for software training are high

At the enterprise level, when you’re trying to train thousands of employees, effective software onboarding is critical. Not just to ensure high usability on a given platform but to your bottom line. You need your employee training and onboarding to:
  • Accelerate employee time-to-competence
  • Boost productivity levels
  • Cost-effectiveness and high ROI
Many companies have realized all of these outcomes with WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform (DAP). The DAP’s contextual guidance, real-time support, and user analytics have enabled leading enterprises to raise training effectiveness and employee productivity to new heights. Six case studies of enterprises revolutionizing digital training with a DAP:

DB Schenker cut the time and effort required to train new employees

employee training DB Schenker is a global logistics provider. Its offerings include the transport of goods via land, air, and ocean freight, as well as supply chain management and contract logistics.

The goal: Consistent onboarding processes for a global workforce

With 72,000 employees spread out across 2,000 global locations, DB Schenker needed a method to provide each employee with a consistent and effective onboarding experience for its Oracle Sales Cloud CRM. Before coming to WalkMe, employees were overwhelmed by the amount of information they needed to learn, and productivity was lacking due to lengthy and inconsistent onboarding strategies.

The solution: Contextual learning and user analytics

DB Schenker launched WalkMe for 6,000 global Oracle users to reduce training complexity and onboarding time. Previously, it took between six and eight hours to onboard an employee to the Oracles Sales Cloud system. Using a variety of apps on the WalkMe platform — including Surveys, ShoutOuts, SmartTips, Walk-Thrus, and Videos — employees could learn new processes in real time as they completed tasks. The company also leveraged WalkMe Analytics to monitor the success of its onboarding method. With this tool, DB Schenker can gain insights about how employees use the platform, the rate of goal completion, and where user friction occurs.

What DB Schenker has to say

“WalkMe is an invaluable solution that makes Oracle Sales Cloud easy to use for our 6,000 users. Implementation was excellent, and we have been able to significantly improve the user experience and cut upfront on-boarding time.” -Maurice Weiss, Corporate CRM Project Management and Change Manager, DB Schenker

Thermo Fisher Scientific eliminated their 6 month training period

contextual learning Thermo Fisher Scientific is an American multinational biotechnology product development company with annual revenues of more than $20 billion.

The goal: Streamlined software training for Workday®

Thermo Fisher Scientific identified a need to boost training when it was gearing up to roll out their new HR software, Workday®. With more than 70,000 employees, Thermo Fisher Scientific could not afford clunky, inefficient software training. Additionally, the company’s geographic spread meant it needed a training program that could support multiple languages.

The solution: A tailored, scalable onboarding solution

The key to Thermo Fisher Scientific’s successful software migration was WalkMe’s ability to offer a tailored training experience according to each employee’s need. Onboarding guidance was segmented by role and by language, allowing each user to access the exactly the information they need to be successful on the platform. WalkMe’s value extended long after the software migration was complete, allowing them to not only to scale their Workday® training and onboard thousands of new employees but also engage existing users within the platform.

WGBH Educational Foundation raised the average onboarding completion rate to 48%

employee onboarding strategy WGBH Educational Foundation is a nonprofit public media company. It is the leading producer of PBS content and a major supplier of programming for nationwide public radio.

The goal: Formalize processes and boost Salesforce usability

With more than 140,000 donors, WGBH is the largest member organization in New England. Its Member Services and Operations teams are responsible for managing all contacts, processing donations, and updating donor data. Prior to implementing WalkMe, the organization lacked any formalized processes and documentation for completing these tasks. It was relying on knowledge transfer, training, and retraining, with no best practices, learning processes, or other guidelines to ensure accuracy and efficiency. This approach was not sustainable — because WGBH is a nonprofit, it needed to ensure its training resources were being allocated in the most cost-effective way.

The solution: Simple Salesforce onboarding for all experience levels

WGBH had a seamless implementation of WalkMe for its Salesforce platform, which functions as the control center for its Member Services and Operations teams. Using Walk-Thrus, employees can complete tasks such as recording gifts, adding new donors, and updating member information with ease. Since implementing WalkMe, WGBH could vastly reduce Salesforce training time. It was also able to raise the onboarding completion rate to 48%, meaning employees who had never before laid eyes on Salesforce could perform complicated processes.

What WGBH Educational Foundation had to say

“This is the first tool I’ve seen which allows you to be in your production environment working as you’re learning along the way; there is no need to switch to yet another application. Finding a way that can scale as more and more stations move to Salesforce for donor management is critical to our success.” -Becky Levy, Associate Director of Development Services, WGBH

National Association of Federal Retirees decreased support requests by 75%

software training The National Association of Federal Retirees is the largest national advocacy organization for federal retirees in Canada. It serves 60,000 veterans and more than 180,000 members and families across the nation.

