The Pain Point
WalkMe solves the problem that you only fully understand when you have spent thirty minutes on a website trying to extend your wireless contract or change your cable bill, only to give up in frustration and a phone call to an agent. With WalkMe, the software finds you, the user, while you are struggling on the website and provides a step-by-step guide, called a Walk-Thru, which moves with you through the website, guiding you on how to get the task done.
Many websites are not intuitive and, as much as every website would like to be Google, with a simple search bar and a single user experience, handling the banking or telecom needs of 50 million customers does not allow for the same simplicity. With many potential paths through a website, the designer has to optimize for the basic tasks, meaning that many other tasks, important to hundreds of thousands of customers, get lost in the third menu bar. The result is confusion, lost customers and expensive calls to a human operator.
The Way Things Should Be Done
When I first saw the Walk-Thru technology, I had the instant response that “yes this is the way things should be done”. I don’t want to over exaggerate or channel my inner Malcolm Gladwell Blink reflex, but I have learned that for technologies that want to straddle the business/consumer divide, the first reaction on seeing the technology should be a strong sense of relief and the thought that “finally someone has solved a problem that has been sucking energy out of my day”. I felt this when we saw Box eliminate the need to move files between home and work, and I felt it in spades when the Docusign app removed the need to ever print out a signature page again. While I may be colored by the miserable experience on the Comcast website (two domains for one transaction), I feel that WalkMe is a must have for complex transaction focused websites. Don’t tell me what to do via an FAQ, carry me over the line!
The product also works really well for corporate SaaS applications. Another personal example: At ScaleVP we have a heavily customized version of Salesforce that we use for all our deal tracking. Every time we add a field, we increase the likelihood that someone (usually a GP) fails to fill it out correctly. By adding a customized Walk-Thru that we built ourselves, we were able to guide the user to fill the data in correctly. We were even able to make sure that if key fields are not completed the record cannot be entered. This opens up the market for WalkMe to every customer of Salesforce, and any other widely deployed SaaS application that needs end-user guidance.
The Team
We are very impressed by the traction. In just six months of selling in the US, WalkMe has already landed such customers as Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Bank of Montreal, Cisco, Citrix and Kimberly-Clark. The founding team is strong technically and the core technology IP around element identification is well done. This is one of those classic technologies where it is really hard to make a tool that is easy to use but WalkMe has executed beautifully. I am delighted to be part of the WalkMe team and look forward to seeing them Scale.