🅾️ Onboarding project | Whatfix

🅾️

Onboarding project | Whatfix

About Whatfix

Whatfix is a Digital Adoption Platform(DAP) that solves enterprise challenges with software adoption by enabling users through real-time guidance, support, and feedback on top of software applications. 700+ customers, including 150+ Fortune 1000 companies are already using Whatfix to drive business outcomes with increased productivity, faster time to proficiency, and reduced training, and support costs.

ICP- Customer journey map

In the acquisition project, we looked at ICPs from the lens of organizational fit and appetite to pay. We have established that the ideal Whatfix ICP is a large enterprise with > 5000 employees.

In this onboarding project, we will flesh out the ICP from a department persona perspective allowing us to go in-depth into ICP needs from Whatfix.

Criteria	ICP1- L&D	ICP2- Sales	ICP3- Product Manager	ICP4- HR
Name	L&D function in Large Enterprises with Complex Software Ecosystems	Sales function in Large Enterprises with Complex Software Ecosystems	Product manager in a medium to large enterprise	HR function in Large Enterprises
Company Size	>5000 employees	>5000 employees	>1000	>5000 employees
Target persona	L&D Trainers focused on Soft Skills or Technology Training within Tech. Training could be Internal (Employees) or External (Customers).	Sales leaders focused on increasing the productivity of their sellers	Product manager building a product for an enterprise(internal or external)	HR leader
Roles/Designation	Director of Learning and Development, Head of L&D	Director/Head of Sales	Product manager, Head of product, Program manager	VP/HR Director
Major responsibilities	1. Training employees on both Soft Skills and technology. (the latter is of importance to Whatfix) 2. Budget for the L&D programs for which they liaison with the top management; create effective learning/development programs. (Whatfix will be helpful for them to create content at a low cost) 3. Work on gathering feedback from the employees and do continuous improvement in the training efforts. (Whatfix helps by making continuous training possible through easy content updates).	1. Maintaining and handling different sales teams spread across territories and accounts with a focus on adding more customers, enabling sellers to sell better, and improving the revenue for the company by meeting quota 2. Enabling Sellers to meet their targets by providing them with resources and getting the resources by liaison with the Enablement, Operations, and Engineering Team (Whatfix can help by helping the sellers adopt the different solutions/tools that can make the selling process easier for them and also help in the content's adoption, demo environments, and solutions that are brought in by the teams) 3. Work on the budget, partnerships, and customer relationships to maintain an effective sales team. 4. Ensuring the effective onboarding of new sellers.(Whatfix can help in the effective onboarding of sellers by enabling effective, contextual training and also help them throughout their time in the role with continuous support)	1. Build a product that meets the goals of the company while bringing revenue and profit. 2. Improve the User Experience within the product to ensure high CSAT and NPS scores. (Whatfix helps here by aiding in UX experience for the customers using its flows, self-help, etc.,) 3. Communicate with the customer about new features/releases to help adopt the feature and upsell. (The Beacon, Pop-ups feature of Whatfix helps to communicate to the customer within the software/product) 4. Help improve the customer adoption of the product by giving a seamless onboarding experience to reduce churn. (In-app guidance by Whatfix helps users adopt and understand the product easily, thus reducing churn) 5. Help in the continuous training of the product for support and sales team to know the product well. (Whatfix can help internal employees understand and use the product easily.	1. Lead the different functions of HR - Talent Acquisition, Employee Management, Performance, Compensation, etc., 2. Implement Business Initiatives by collaborating with other leaders of the Organisation. 3. Improve turnaround time for hiring resources to ensure the productivity of the organization (Whatfix can help the Talent Acquisition team adopt their ATS and use it efficiently to hire faster) 4. Achieve Smooth Onboarding and Enrich Employee Experience, ensuring high retention rates. (Whatfix helps employees onboard to the tools quickly. It also helps to use the HR software to its fullest with in-app guidance, thus enabling them to self serve) 5. Streamline and simplify HR processes like Performance Management, Employee Information Management using relevant tools (Whatfix helps with the adoption and easy use of the tools used, helping in the streamlining) 6. Ensure the privacy and security of Employee Data, meeting all compliance laws.
Decision Maker	CIO, CTO	Head of Sales	CTO, CIO	CEO
Decision Blocker	• Complexity of integration with existing systems • Concerns about ROI and cost-effectiveness • IT compliance	IT	IT	IT
Frequency of use case	Frequent, especially during software rollouts, updates, and onboarding periods.	Frequent	Frequent- The Product Manager highly works on his own product to create demo instances, test run and manages it.	Frequent
Products used in workplace	1. LMS - Cornerstone, SumTotal, SABA 2. CMS - Sharepoint, Confluence 3. Course Authoring Tools - Camtasia, Storyline	1. CRM - Salesforce, Oracle, Zoho CRM 2. Demo Tools - Demoflow, Demodesk, Navattic 3. Training/Learning (LMS) Tools - SAP Litmos, Mindflash, Blackboard 4. BI Tools - Tableau, SAP Business Objects, Zoho Analytics 5. Forecasting Tools - PipeDrive, Anaplan 6. Call Recording/Analyzing Tools - Chorus, Gong 7. Sales Enablement Tool - Highspot, Showpad, Seismic 8. Communication Tools - Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, MS Teams	1. Project Management Tool - Asana, Jira, Confluence 2. Communication Tool - MS Teams, Slack 3. Company Email Tool - Gmail, Outlook	1. HRMS - Workday, SuccessFactors 2. ATS - Workday ATS, Zoho Recruit 3. Payroll - Paylocity, Gusto 4. Performance Management Tool - Workday HCM, Lattice, UKG Pro 5. Company Communication Tool - MS Teams, Slack 6. Company Email Tool - Outlook, GSuite
Challenges	1. Post software training, tackling a forgetting curve/ lack of knowledge retention amongst learners is their biggest challenge. 2. The time it takes to create multi-format & multi-lingual content is quite long. 3. The quality of content created is sub-par. 4. The inability to give continuous training, as updating content regularly, is a challenge. 5. The lack of time/ tools to produce quality training content. 6. Inability to track the training progress and their impact on learners. 7. No room to add Personalization based on cohorts, teams, locations or languages to the software training. 8. Low adoption of the LMS and all its content. L&D teams spend a lot of time creating content but there's a direct impact on their productivity when there's no absorption or usage of the content they've created.	1. Inability to find the right talent required for the territories and accounts 2. Providing Training and coaching to the Sellers to enable them to sell better. (Whatfix can help in creating the training and coaching content, also provide contextual support) 3. Use the CRM effectively to observe, analyze and measure the effectiveness of the Sales Process, identify places of improvement to help the sales targets. (Whatfix can help navigate the CRM easily for the manager and the sellers, helping them use the CRM effectively to capture the flow of the sales process) 4. Ensure the consistent productivity of Sellers in the sales process/cycle. (Whatfix helps with the different tools used by a seller, making it easy to use, thus ensuring high productivity) 5. Inability to provide an effective onboarding to the sellers that helps them sell with confidence and also retain in the organization. (Whatfix helps in the onboarding and continuous training effectively with its in-app, contextual guidance)	1. Lack of adoption of the product by customers, leading to no renewal or churn 2. Low awareness of features in the product amidst customers leading to increased support tickets and customer frustration 3. Lack of knowledge on the distinct features of the product in Support and Sales Team leading to bad customer support and lost deals 4. Difficulty in keeping all the teams around the product updated about the latest releases, changes, and fixes on the product. 5. Improve the Customer Onboarding Experience to ensure excellent customer experience and long life of the partnership	1. Lack of Adoption of the HR Tool - ATS, HRMS, etc., by HR teams and Employees 2. Poor Candidate and Employee Experience leading to a company's poor brand image 3. Inability to track accurately and measure the usage of HR tools amidst teams and employees to ease the different HR process 4. Increased internal support queries from employees
How Whatfix can add Value	1. Through in-app guidance and flows, Whatfix supports users on their learning journey within the applications they're trained to learn, ensuring knowledge retention in the flow of work. 2. Whatfix Studio allows L&D teams to auto-generate multi-format content from existing flows and walkthroughs and auto-populate them strategically in the LMS or content repositories they use. This ensures a reduction in content creation time and a huge improvement in the quality of content. 3. Efficient maintenance and updates of Content, reducing content creation time and effort by up to 50 - 84%. 4. SCORM and X-API-compliant content that allows the bidirectional flow of content between your application and LMS/ repository. This means Whatfix created -content can automatically flow to your LMS and the content present in your LMS is also displayed in-app. This takes away the need to switch tabs to an LMS and find content. This ensures there's a better adoption of the LMS and its content. 5. Add Personalization in Training with individual flow or walkthroughs based on cohorts. 6. SCORM & xAPI compliant-content tracking allows L&D teams to track the learning progress of learners through the LMS, even if the learning is happening on the application. 7. Product Analytics can help L&D teams understand the post-training friction areas and adoption gaps among learners. 8. Increased Overall Adoption that leads to improved ROI of the tools used for L&D purposes.	1. Whatfix helps the Sales Director ensure their team is adopting all the sales tools on time to ensure no loss of productivity + ease of the process 2. Whatfix can also bring contextual support and content required by the sellers during their sales process within the different tools they use, ensuring ease of use and self-help 3. With Whatfix, training, and coaching of the new sellers becomes faster, smarter, and easier, thus ensuring short ramp-up time and faster growth in productivity. 4. Whatfix helps set a process to the sales cycle than what a tool can do which ensures all the information required to be captured is there in the tools, giving way for the persona to measure processes easily and make changes/improvements based on that. {For Eg: With Whatfix, one can set prompts that remind sellers to fill all the data required as part of the sales process analysis.} 5. Whatfix provides continuous, contextual, in-app support that helps in the effective onboarding of employees, it also helps the sellers be updated with information at all times, which leads to better selling, high morale, and less attrition.	1. Whatfix helps improve the user adoption of the product through in-app guidance, walkthroughs, and flows. 2. Whatfix Analytics will help the PM easily measure and track the user adoption rates and work using the data. 3. Continuous and in-app training along with task-list and self-help helps to onboard customers easily. 4. Improved customer experience by using Whatfix on their end-product. 5. Easy to create and maintain learning and development content used for customer/employee training	1. Improve Employee Experience by giving in-app guidance, contextual support within the tools, where the user is present. 2. Reduce Support Queries, as employees can self-serve with the help of Whatfix. 3. Enable a Digital Experience for Candidates and Employees by making adoption of the different tools easier 4. Increase Employee Productivity by reducing time to discover help or training content, making it available in-app. 5. Improve Collaboration amidst teams by increasing the use of collaboration tools.
Tools on which Whatfix can be deployed	1. CRM 2. HCM/ HRIS applications 3. ERP or other Enterprise Applications: custom-built or 3rd party	1. CRM like Salesforce	On product owned	1. HRMS - Workday, SuccessFactors 2. ATS - Workday ATS, Zoho Recruit 3. Performance Management Tool - Workday HCM
Metrics that matter	1. Time To Proficiency - Time Taken for learners to become proficient in the trained content 2. Training Completion Rates - Number of Employees who have completed the training 3. Training Scores - Individual and Average Scores of Employees 4. Learner Satisfaction Score - Training Satisfaction amidst the Learners/Employees 5. Cost of Training - The cost of producing, distributing, and conducting the Training. 6. Business Impact - The Direct Goal/Target Completion achieved after the training 7. Onboarding experience: Learner satisfaction post the new joinee/ new learner onboarding timeframe.	1. Conversion Rate - Number of trial users/demos that converted into paying customers 2. Pipeline Velocity - How rich/populated a pipeline each territory has. 3. Monthly Sales Growth - Sales Growth for the company month-on-month 4. Customer Lifetime Value - Amount spent for a customer and the value the customer brings to the overall profit 5. Customer Retention Rate - Number of customers retained YoY.	1. MAUs/DAUs - Monthly and Daily Active Users of the Product 2. Customer Conversion Rate - The Number of customers in Trial/Free Plan who convert to paid customers 3. Customer Retention / Churn Rate - The number of customers who leave and stay with the product 4. NPS / CSAT Score - Customer Experience / Promoter score that tells how likely a customer is to promote or leave the product 5. CLTV - Customer Lifetime Value helps analyze the value of each customer 6. CAC - Cost of Acquisition of Customer 7. MRR/ ARR - Monthly and Annual Revenue of the Product	1. Cost Per Hire - Amount/Resources Spent to hire one new employee 2. Employee Turnover Rate - Number of Employees quitting the organization within a time frame 3. NPS - Score to show the chances of an employee recommending the company as a workplace 4. Performance Rating - Overall Internal Performance of the company's human capital 5. Employee Productivity Rate - Human Capital Efficiency measure 6. Training Costs - Cost spent to train the employees 7. Diversity Score - Metric that shows how inclusive and diverse the organization is in terms of its Human Capital/

Jobs to be done(JTBD)

ICP	Functional goal	Personal goal	Social goal	Financial goal
ICP1- L&D	Creating training content and making this content easily accessible to all	Spending less time creating content manually	-	-
ICP2- Sales	Providing Training and coaching to the Sellers to enable them to sell better	-	-	Increase sales growth and CLTV
ICP3- Product manager	Help improve the customer adoption of the product	-	-	Increase MRR/ ARR - Monthly and Annual Revenue of the Product
ICP4- HR	Improve employee experience	-	-	Decrease cost per hire and training costs

Onboarding teardown

Whatfix has a Sales-led motion, and hence I am looking at onboarding from the entire sales funnel process.

Please find the whimsical link for the Whatfix onboarding teardown here. If you need google slide, its here.

Activation metric

Hypothesis: People who have ‘Booked the first call in 48 hours’ have significantly higher chances of converting than those who have not. This funnel stretch can be optimized to increase onboarding conversion.

Reasoning: Since Whatfix is heavily reliant on the sales team furthering the leads down the funnel(the sales cycle being more than 3 months for a large enterprise), the first touchpoint to get initiated with the Whatfix sales team is getting the first 15-minute meeting, where the sales team can start the conversation with the lead on understanding their pain points, their persona fit, budget, and time constraints.

Metrics tracked:

User cohorts

Acquisition source

Funnel drop-off rates

Form fill-up rates

TAT (Time to Load a Page)

Current challenges in achieving a high activation rate

Challenge 1- 40-50% drop-off from the form fill-up to book the meeting

Possible reasons why people are not booking the call:

Unavailability of relevant slots. The Account Executive(AE)’s calendar for the preferred slots is already booked. Whatfix SDRs are split across regions, like NA, Europe, the UK, Australia, and India. When a form fill comes in, the backend identifies the IP location of the form fill and tries to assign the form fill to the SDR relevant to the specific region, hence showing the SDR's calendar availability in that particular region.
The booking pop-up is taking time to load. This happens as Chili Piper runs underlying logic in the background to find the calendar availability of SDR in the region.
30% of users are dropping off on the ‘Phone’ field as personal phone numbers are sensitive data and users are hesitant to fill out the form.

Challenge: Why we can’t do away with the phone field

Data concludes that the ‘Phone’ field is more sensitive data for users to fill than the ‘Company’ field. Phone numbers are important for our sales process as SDRs are heavily reliant on phone numbers to call and nurture leads. In cases where the user has booked a meeting slot and not attended it, the SDR uses the phone number to reach out to them for nurturing.

Current solutions being experimented with:

We can skip asking the phone number on the form if we use tools like Zoominfo and Lusha in the backend. These tools can give us the phone number of a person if we input the email, and thus SDRs can get the phone number in the backend. The catch here is phone numbers are often inaccurate in these databases.
Stats show that the sooner an SDR reaches out to a qualified lead, the higher the percentage of conversion.

