How-to Guide

6 steps to improve the employee digital experience through in-app onboarding

Over recent years, companies have made massive strides with the digital experiences that they deliver to their customers but many struggle to provide the same digital experience to their employees. Whether it be enabling employees to perform tasks and serve customers faster, automate data collection to drive certain behaviors, or better communicate internally, digital tools can serve a variety of functions to help employees perform their roles more efficiently and effectively.

As the focus on internal tools continues to grow as part of digital acceleration efforts, companies are faced with the challenge of ensuring employees can unlock the value they expect from these tools. The first of these challenges is building a product onboarding strategy that sets users up for success from their first login.

How do you create a product onboarding strategy that maximizes the impact of internal tools?

It starts with the delivery method

With the proliferation of internal tools, training costs have also been on the rise. The 2019 Training Industry report indicates that 88% of companies increased their training budget or kept it the same, and the cost of training per employee was more than $1,500. Between the time employees spend in sessions and the travel costs associated with instructor-led training for a global, distributed workforce, it’s evident how tools training can quickly become an expensive activity.

As remote work increases and the nature of work dramatically evolves, companies are finding the need to evaluate new product onboarding delivery methods. Generally, product onboarding is delivered and achieved three different ways:

1. Self-discovery: This approach lets the employee explore and discover the product on their own without guidance. While this may work for certain users, this approach increases the risk that employees may not be following the desired workflow or don’t know how to take full advantage of all the functionality.

2. Human assisted: This method relies on live product training sessions, email training campaigns, or external help documentation to guide users through the product. While this approach provides detailed support, these methods may be more time-intensive and costly. It’s also important to do these sessions close to when a user is actually accessing the product to ensure the training feels relevant and information is retained.

3. Automated in-app: Quickly becoming an industry best practice in this new remote environment, this strategy provides in-app onboarding walkthroughs and tutorials. In-app guidance provides just-in-time support, can be customized, and helps accelerate time to value for the employee. This approach, however, may require some shifts in the existing onboarding process and ownership.

While companies may often use a mixture of these three methods, embedding user onboarding into your internal tools is proven to increase employee satisfaction, lower costs, and even enable your employees to provide a better experience to your customers.

Pendo provides code-free in-app onboarding to help users capitalize on the benefits of in-product onboarding while not taking critical time away from internal development teams. For those who may be new to in-app onboarding, we’ve surveyed some of our most successful customers to help you get started.

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