Now live in Pendo Adopt is a new feature called Journeys. Journeys shows you how employees are completing processes—and provides insights into how you can optimize those processes and experiences. If you have Pendo Adopt, click here to get started with Journeys.
Right now, businesses must maximize employee productivity. Why? With frozen or shrinking budgets and headcounts, organizations across industries need ways to do more with less. The businesses that do this best all share one thing in common: They understand that productivity is as much a function of process as it is of people. In other words, the best way to increase employee productivity is to make it easy for employees to be more productive. That means better workflows and processes.
Optimizing your business processes is crucial to building a better, faster organization. But as business operations and transformation teams know, the bigger challenge is knowing what needs optimizing. People never behave exactly like you hoped they might—but does that mean a workflow is broken? For example, does a given process simply need better, more personalized in-app guidance and support around it? Or is a radical redesign of the process itself required?
The truth is that process owners usually don’t have good answers to these type questions. They lack data and usually make decisions based on gut feel or word of mouth, which are historically unreliable sources. That’s why Pendo Adopt is launching Journeys, a new tool to meet these challenges head on.
A better way to understand how work happens
There are usually many different ways to complete a business process, and the ways employees do so aren’t always the ways management assumes or desires. With Journeys, business ops teams can see all the unique, sequential steps employees are taking to execute a given workflow. Armed with this data, they can baseline a productivity level and begin digging into ways to improve it.
Journeys gives process owners meaningful answers to key questions:
- What’s the overall time it takes to complete a workflow?
- What’s the average time between individual steps?
- Are employees completing the process in the most efficient way? If not, what additional or alternate steps are they taking?
- What are employees doing before and after the process?
- Are employees dropping off to seek assistance before resuming the workflow? If so, at what point?
To better understand the benefits Journeys provides process owners, let’s take a look at a specific example.
Optimizing expense reimbursement processes with Journeys
Say you’re on your organization’s finance team, and you notice that too many employees are filing inaccurate expense reports. Team members have to follow up with dozens of employees individually to correct common mistakes. You know the current reactive approach is a waste of time and resources. And you want to find the best path to reducing the number of rejected reports while encouraging employees who have questions to reference the reimbursement guidelines.
You’re thinking of deploying an in-app guide in your expense management platform to help employees file expense reports correctly, but you don’t want to send it out to the entire workforce (most of whom file correctly). Maybe you’re not sure at which point(s) in the process to best place the guidance. What’s more, you know there are many different ways to successfully file an expense report (e.g., uploading receipts via the app, scanning one’s credit card and having expenses from it auto-uploaded, etc.) and you don’t want to be overly prescriptive and force people to follow only one of them. You just need to make sure they don’t forget a few critical steps or fall into common “error flows.”
This is where Pendo Adopt comes in. With Journeys, you can now create a workflow with a fixed start and completion step around the expense-filing process and see all the steps employees are taking in between. You’ll immediately have a view into the quickest path employees are taking (which path has the shortest time to completion), which path is the most common, and which has the fewest steps. You can also see how long it takes to complete each step and at what point in the process people are seeking help.
With these and other insights, you can both identify problem areas and friction points and learn from what employees are actually doing in the process. Not only does this shine a light on where to best place a guide for assistance, it also can help inform the support content itself. You may, for example, discover what is clearly the optimal completion path for employees, and leverage insights about what sets that path apart to guide the segment of employees who need assistance.
Start your journey to better ways of working
At a time of peak economic uncertainty, getting your business processes right is a must. For organizations to become better, faster, and more productive, they need to empower employees to do their best work. Process optimization is key, and with Journeys, it’s a goal that’s never been more attainable.
Ready to learn more about Pendo Adopt and Journeys? Schedule a custom demo here and start your journey to greater productivity.
