You’ve just invested in a leading revenue management software platform that you know will improve margins and overall profitability for your life sciences company. But your users are balking. They don’t understand all the capabilities – some of which, admittedly, may be complicated.
You could conduct an intro workshop or in-person learning sessions. But users will forget what’s been taught. Product demos? Users skip them. Manuals? No one refers to them. They text your IT support team, who are overwhelmed with other projects.
Sound familiar? It should. Sixty percent of workers said new enterprise software had frustrated them within the past 24 months, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. In fact, more than half (56%) of users said new software had made them wish management would bring the old way of doing things back.
Why does this matter? Revenue management software can have an electrifying effect on your margins and bottom line, as well as your team. But only if your people use it. And let’s face it, revenue management solutions are as complex as the revenue cycle processes, they support. They can achieve great efficiencies and capture more revenue for pharmaceutical companies. But they’re difficult to master.
Small wonder that 40% of users resist using applications after a negative experience by using minimal features, avoiding or delaying use, Gartner says. And more than 90% of customers feel that the software companies they buy from “could do better” when it comes to onboarding new users, according to Wyzowl Research.
The answer: In-app guidance
An in-app guidance solution, seamlessly integrated within your revenue management software, interactively introduces users to a software’s capabilities while in the app. No need for classroom or even in-person training. It’s all done in context: your users learn about features as they need to, in real-time, inside the software, with pop-up tips and explanations, interactive walkthroughs and simulations, self-help widgets, and even videos.
It teaches users about functionality, improves engagement, lessens frustration with learning a new digital tool, and accelerates product adoption. That’s great news because after having a positive experience with an application, Gartner found that 41% of users spent more time delving further into its features.
5 reasons you need in-app guidance
Revenue management is critical to staying competitive and here are five ways in-app guidance will help your company make the most of your technological investment.
Support Onboarding and knowledge-sharing
When introducing important new business software like revenue management to your team, hosting a one-off workshop simply isn’t enough.
Imagine this: You’ve just introduced your users to the new revenue management system. They’re quite a motley crew. You have pricing analysts, market access professionals, revenue analysts, and data experts, each with different roles and responsibilities. They might not even talk to each other, although pricing and contract data should flow through all these functions in an orderly way. But as a matter of fact, it often doesn’t, so that’s why you’re introducing revenue management software to the team. They each will use different functions of the software. So how do you get each of them up to speed on what they, particularly, need to know?
In-app guidance software solves all this. By inserting your company’s own intelligent guidance and prompts into your revenue-management solution based on each user’s specific role and responsibilities, you reap so much more success. Revenue management actually becomes “sticky.” Most in-app guidance solutions also give you user analytics so you know if someone runs into trouble and can give them help when they need it most.
Then there’s the institutional knowledge that you don’t want to lose. Talent is scarce, and when you lose an experienced worker, you don’t want all the knowledge walking out the door with her. With in-app guidance software, you can “bake” all the know-how into the software interface in the form of processes and tips on best practices.
Accelerate adoption of new features
Leading revenue management software vendors are always introducing new features and functionality. They tell their customers and their customers need to communicate what’s new – and how to use the new functionality – to the many users within the enterprise.
But with in-app guidance, it’s so much easier. Announcements can be made through in-app alerts, but in context, as in “did you know that you could now….?” in real-time, at the point where a user might want to use a new feature.
Revenue management software also inevitably drives operational changes. As your company evolves its operational processes and finds more effective ways to perform tasks, this can all be communicated – and reinforced – through in-app guidance.
Reduce IT effort and time
In-app guidance gives IT and support teams quite a few valuable capabilities. Among other things, they can:
- Analyze users’ activities to detect problem areas
- Target in-app notifications to anticipate and prevent user actions that could cause problems
- Survey users to understand what they think or if they have any suggestions for improvements
- Make important or time-sensitive announcements in-app so everyone is up to date on critical happenings
In addition to transparency and proactive communication, in-app guidance reduces the number of tickets and questions, enabling your team to focus on higher-level business-critical matters and driving further innovation.
Ensure compliance
In any life-sciences sector, there are many strict compliance mandates, especially around data. In-app guidance allows you to put up guardrails around your data usage policies and software features to avoid errors that could later prove costly. You can embed best practices in the end-to-end processes so a user doesn’t inadvertently check the wrong box or miss filling out an important field.
Promote individual success
Most leading in-app guidance software will allow you to perform analytics to find areas where individual users might need help or additional training. You can provide them with additional popups or tips in those specific places in your revenue management platform that they are struggling with.
What’s more, in-app guidance enables users to perform tasks and resolve issues without asking anyone for help. It uses a customer self-service support model that helps increase user proficiency in the revenue management platform and results in more proactive.
Model N Ngage
To help our customers and their users get the most out of the Model N revenue management platform, we offer a SaaS in-app guidance toolset to drive and measure your process excellence, software adoption, and change management.
With Ngage, our customers also gain access to a management portal with full enablement and support to:
- Increase efficiency, ensure compliance with standard operating procedures (SOPs), and streamline change management
- Reduce onboarding & training time
- Create, manage, and insert tips and process flows as needed
- Identify the areas where users are struggling the most to offer additional support
Our customers think that Ngage is a game-changer and invite you to experience it for yourself.