In the case of Whatfix, the quality of leads matters more than the quantity of leads. Hence the website form fill-up uses fields and logic that prioritize high-quality leads and tries to reduce junk leads.

Quality of leads is very important to ensure we put efforts into nurturing the right leads.

Some steps done to ensure the right quality of lead data are:

Personal email is not accepted in the form fill. Only business email is accepted.
Data shows that up to 30% of form fills in a month were filled with invalid mail. These 30% junk leads with invalid mail book up to 15% of SDR calendar slots.

Current solution:

An internal deployment was done to accept only verified emails in the form fill-up using the Clearout tool. This ensures that bogus emails are not booking the form and filling up calendar slots. After this deployment, the number of form fills with invalid mail has reduced to 5% from 30%.

Challenge 2- A high percentage of junk leads that book meetings leave good leads with no option for booking slots according to their preference leading to low meeting book rate.

Experiments

1. Increase availability through automated scheduling

Solution: Implement an automated scheduling tool (such as Calendly or HubSpot Meetings) that syncs with multiple team members' calendars. This ensures a wider range of available time slots by distributing calls across team members who are available.
Benefit: Expand the range of available slots by leveraging the collective availability of multiple team members, reducing the likelihood that a user won’t find a suitable time.
Limitation: SDRs are hired for certain regions. Hiring more SDRs for regions will not bring in more qualified leads, as the inherent problem is junk leads booking calls. Optimizing for lead quality makes more sense.

From the 3 inbound channels, the maximum leads are being generated by the blog content, but the leads are not of high quality. These low-quality leads book the slots of the SDRs and overwhelm the calendar. Good quality leads coming from whatfix.com do not get preferred slots.

Solution that has worked so far:

Group Demo- Identified regions and certain blogs that have a history of giving junk leads. After form-fill, if the IP belongs to a certain region, or the referring page URL belongs to certain lists then we redirect those leads to a group demo, rather than showing them the normal chili piper booking form(belonging to SDRs). This way we are allocating the SDR’s availability only for IPs and URLs that have a history of giving us good leads.
Automated flow- From analysis we discovered that if a company employee size is <50, then those companies are least likely to convert. So at the form level we try to identify if a lead is from a company less than 50 employees. This is done by populating the email ID entered with the Zoominfo database. When such leads are identified they are directly directed to the group demo rather than the SDR calendar.

Bias used and experimented with.

Feedforward (When users know what to expect before they take action): ‘

Book a demo’ button prepares viewers to expect booking a meeting as the next step.

Investment Loops (When users invest themselves, they're more likely to come back):

When users book a 15-minute meeting and invest that time exploring Whatfix, they are more likely to follow the next steps in the onboarding process.

Progressive disclosure (Users are less overwhelmed if they're exposed to complex features later):

Step-wise forms have been experimented with, where on the first screen we ask for email, and on the next screen all the other fields are shown. The conversion of the step-wise form was lesser than the current form where all the required fields are shown at once.

Sunk Cost Effect (Users are reluctant to pull out of something they're invested in)

For Walkme(Whatfix competitor) displacement opportunities, special sales enablement training and sales motions have been developed to make the lead feel that pulling out of Walkme has major gains for them in the near and long run with cost advantage, better customer experience, and ROI.

Social Proof (Users adapt their behaviors based on what others do)

A carousel showing logos of large enterprises(Target ICP) has been used at the bottom of the form fill-up for social proof.

The bottom of the form fill shows the names of current large enterprise customers as social proof.

Cognitive Load: Total amount of mental effort required to complete a task.

The current form has 5 fields, which can be reduced by removing the company field. This field can be enriched in the back-end using the email and auto-populated. An A/B test was done where 50% of traffic was directed to the 5-field form, and the other 50% to the 4-field form sans the company field. The conversions remained the same in both sample tests. Hence we are using the 5 field form as having the company filled by the user enriches the correct data in Salesforce.