The Challenge

Inadequate resources for employee software enablement resulted in reduced productivity.

Pipes is proprietary software used by multiple divisions of dentsu (Merkle’s parent company) to deliver outstanding client experiences. The Pipes software owners are responsible for enabling employees across the globe (mainly account managers) to use the software effectively and troubleshoot any technical problems that may occur.

With limited resources allocated towards this project, the software owners had difficulty enabling employees to use the software most effectively. They were overwhelmed by one-on-one training sessions and repetitive help desk tickets, many of which were placed in project backlog due to a lack of capacity.

Employees needed integrated knowledge base articles and support to get the most out of Pipes. The software owners could not integrate the Pipes knowledge hub inside the software, nor did they have the time to make it comprehensive enough to answer common questions effectively. Unable to find the help they needed on the Pipes platform, employees had no choice but to submit a ticket to the software owners whenever a question or issue arose. Rather than submit a ticket, some employees reverted to old, inefficient methods that involved not using the software at all.

Merkle needed to implement proactive, adaptable guidance directly into their proprietary software, Pipes, to empower employees to use it effectively and drive adoption.

The Solution

A personalized, proactive success layer to scale digital adoption across every software employees use.

With Stonly, Merkle leverages a highly-customized knowledge base and triggers directly inside their software to give employees the right guidance at the exact point of need. That way, software owners can anticipate and answer employee questions before they become help desk tickets. Furthermore, they can automatically onboard employees and guide them through common actions without scheduling one-on-one training sessions. This helped further support one of the overarching purposes of Pipes, to act as a self-service tool that teams can integrate within their daily workflow.

Within any section of their software, Merkle employees can access the guidance they need, including:

• A knowledge base that contains interactive, step-by-step guides that take each employee through personalized paths to address their specific question or issue.
• Guided tours that present employees choices based on their specific role, department, and what they are trying to do within the software.
• Tooltips that drive awareness of new features and help employees accomplish their specific goals. These provide concise information to employees and allow them to follow along with an interactive guide or see what to do with a guided tour.
• Banners that announce important software updates and bug fixes that are relevant to that specific employee.
• A custom form that sends employee requests, including feedback, feature ideas, help desk tickets, and bug reports, directly to the software owners’ inbox.

The software owners pair guides and tours with multimedia (videos, GIFs, images) for a more engaging digital adoption process. Certain guides are paired with video walkthroughs so users can choose the format that best suits their learning style.

The Results

Improving software time-to-value cut help desk inquiries by over 50%, enabling software owners to focus on product innovation

“We love how easy it is to add digital adoption guidance everywhere employees need it and in multiple formats to fit their learning preferences. By instantly empowering them to self-solve more often with Stonly, we cut our help desk tickets to below half so our team has more time for other projects.”

~Joe Boniface, Product Success Manager at Merkle

With Stonly, Merkle drastically improved the adoption of business-critical software by:

1. Building better guidance in an easy-to-understand, step-by-step format.
2. Putting help anywhere employees need it, including directly inside software without code.
3. Empowering software experts to share their knowledge one-to-many more often.
4. Making it easy to gather feedback to continuously improve the software employees need to do their jobs effectively.

Stonly helped reduce the number of help desk tickets to below half of what they had been. With fewer repetitive tickets, the software owners are also more efficient and productive. The time previously spent on 1:1 training and responding to tickets is now spent on further building out the Pipes software and refining their digital adoption guidance.

Employees can now self-solve issues instantly, instead of the previous time frame of hours or days. With Stonly guidance available when and where employees need it, the Pipes software experience is more engaging, detailed, and simple to follow.

Software owners can obtain guide insights and employee feedback to improve their proprietary software. Employees can submit and receive feedback, feature ideas, request help, and report bugs. Using Stonly guide insights, the software owners track which paths employees follow, which are working, and which need optimization.