WalkMe Review: On-screen Tutorials Made Easy

What if you could create a virtual tour of your website, showing customers how to place orders for customized products or guiding them through the process of setting up a new account? Or what about highlighting the new features you just added to your most popular app? That’s a job for WalkMe.

Designed as an overlay, the WalkMe platform gives small businesses a way to provide customers and employees with additional help when and where they need it. The solution works for a variety of purposes, such as customers trying to navigate a website or people using applications—a word processor, a mobile-based banking app, etc.—for the first time.

WalkMe Review: Features that Fit Small Business Needs

Boaz Amidor, WalkMe’s head of corporate and marketing communications, compares WalkMe to putting on Google Glasses or a virtual reality helmet. “WalkMe is a transparent layer that gives you all this augmented information,” he explains. “Instead of moving between screens, you get what you need to know right there. It’s an overlay that shows, step-by-step, how to do something.”

WalkMe review

Easy on-screen directions help customers or employees find what they need quickly.

Businesses can use it to move customers through the sequence of actions to accomplish just about anything: place an order, use video chat for support, or navigate an online appointment system. It’s also a great solution for in-house needs, such as showing employees how to upload files into the master document database or to guide them through a new submittal process for expense reports.

The majority of small businesses run a very lean ship, with few internal resources available for technology implementation and customer support. WalkMe helps to fill those gaps with easy-to-use tutorials targeted at keeping operations flowing.

“Small businesses often turn to self-service technology to help them,” says Amidor. Where they might post videos or provide live chat, he explains, they can also use WalkMe. Most entrepreneurs don’t have much time or money to constantly retool their website’s design when, for example, they add new classes of products or services that may require a different ordering process. “Instead, they can use our guided tours,” Amidor says of WalkMe’s on-screen directions and tips.

One big benefit is that WalkMe’s always ready to go; it doesn’t matter whether it’s a person’s first time through a particular process or the 10th. “Even after people learn how to use something, unless they practice day-after-day they’ll eventually forget how to complete the task,” says Amidor.

WalkMe’s platform is particularly handy at helping employees complete a task that isn’t part of their normal routine. Two great business-use examples include annual performance evaluations or occasional document archival projects. Create a WalkMe tutorial only once, and then watch it provide multiple time-saving opportunities down the road.

WalkMe Review: Flexibility Rules

Knowing that customers and employees will use WalkMe on a number of different computing platforms—smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops—each with its own limitations on processor speed and screen real estate, the company built smarts and flexibility into the software platform. Whether you’re helping a customer navigate your website via a tablet, or you’re showing an employee how a desktop-based application works, you don’t need to create a separate walk-through for each platform.

Amidor notes that while some entrepreneurs use WalkMe to move customers through the sales funnel more easily, others struggle with more basic issues.

“We’ve had firms operating in areas where people have different backgrounds and speak different languages,” Amidor says as an example. “Small business owners can’t necessarily translate everything into a different language, so they used WalkMe to detect the end-user’s preferred language.” The company website still appears in English, but they can deliver tutorials, support, and additional information in a different language, thus saving time and money for the business while also improving the customer experience.

WalkMe review

WalkMe lets customers and employees receive on-screen tips in their preferred language.

WalkMe Pricing: Easy to Try; Free to Use

“Once you create and publish your walk-through, you receive a snippet of code. Then you copy the code and embed it at the top of your website’s home page,” Amidor explains. He compares it to the ease of embedding Google Analytics or using WordPress to build a website—platforms that many small business owners already know how to use. “There’s no hardware, it’s purely software-as-a-service.”

[Looking for more ways to engage your customers? Don’t miss this article: The Benefits of Online Communities for Small Businesses]

WalkMe is also easy on the bottom line. The free plan includes three walk-throughs, up to five steps per guide, 300 assists per-month and basic online support. It even includes a WalkMe tutorial to help small businesses launch the platform successfully.

If you’re looking for more function and features—including unlimited walk-throughs, a multi-language experience, or higher-level API support, the company can create customized, higher-tiered plans that offer greater functionality. Contact WalkMe for a price quote.

Julie Knudson is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in technology magazines including BizTech, Processor, and For The Record. She has covered technology issues for publications in other industries, from food service to insurance, and she also writes a recurring column in Integrated Systems Contractormagazine.

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