Low Usage of WalkMe Content: RED ALERT?

I spoke with someone recently who said the main issue facing their WalkMe deployment was low usage of content.

Uh-oh... Should we start changing stuff, do more ShoutOuts, etc? 

Well, there are a number of ways to come at this so let's back up a bit and think through this.

#1 - Are Users Not Seeing WalkMe?  Deployment Method 

If your users are not seeing WalkMe content that they should, that's a technical issue to work through. 

We need to go back to the start.  Did we deploy via snippet or extension? 

If snippet:

• Was the code able to be in place on all pages?  Every app is different. 
• If it's Salesforce, this is a straightforward integration. 
• If it's a homegrown app, it depends.  It could be simple for a DEV team to do have it be guaranteed to be in the HEAD tags on all pages.  Or it could be more development work for them to hunt down each type of page and make sure the code was injected.
• This is your baseline so just be sure this is set.  You should navigate around the app, open the console and double-check that WalkMe is running on various pages.

If extension:

• Did we actually get it to all the application's users?  The larger the enterprise, the more challenging it may be to be sure the extension was pushed via the right group policy to the right browsers.
• Was the Active Directory Group used for All Employees, North American Employees, or Sales Division North American Employees hired after 2020?
• Depending on how locked down your hardware is, you may have rogue older installs of Google Chrome without the extension.  Or you may have company resources accessed from home computers.  
• You may also have applications which have both internal and external users.  Meaning - the app is used by company employees with company hardware AND contract employees with different hardware.  In that case, one user population can be counted on to have the extension and one not.

Once this issue is sorted, we should not see / notice / hear of users who report missing WalkMe content. 

#2 - Baseline and Changes in Usage Over Time

• What's the baseline usage of a Smart Walk-Thru supposed to be?  There's no answer to this.  Remember, before you had WalkMe, the usage was 0.
• So you don't want to look at a usage number of 20% and think "that seems low".  That may just be the steady-state usage number.
• Your users don't want or need assistance all the time.  They just want to do their job and get out. 
• Additionally, it can be natural to see an initial spike in usage of a Walkthru (for example) which then drops to a lower level of usage.
• So if you introduce new content and it goes to 10 plays / month for a while then drops to 3x / month, that CAN BE OK.  The more important question is the next one:

#3 - What Was The Goal?

Let's talk about business outcomes.  When we implemented a Digital Adoption Platform to begin with, what problem were we trying to solve?

• High number of tickets?
• Low completion of tasks in software (adoption)?
• Low user satisfaction?

Hopefully we had a goal in mind.  And to achieve that goal, we built DAP content: Announcements, shortcuts, field validation, walkthroughs, help menu, whatever.

This stuff doesn't exist for it's own sake, it's there to help produce a particular outcome.  Have we achieved the outcome we were after?

The WalkMe "Adoption Projects" Feature is great for this.

If we've achieved the business outcome we wanted, you're in good shape.  But if not, we'll need to go app-by-app and look at the design of the WalkMe content.

Wrapping Up

Insights is a great name for WalkMe's back-end analytics.  You learn something every time you open it up.  But keep in mind that evaluating the usage numbers is VERY contextual.

Hope this helps.