The best way to optimize employee onboarding—and deflect support requests in the process

As a new year begins, businesses are doubling down on boosting efficiency. In doing so, they’re taking innovative approaches to age-old problems. For example: What’s the best way to get employees up to speed on new business processes and ways of working? How can you shift from a reactive model of processing support requests around business technology to a proactive model of arming employees with the right guidance at the outset?

The answer: Leverage the power of a digital adoption solution to bring support to employees where and when they need it most—in the app itself. 

One-and-done training vs. always-on support

In every way, building in-app guides to onboard and familiarize employees with processes and workflows is superior to traditional training models. For one, they’re more convenient. At a time when the norm for large corporations is to have globally distributed workforces, with teams spread across different timezones (or even different continents), employees need support solutions that are flexible to their needs. One-off training sessions can be long and tedious. Employees start forgetting the session almost as soon as it’s over and often don’t know where to find the recording or documentation after the fact. Is it any wonder they find themselves having to open support tickets when they hit a point of confusion?

Employees also need support that’s easily accessible and will follow them across their user journey. Business-critical workflows hardly ever happen in one app alone. Rather, it’s through processes comprising multiple pieces of software that most work happens. The best digital adoption solutions understand the multi-app reality of work and offer solutions that reflect it. 

Guide your employees to success across the entire process journey

Pendo Adopt’s Cross-app Guides and Analytics, for example, give business technology and transformation teams the ability to easily unify guides across applications and create one guide for one process, no matter how many apps it involves. What’s more, users can quickly update or edit any cross-app guide, with no coding or back-end development work required. Processes change, and the support on offer needs to change with them. 

Once a cross-app guide is ready, business transformation teams can segment its audience based on metadata (role, geography, etc.) or behavior (whether it’s someone’s first time using an app, for example) to ensure that the only people who receive it are those for whom it’s relevant. After a guide has been deployed for a set period of time, transformation teams can then leverage Pendo Adopt’s Cross-app Analytics, making it easier to understand where in a workflow users fall off, what apps they may not be using, and how process adoption is going.

Empower employees through better processes

Cross-app support not only helps employees, but the business as a whole. Let’s take a step back. When we think about becoming more productive, effective, or efficient at our work, it’s important we look at the challenge in the right way. Too often, business leaders consider these goals a function of individual performance—is a specific person or team taking the right approach to execution? 

What this mindset misses is that employees are only as efficient or productive as the processes and systems they work in allow them to be. The question business leadership needs to pose is not “Are employees doing enough to be productive?”, but “Are we doing enough to set employees up to be productive?” By building timely, contextual, relevant guides that will support employees within and across the apps they work in, businesses can ensure they are.

To learn more about Pendo Adopt’s powerful Cross-app Guides and Analytics, take a self-guided tour.