TUI and WalkMe: The tech that drove our digital adoption

In advance of our recent UNLEASH America show, UNLEASH editor Jon Kennard got some time with Laura Dean and Matthew Buckland from vacation specialists TUI.

They spoke about how TUI has thrived and excelled using WalkMe as a digital adoption layer in conjunction with SAP SuccessFactors.

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Jon Kennard: It’s quite a wide ranging topic with plenty of definitions, but how would you describe ‘digital adoption’ to other HR professionals from your experience?

Laura Dean: The easiest way to describe it is that it’s a way of allowing your users to learn the new technology that you have, or the existing technology that you have to its fullest. And by doing that, it increases their productivity and efficiency.

So essentially, what you’re hoping to achieve is they spend less time focusing on complex processes, and they can do it in less steps as well. So the way we do that [is] by providing in app guidance, we have 24/7 support, we have contextual guidance, tips all over the system, notifications for important news, automation, error alerts, all those sorts of things.

And by providing that to our end users, it means when they log in to do a call process maybe three times a year, it’s not like they’re logging in for the first time all over again, and seeing it for the first time. We’re actually allowing them to complete that product process relatively quickly, without error, and without needing the support from other team members. So I guess that’s a really simplified way of describing digital adoption.

JK: Matthew, would you add anything to that definition?

Matthew Buckland: I think that’s a very succinct definition. I think that covers everything, to be honest with you.

JK: Perfect. Although I’ll come to you for the next question actually, which is; how did you get started with digital adoption and WalkMe and at the start of this, did you have any overarching goals?

MB: So it was an interesting one, actually, because we’re in the middle of our rollout of SuccessFactors across TUI, [and] as you can imagine, TUI is a global organization – we’re in many, many countries, mainly across Europe, but across the world as well. And I looked around the office, and I saw how exhausted everyone was, especially Laura, from a training delivery perspective; we were doing a lot of face to face delivery, as well as face to face delivery with the rollout, we were producing huge amounts of documentation.

And as I’m sure you know, we used to have quarterly updates with SuccessFactors updating all that documentation. Updating the business in such a frequent time period was hugely resource intensive.

Looking at everyone in the team, I just thought there must be a better way of doing this. I know we’re a travel business but traveling to different countries on a weekly basis didn’t seem very sensible.

I think actually, it was at one of the UNLEASH conferences that I did see WalkMe, so it was in the back of my mind. It was 2019, and we started investigating and looking at different options. And obviously, we engaged with WalkMe and then we launched beginning of 2020.

And actually, ironically, it was one of the one of the big benefits of the pandemic, I would say, because it did actually leverage us and springboard us to implement WalkMe on top of SuccessFactors within the business.

JK: So let’s talk about results; what have you seen across (not least) across process improvements, but also employee experience and any other kinds of benefits since the adoption?

LD: So results-wise, what we’ve seen is that the amount of queries that we get from our end users into our local support teams, the number of queries that we get about the more common processes are just simply not there anymore, because WalkMe covers those questions and those problems for us.

We also see that at certain times of year, when we do need to complete certain processes, they are done in a much quicker way now, so people don’t spend as much time doing these processes anymore.

A benefit for me as a trainer is that the reporting that I get from WalkMe – we would always start with a walkthrough, as you know, as a general starting point for one of our core processes. The reporting then shows me, where does somebody start their journey with WalkMe? Where did they end that journey? And do they drop off at any point?

So then I can start to learn what, on average, our users like to do and how they like to use the tool and the system. So then I can adapt what we have to see how they’re working.

Because we have such a huge population of people using the system, it’s really difficult for me to be able to go and ask people, what are you getting stuck on? How can I help you? So actually just being able to see their usage within the system (and it’s always an average, it’s never done to an individual, it’s an average usage), it allows me to anticipate how we can improve and look at how we can support them a little bit better.

And as Matt mentioned earlier on, we did used to spend a lot of time traveling around the world delivering classroom training. And what it’s done for us is, it’s reduced the amount of time that is spent traveling doing classroom training on some of the admin functionalities that exist in SuccessFactors.

And now what I’m able to do is actually spend time with people on really complex processes that we have WalkMe to complement with, but they still need that human touch in there. And that time that I now have back from traveling and training, means that I actually get to connect more with my key users.

Our key users tend to be HR, they tend to be the local systems teams. And what it now means is that I actually have the time to speak to those teams and to find out, how are they getting on? What’s the noise like from a business? Where are they getting stuck? Are we managing to do what we need to be doing? And I think that’s a massive benefit. Because historically, pre-WalkMe, I just would never have the time, I would just always be in a classroom, or updating the user guide, and that’s all I could do. And now I actually get to connect with people.

And by doing that, we’ve managed to build this internal WalkMe community of key users who will feed into the content that we build; they’ll test it for us, they’ll promote it for us as well. So, that’s such a huge benefit for us. And WalkMe is one of those common words now that’s used within TUI itself, because people are really aware of it from using SuccessFactors, which I think is amazing…

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You can listen to the full interview here or a preview beneath.

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WalkMe are a Diamond Sponsor of UNLEASH America. You can sign up for our exclusive UNLEASH America Digital Pass here.