Every company wants to support its employees in their work as best it can. But when it comes to planning and implementing the right support interventions, too many organizations are stuck in the traditional way of doing things.
Call it the “guess and check” method. As Jonathan Rice (Senior Data Analyst, Pendo) and Thu Young (Senior Data Scientist, Pendo), explained in a recent webinar, this method has its strengths, but its limits. Business operations and transformation teams start with an observation—say, a spike in support tickets around an important work process—and conduct research into why that observation is happening. They then brainstorm solutions for the problem, and assess each idea in terms of effort and impact before choosing to move forward with one of them.
Once they’ve produced the intervention (a new in-app guide, an updated walkthrough, a Google or Word doc with screenshots sent out via email), the team then deploys it and waits a few weeks to measure its effectiveness compared to the baseline behavior. Finally, the team analyzes whether, and to what extent, the intervention moved the needle on whatever the KPI was in question and determine next steps.
The inefficiency of “guess and check”
This traditional method of support intervention may sound well and good, but it has two major flaws. First, it’s slow: It can be months between the transformation team’s first observation and when they look at the results of their intervention, perhaps only to see that it’s failed. And second, it’s too limited in scope. By only testing one intervention over such a long period, business ops and transformation teams lose out on a precious opportunity to use their time more effectively.
What if one of the other ideas had worked better? And what if there was a way for teams to try not just one, but several of their ideas quickly, get meaningful insights, and iterate to make support better, faster? With a strong digital adoption solution, there is.
“Test and learn”: A better, more dynamic way
Unlike the “guess and check” approach, the “test and learn” strategy enables a much more dynamic, experimentally minded process of support delivery. It dramatically speeds up the time it takes from when business ops or change teams first make an observation to when they’re able to measure the impact of their interventions. And it delivers greater confidence that a team’s intervention is a good decision before dedicating the time and effort required to fully implement it.
With a strong digital adoption solution like Pendo, business ops teams can build a lightweight test and harness robust analytics to gauge its impact, fast. Let’s say the team chooses to quickly create an in-app guide walking users through the process in question. They can then deploy the test to a segment of users and compare results to a control group. After the test has run for a period of time they can see how the KPI—say, process adoption or time to completion—differs between user groups. If they see that the guide is effective, they can instantly deploy it to all users and change the user experience for the better.
From there, teams can quickly take another idea through the testing cycle. After all, even if an intervention is effective, what’s to say one of the other potential interventions wouldn’t be even more effective? By letting teams deploy and iterate on change support quickly, Pendo empowers them to learn what’s truly impactful for key KPIs, and build their strategy and tactics accordingly.
To learn more about how Pendo enables, faster, better support, including examples from Pendo’s own HR team, watch the full webinar below:
