Enterprises are increasingly embracing new, fast, and frequently changing digital technology to solve business problems. But this digital transformation will only be effective if employees are engaged and prepared to deal with these changes.

Guiding corporate employees through this journey is the mission of the performance support software platform Whatfix. Founded in 2013, the startup has offices in four different countries and 500 customers, including companies like Amazon, UPS, Facebook, Microsoft and Western Union.

“As employees onboard to the applications for the first time, Whatfix welcomes them and holds them to it,” said Vara Kumar (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of Whatfix. “We provide what we call as flows, so these are step-by-step guidance to the users for using the applications and processes.”

Kumar spoke with Donald Klein (@don_c_klein), guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. He talked about digital transformation and the challenges many companies face in helping employees embrace the new solutions that drive their business.

The challenges of customized apps

Whatfix’s guide does not only work within one application. In fact, it guides employees through an entire workflow that can span across multiple solutions. The challenges are greatest in large companies, where many of the well-known vendor applications are highly customized for those specific business environments.

“Salesforce instance of UPS looks very different from Salesforce instance of Western Union because it’s completely customized to the organization business workflows,” Kumar explained. “This customization also brings a lot more adoption challenges because, even though I’m an account executive who has seen Salesforce in my past experience, it looks very different from my current job.”

Whatfix also helps employees deal with applications that are updating increasingly faster. “That means changes are constant because you are reinventing your business process as you’re learning,” Kumar said.  “Employees have to be on top of those updates so Whatfix can help them with these and make sure that employees are self-served.”

Because this problem is widespread in many large companies, solutions that help employees on this journey are now becoming a mature category of software, called by the global research and advisory firm Gartner Inc. as digital adoption solutions.

Migration to the cloud is one of the factors driving demand for these solutions, according to Kumar. In addition to applications evolving much faster, interfaces are changing and becoming more complex because they are more interconnected. Therefore, this kind of step-by-step guidance is needed to help people navigate these integrated applications and actually run a single workflow.

“At the same time, we are learning a lot about the users and what they are doing, what they are good at and what they’re not good at,” Kumar explained. “This is helping us to make our content more personalized to the users.”

The idea is to help employees to be more productive by automating certain steps.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE