SaaS onboarding seems like an odd concept to the uninitiated. Implementing a secondary system to integrate into an existing web interface would once have seemed like something that would be not only redundant, but barring that, impractical and too taxing of the mess that once was the web development platform in a nutshell. Well, once it became practical to use web constructs for complex and powerful solutions, revisiting the concept of onboarding showed a solution for a few problems that have plagued business and the nascent computing world for some time.
The original thought exercise in early high-capacity computing that begat the idea of SaaS onboarding later on was the concept of subclassing and API, to allow a new piece of software to either install as an extension, or to use complex interaction to control and augment new features without rebuilding the target.
Well, while much of SaaS is not compiled in the traditional sense, modifying a lot of core sources is actually a violation of usage terms, and when it isn’t, augmenting new features is a headache. This has meant that a lot of SaaS isn’t easily made to perform some functions that you later discover a need for.
One of these problems is an easy way to handle a few forms of training. This includes making complex processes easy for end users, or training staff to use complex utility SaaS such as CRM and BI services. This barrier of complexity and difficulty to teach users also directly inhibits the much-desired self-service concept for commerce and customer service scenarios. No software really has a standard set of features to handle these problems, and designing your own, if that’s even an option, is well … a task.
However, some clever developers saw the vacuum left in SaaS feature sets and in SaaS expansions, and has taken action. They created WalkMe, which is the onboard service compatible with everything, that would remedy the problems above effectively. This concept was actually inspired by the challenge of training specifically. Basically, it’s a self-contained SaaS construct which can integrate with other web structures. Once there, it can be mapped to observe whatever elements are in the forms, and it can also interact with them. Through this, it can see the user’s actions, and follow logic given to it to guide them in the right direction, or to just sequentially talk them through a process while guarding against damaging mistakes.
It also has a comprehensive interactive menu system for communicating with the user to ask questions and get answers, etc. Such a system sounds pretty useful, but it also sounds like it’d be hard to set up. But, surprisingly, it isn’t. You don’t have to know how to program to set the logic up. Of course a good sense of logic is helpful, the point and click interface for scripting eliminates the need for coding skill. Mapping and designing form interactions and so forth is no more complex, so WalkMe is really easy to pick up. You will need to understand how your target SaaS works to some level, but not painstakingly so.
This SaaS onboarding tool can be a little surprising to those who hadn’t thought about the idea of onboarding before, but more of a “gee whiz” experience. However, for those who have longed for a solution like this are pretty ecstatic.