The goal: Simplify training for volunteers on Microsoft Dynamics 365

The biggest challenge the National Association of Federal Retirees faced prior to implementing WalkMe was onboarding its 800 volunteers to its Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform. Before WalkMe, the organization received over 40 support and usability questions from volunteers per week. This added up to more than 2,000 training hours in phone support and in-person training.

The solution: Real-time guidance and on-demand support

WalkMe enabled the National Association of Federal Retirees to simplify onboarding and accelerate Microsoft Dynamics 365 user adoption. With contextual and real-time guidance, volunteers could access instant support at any time. Since implementing WalkMe, the National Association of Federal Retirees reduced volunteer training time by 70% and decreased support time by 75%. Employees embraced the in-product support tool, which made it easy for them to acclimate to new features and updates.

What the National Association of Federal Retirees had to say

“WalkMe has become our first step in training new volunteers as well as retraining regular and occasional volunteers in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It’s the perfect tool for getting familiar with the system, as well as getting a refresher on less common tasks. Best of all, WalkMe helps the work get done. It’s far more effective than asking someone to watch a video or read a how-to.” -Alex Charette, Client and IT Support Services Associate, National Association of Federal Retirees

Spark Digital reduced Salesforce user errors by 25%

salesforce training Spark Digital is an information and communication technology provider serving business, enterprise, and government clients. Its ICT solutions include design, consulting, deployment, management, and support to help customers advance their digital transformation efforts.

The goal: Reduce onboarding time and improve accuracy on Salesforce

Spark Digital plays a pivotal role in helping companies and government organizations achieve successful digital transformation. But upon examining its own internal processes, leadership discovered training was being hindered by tedious and outdated training methods. Classroom training sessions proved ineffective and costly when training employees to use its Salesforce platform. The company also found that even employees who were experienced on the platform frequently made mistakes when filling out basic forms. Spark Digital needed an onboarding solution that could provide effective guidance and support while eliminating overhead training costs.

The solution: Cost-effective and engaging Salesforce onboarding

The company was able to provide effective Salesforce training and boost user engagement by incorporating WalkMe tools such as Walk-Thrus, SmartTips, and ShoutOuts. In addition to cutting employee training time by 20%, Spark Digital reported a 25% reduction in errors within forms. The success of the WalkMe training tool was quickly adopted by the company’s sales organization, which uses it to help employees improve product knowledge, boost onboarding efficiency, and ensure tasks are completed accurately.

What Spark Digital had to say

“WalkMe has been instrumental in aiding our training process here at Spark. Initially we started using WalkMe for very basic guides and Walk-Thrus, but that shortly evolved into a complex, highly customized training tool for our sales users. We have received extremely positive feedback since we have deployed WalkMe and have even had many other divisions of the business starting to utilize WalkMe, too! WalkMe is now regarded as a fundamental training tool at Spark with certain processes boasting a 20 min to 40 min reduction in admin time. Highly recommended product.” -Raz Raslan, Certified Salesforce Administrator, Spark Digital

CenturyLink cut training costs and freed up support resources

employee onboarding solution CenturyLink is the second largest U.S. telecommunications provider, servicing enterprise customers in more than 60 countries.

The goal: Empower sales professionals to complete complex Salesforce processes with ease

The biggest challenge for CenturyLink’s sales professionals was keeping up with the sheer volume of information they had to know. After undergoing numerous mergers and acquisitions over the last decade, the company’s sales team is tasked with staying abreast of changes to products and services. They also needed a solution to better utilize Salesforce, which meant quickly gaining proficiency on an array of complex processes.

The solution: Self-service training and real-time support

After an initial trial of 200 Salesforce users, CenturyLink expanded WalkMe to 3,000 users to provide “just-in-time” guidance to new hires and seasoned sales professionals. The result was faster training and faster time-to-productivity. With WalkMe, CenturyLink saw a 31% drop in support calls, which had a positive effect on the company’s bottom line. Greater employee self-service and less reliance on the help-desk enabled the company to steer training and support resources toward solving more complex cases.

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What CenturyLink had to say

“Many companies are looking to cut costs, and are under pressure to cut costs, but still keep that volley with customers and sales professionals. [WalkMe] has allowed us to take our training resources and our support resources and move them to where they’re needed most — the very complex, one-off situations. And instead of having them answer the same questions over and over again — the basic questions on processes — we’re able to have our users use WalkMe for those processes and free up those resources on the back end.” -Shelly Huber, Senior Lead Process Analyst, CenturyLink Business
WalkMe Team
By WalkMe Team
WalkMe pioneered the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) for organizations to utilize the full potential of their digital assets. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning and contextual guidance, WalkMe adds a dynamic user interface layer to raise the digital literacy of all users.