Greisy Flores

Senior Product Manager, Nestlé IT, Nestlé

Supernova Award Category: 

Future of Work - Employee Experience

The Organization: 

Nestlé is the world’s largest food and beverage company. We aim to unlock the power of food to enhance the quality of life for everyone, every day. Our portfolio covers almost every food and beverage category—products and services for all stages of life.

Since its start in 1867, Nestlé has grown to include more than 2,000 brands ranging from global icons to local favorites and employs over 250,000 people with operations in almost every country in the world (186 countries to be precise).

Within the Nestlé IT organization, the Technology Learning Center, a diverse group of L&T experts, focuses on improving Digital Adoption via new age L&T products that benefit our entire organization.

The Problem: 

In 2019, we had an immediate need: improve the use of SuccessFactors®, a critical application for HR and the Nestlé employees. Line managers and HR business partners weren’t optimizing their use of SuccessFactors® and the product was not delivering or meeting its true potential. This was when my team was tasked with improving the SuccessFactors® user experience. And because of regional roll outs, we had six weeks to get the job done.

Digital Transformation at Nestlé, like in many other companies, is hindered by low technology adoption rates, inefficient use of critical applications, and low user satisfaction. To remove these obstructions, we needed to understand where people were struggling and find ways to deliver training and on-going support efficiently and effectively. We needed an in-application solution that was available 24-7 to our global workforce.

The Solution: 

Digital adoption is the process by which users learn to leverage technology to its fullest potential and derive maximum value from a digital process or solution. So, we established a Digital Adoption Strategy that focuses on making technology people literate, instead of the other way around.

A key component of our strategic initiative is the use of a user-friendly Digital Adoption Platform, WalkMe. WalkMe places an invisible overlay on top of an application to provide in-app assistance and contextual help at the moment of need.

Our vision is for Nestlé to achieve a state in which every user has gained the ability to use digital tools as they are fully intended. We want to be certain employees achieve digital adoption by not only learning the basic functions of a system, but by maximizing the advanced features to unlock innovative new ideas and processes.

The Results: 

By developing a Digital Adoption Strategy around SuccessFactors® we met our initial objectives and 6-week timeline.

·   Using WalkMe’s digital experience analytics we identified and successfully re-engineered 15 critical user journeys and made them substantially more efficient and effective.

·   We used WalkMe to automate a wide range of repetitive tasks or steps, boosting efficiency and streamlining a number of processes. Having that high level of automation freed up people’s time to take on more value-added, satisfying work.

·  We used the in-application notifications feature to engage directly with the users, alerting them of changes or to highlight advanced features they were not using.  

·  We created polls to gather user feedback at the end of the user journeys, using that information to optimize the workflows.

The results we are seeing are higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS) among users, indicating they are happier while using SuccessFactors®. New feature adoption increased with targeted, direct in-app messaging. Task completion rates are much higher, almost doubled in some cases. 

The success of our Digital Adoption Strategy, demonstrated by our improvement of the employee experience with SuccessFactors®, allowed us to expand the use of WalkMe applications in other functional areas. We now make high impact decisions across our technology stack with confidence.

Metrics: 

Before we implemented WalkMe, it was difficult to bring visibility to the user experience and behavior in the application. Users struggled to use SuccessFactors to complete tasks, and satisfaction levels were low.

With the new Digital Adoption Strategy and WalkMe implementation we started to see amazing results:

·   Average task completion rates increased approximately 200%.

·  Overall IT friction decreased significantly, and user feedback was positive.

·  Automation of repetitive tasks improved productivity and freed up employees to work on more satisfying and value-added work.

·  NPS scores increased by 30%.

·  We now have over 40 applications using Digital Experience Analytics and 20 applications using WalkMe to create new use experiences.

We are now in the process of formalizing the Digital Adoption Strategy and creating a DAP Implementation Guide so that we can scale across all functional areas.  We found WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform solutions a key enabler of our corporate-wide, global, digital transformation strategies and goals.

The Technology: 

WalkMe's Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) provides tangible benefits including: 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. DAP is a holistic approach to digital adoption that simplifies any organization’s digital assets for the overwhelmed user and is completely customizable to align with Nestlé’s requirements and branding. 

Disruptive Factor: 

The main challenge to this initiative, or any other, is that everyone is competing for the employees’ time. It is difficult to attract their attention and get them to try new things. So, we needed to make the benefits to the individual as clear and encompassing as possible.

Our solution had to be delivered quickly, be precisely what the user needed, and placed exactly where they needed it most. Anything short of that would just be another disruption and not performance support.

By focusing on only 15 key processes and on what was needed to complete each individual task of the process, we were able to deliver the right content at the right time. And by engaging directly with the user in the application, we were able to collect information for continuous improvement.  The disruptive factor was the powerful and measurable impact that we could have on improving the employees' experience and engagement with technology in an entirely unique, unmatched way to achieve unprecedented results at our company.

Shining Moment: 

What I am most proud of with this initiative is my team’s willingness and ability to see a critical need in our organization and to respond with an agile mindset. We had to shift resources from other technologies and other L&D initiatives to focus on onboarding WalkMe and developing a Digital Adoption Strategy. They had to learn a new system and acquire new capabilities. Everyone on the team, including our WalkMe technology partner, contributed to this remarkable success.  

About Nestlé

Nestlé is the world’s largest food and beverage company.  Our purpose is to unlock the power of food to enhance quality of life for everyone, today and for generations to come. We constantly explore and push the boundaries of what is possible with foods, beverages, and nutritional health solutions to enhance quality of life and contribute to a healthier future.