Laura Valenziano

Sr. Manager, Walgreens

Supernova Award Category: 

Future of Work - Employee Experience

The Organization: 

Walgreens is a provider of trusted care in communities around the US. Our vision is to be America’s most-loved pharmacy-led health, well-being, and beauty company, and our purpose is to champion the health and well-being of every community in America.

Through constant innovation, Walgreens consistently breaks new ground to better meet customers’ needs and improve their health. We have a footprint of over 9,560 retail stores in all 50 states and U.S. territories, as well as an omnichannel business at Walgreens.com. With our broad reach and continued commitment to leading edge technology, we are making out vision and purpose more attainable, and furthering care for the communities that we serve.

The Problem: 

One strategy that we embrace—one often overlooked by large businesses—is to improve the customer experience by improving our employee experience. We want to empower our employees and team members to make decisions, and to give them the information and resources to do a better job: to eliminate unproductive work, reduce frustration, and give them the space to better serve our customers.

We have made several strategic investments in new software designed to assist store managers and employees such as the HCM SAP SuccessFactors. However, these new software initiatives have, in many ways, become distracting to the organization —the rollout, training, and trouble-shooting can be disruptive and time-consuming, ultimately taking our employees away from their primary customer responsibilities. Not to mention, the overwhelming pressure put on our support and HR departments every time there are changes made within the platform.

With 220,000 employees across the country, delivering training can be difficult and the effectiveness of the training can be temporary. But that’s not all—the impact of poor adoption and process confusion by employees means that small issues can quickly snowball and affect the entire business. Our goal was to implement a solution that would increase user adoption of SuccessFactors and be able to scale with us as our entire organization navigates multiple cycles of digital transformation.

The Solution: 

Taking an innovative approach to a common challenge, we invested in a digital adoption platform, WalkMe, to provide employees with real-time digital assistance. WalkMe seamlessly integrates with the SuccessFactors platform and engages our employees using step-by-step directions delivered via tip balloons and other tools that provide intuitive instruction and even automate processes exactly when and where our employees need it. Employees are able to problem-solve quickly and independently and get back out to serving our customers.

The Results: 

Employees feel the immediate impact—WalkMe relieves the stress, confusion, and delays of using an unfamiliar system and, in doing so, gives them time back to better serve our customers, improving both workplace and customer satisfaction.

The impact of WalkMe has also been felt in our HR department. By easing HR’s responsibility for training and answering support questions, WalkMe allows HR to spend time on more impactful initiatives than training and support, while still ensuring the business functions as needed to be successful. WalkMe’s self-service help reduces HR’s costs while substantially improving agility, timeliness, and the employee experience.

Overall, this innovative investment in digital adoption has fundamentally changed Walgreens training: it is more effective, takes less time, and encourages full use of digital tools that, in turn, improve the employee and customer experience.

Metrics: 

One of the largest software rollouts in our organization to date was with SAP SuccessFactors, a comprehensive HCM platform targeting 40,000 managers and 180,000 individual contributers. We took a different approach than we traditionally would with a rollout this size, by implementing WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform. The difference was incredible. WalkMe’s intuitive self-service experience led to only 1,600 support tickets in the first week—a 70% reduction in disruptiveness.

After only five weeks, support tickets dropped to 800 per week. In large part, this is because WalkMe makes it quick and easy to deliver new content to users, and our HR team could collect feedback and react quickly to solve employee issues.

The Technology: 

WalkMe pioneered the Digital Adoption Platform combining insights, engagement, guidance and automation capabilities into a transparent layer of predictive, contextual help that sits on top of an enterprise’s digital assets. The platform is a holistic approach to digital adoption that simplifies any organization’s digital assets for the overwhelmed user, is completely customizable to align with the company’s requirements and branding.

Disruptive Factor: 

We knew that we were facing a large digital transformation challenge, and with a huge global workforce and slimmer-than-ever support and training resources, we felt the odds were against us in rolling out a completely new platform to our employees. Traditional training methods are simply no longer scalable in the increasing digital environment we live in, regardless of industry or size.

We believe strongly in the need to embrace digital transformation, but also recognize the challenges of doing so while delivering an optimized employee experience to a geographically dispersed workforce of 220,000. It’s important for us, as HR, to put ourselves in the shoes of our team members. The last thing we want is for employees to struggle with the very system designed to make them more efficient, and then to require hand holding by support agents to complete basic processes.

WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform has not only helped our employees get to know a new platform, but also reduce frustration, improve workflow, and help us recognize substantial savings.

Shining Moment: 

Here at Walgreens we are aware that we don’t need every single team member to learn every possible process within a system. Rather, we just need to ensure that our employees are completing processes efficiently and accurately and having a positive experience while doing so. With our deployment of WalkMe’s ActionBot, managers can simply interact with the intuitive chat based interface, and have the process automated based on their input, giving managers back time to focus on our customers.

About Your Organization

Walgreens is the Retail Pharmacy USA Division of Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. (WBA), and WBA is currently ranked No. 2 in the Food and Drug Industry list of Fortune's World Most Admired Companies (2018), and has been included on this list as WBA (or previously as Walgreen Co.) for the past 25 consecutive years.