70% of organizations struggle to navigate their digital transformation (DX) efficiently. Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) are the answer to this challenge because they give employees the resource and guidance they need to navigate DX and do their jobs. At Whatfix, we decided to leverage our own DAP to build a virtual onboarding program and engage employees.
Whatfix Needed to Virtually Scale Onboarding and Operations for Our Growing Organization
Founded in 2014, Whatfix has achieved seven years of exponential growth and expanded to five offices globally – San Jose (US), Atlanta (US), Manchester (UK), Melbourne (AUS), and Bangalore (IND). Recently we have seen our organization more than triple in size, with over 620 new employees since 2020. Because of this massive scale, we knew we needed to systematically drive initiatives to ensure we retained our high-quality employee onboarding experience across all geographic regions.
When we started hiring globally, every new hire needed to be trained on a varying combination of Whatfix’s 120+ internal applications. As a result, virtually onboarding our new talent became difficult: “At one point, we were in a situation where a few senior managers had more than 20 people directly reporting to them and most of them were hired in just a span of few weeks,” said Sujoy Chaudhary, Digital Adoption Consultant at Whatfix. “So imagine the pressure of onboarding all those new employees.”
With new hires joining in various roles, Whatfix employees needed personalized, role-specific content. Mohit Jain, Senior Director of Global Consulting, also explained, “A challenge for any growing organization is that your onboarding practices are not standard. Every team has a different onboarding process, and the ramp-up time for resources varies.”
Whatfix Personalized Onboarding and Enhanced Employee Experience
We brainstormed how to use our software to scale onboarding and even realized we could also use it to strengthen our remote company culture.
The team began by documenting what kind of training and applications each role needed to succeed in various stages of their onboarding journey. We created a personalized Tasks List, an individual to-do list, for each function that new hires see when they access the Whatfix platform or their email. Then, we created training for every one of our applications. Previously, the HR team would manually assign each new hire their unique set of applications, but “now, every application in Whatfix has its own training built within it.”
Additionally, we implemented the Self Help feature, so new hires could easily find assistance in-app, no matter what application they were using. We personalized the Self Help feature and named it ‘Hey Quicko’ so it was easily recognizable for employees.
Image Source – screenshot from the video
This revamped onboarding sparked new ideas to boost employee engagement and company culture. We realized we could use in-app features to engage employees long after the initial training. For example, the team implemented Pop-ups to remind employees to get up and stretch their legs. We also encouraged co-workers to recognize each other with badges for their hard work. Ashish Saraph, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Whatfix, explained, “We felt really connected even though we were working remotely.”
Whatfix also used our features to make announcements regarding pandemic information and create surveys to gauge how employees were feeling during lockdowns.
Whatfix Increased All-Company Productivity
The team used Whatfix’s DAP to transform our onboarding structure within a month. “We now have a personalized onboarding experience for each and every new hire,” said Chaudhary. “I have personally seen two customers adopt this same strategy in the exact same way in their own application. So it’s been a success.” Additionally, the Self Help feature has alleviated the back-and-forths with HR, with 941 search queries resolved in just three months.
Image Source – screenshot from the video
Other Whatfix features utilized to increase engagement also garnered positive results. For example, both new hires and more senior team members interacted with the engagement Pop-ups, and we saw a massive increase in users awarding badges. Whatfix also started using features to remind employees to accomplish tasks.
- Webinar Pop-up: Sent out to remind customer success managers to tell their customers about webinars. When our managers clicked the Pop-up, it autogenerated a prewritten email. Webinar attendance skyrocketed almost three times more than it was before.
- Customer interaction Pop-up: Sent automated reminders for employees to connect with their customers if they hadn’t within a specific period. “We found it effective in nudging employees to complete the right process at the right time,” Chaudhary said.
- Appraisal Flow: Set up a yearly performance appraisal reminder that uses a Flow to walk employees through the process of filling it out. Whatfix saw a significant reduction in support questions.
Whatfix Plans to Continue Rolling Out New Productivity Applications for Employees
Whatfix has seen enormous success using our DAP internally, and we don’t plan to stop any time soon. Our focus is automating as much as possible to make our employees’ lives easier and our organization more productive.
Our team has found that Whatfix is not just a training solution; it’s an engagement solution. We want to continue using our DAP to drive internal cultural change and find creative methods to keep us connected. Whatfix is constantly innovating and releasing new applications internally to ensure that despite our massive growth we retain a highly productive and connected global workforce.
