Whatfix’s 2023 digital adoption survey discovered that 84% of respondents didn’t know how to use many of the core features and processes across their technology stack.
User guides have an obvious purpose of filling knowledge gaps and providing a comprehensive overview of a product.
In the world of software, the digital skills gap can easily widen if users are bogged down with a variety of tools that they don’t know how to maximize or integrate into their everyday workflows.
But beyond filling in gaps, user guides help businesses grow by making sure that resources spent don’t go to waste.
Here are some benefits you can expect to see by doubling down on clear and compelling user guides:
User guides shorten time-to-value for new customers and users, which enables them to adopt new processes into their workflows quickly. This allows new customers to achieve business outcomes faster with your new product – driving user adoption .
Beyond introducing the basic operations of a product, user guides help businesses dive deeper into advanced functionalities, buried features, or special offers that users may not find themselves.
These additional elements can help build brand loyalty, increase customer satisfaction, or surface capabilities that make a product indispensable to a user.
“Whatfix is the ideal way for Marketboomer to communicate training to customers. We can easily target use case types and countries, pushing relevant, personalized content to customers. We particularly like task lists, which create roadmaps to progress our PurchasePlus experts and monitor efficiency in real time. Contextual walkthroughs and relevant smart tips personalize the learning processes and provide 24/7 provider self-support”
Drew Nixon, Head of Customer Success at Marketboomer
In a 2022 survey on digital customer experiences, 95% of companies said they saw a dramatic increase in customers wanting self-service support channels.
This shift in consumer behavior stems from a desire for faster service that users can depend on when they need it most. With user guides, businesses can deliver content that helps customers answer basic how-to questions and conduct simple troubleshooting without depending on any external help. This self-help support not only enables a better customer experience but empowers customer service teams to deflect support tickets through self-service solutions.
Have you ever given up on doing something because you were frustrated about not knowing how to do it right?
User guides help businesses avoid attrition by enabling customers with the tools they need to become proficient, with minimal friction or external intervention.
You want to empower your users with enough information to feel confident exploring your product and pushing the boundaries of what they can do with it. In-app user guides do just this, empowering your users with contextual onboarding and support that drives adoption and helps them achieve their intended business outcomes.
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You can equip your products with different types of user guides to engage with customers throughout these different points in their user journey. The most common types of user guides include:
An instructional manual is a comprehensive document that provides a thorough introduction to a product, how individuals can get set up with it, the different types of applications the product has, and tutorials on each of those applications.
Instruction manuals are a good fit for complex software with intricate features and robust data management policies, helping provide product support for systems like ERPs, computer-aided design software, and healthcare information systems.
These guides focus specifically on guiding users through tasks that help them utilize a product. How-to guides use concise and clear language to explain instructions to users quickly.
Individuals who use how-to guides tend to be somewhat familiar with the product already and are only looking to solve specific problems efficiently.
Most SaaS platforms provide their end-users with in-app tutorials and user guides that provide contextual, guided experiences that walk users through their processes and workflows. These in-app guides can also be linked to how-to articles in a company’s knowledge base for additional context and support.
These documents are designed to educate individuals and teams about using a product in real-life scenarios — like using products to solve problems, leveraging internal and external communication, or learning when exactly a product should be roped in to make processes run smoother. Training manuals are incorporated into training workshops, onboarding packets, employee orientation, and learning and development initiatives.
In-app guided tutorials are built into a product experience to provide contextual user onboarding and create intuitive product experiences.
In-app guidance includes product tours, interactive walkthroughs, task lists, tooltips, pop-up windows, and more – all that guide users through sequencing events, detailed workflows, and user flows.
In-app guidance provides learning at the moment of need for users, and provides context that traditional software documentation lacks. In-app guidance provides a level of support that drives product knowledge and adoption.
Product managers and non-technical team members can create in-app user guides and help elements with a digital adoption platform (DAP) . A DAP like Whatfix provides these team members with a no-code editor to create, launch, and analyze in-app guided experiences.
A knowledge base is a centralized hub that contains all types of educational content, from training manuals to product guides, support articles, and how-to articles.
Knowledge bases are also designed to support self-service learning, giving users a single repository to answer common questions, troubleshoot errors, or deepen their understanding of a product. Easy navigation and clear content organization are needed to make knowledge bases deliver optimum results.
FAQs are common questions users ask about a product. These can include questions about the availability of features, pricing, security, how to communicate with customer support, and more.
Now that we’ve explored different types of user guides, let’s see what they look like in action with these real-life examples:
With Whatfix, enterprises can create in-app user guides for their internal employees, contextual for the processes, roles, and workflows of their business.
Let’s look at an example. REG recently implemented Salesforce CRM and Oracle ERP across its enterprise’s 1,200+ person workforce. Salesforce and Oracle’s user guides were basic and non-contextual to the highly-customized implementation built by REG.
To overcome this, REG partnered with Whatfix to create in-app user task lists, step-by-step flows, smart tips, and other in-app guided experiences to provide contextual support for their various end-users using Salesforce and Oracle.
“These step-by-step instructions are ideal when a user thinks, ‘Just remind me how I complete that task?’ Instead of wandering the office looking for help, the answer is there in an intuitive walkthrough” said Abby Essings, Sr. Manager of Operation Services at REG.
With this in-app guidance, REG could nudge employees to the correct next step in their user journey, reduce time-to-proficiency for new employees, and provide self-help support on common IT-related issues and process questions.
REG also used Whatfix to curate its employee user documentation and guides into an embedded wiki that enabled end-users with a searchable, self-help wiki to find answers to common questions and overcome product workflow friction.
“Whatfix reimagines our training. It supports in-app guidance across almost any platform. It’s so easy to update materials, we can finally keep pace with the system changes. Whatfix is an ideal platform for renewables and energy companies looking to improve the adoption of JD Edwards, CRM, or other applications. It dramatically reduces the time spent training and onboarding our employees and supports our environmental stewardship. Looking back, Whatfix was one of the best decisions we have made.”
Abby Essing, Sr. Manager, Operations Services at Renewable Energy Group, Inc.
In this example from Scribe, a user created guided instruction that details step-by-step how to use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator to create an account list and filter leads.
The content in this tutorial is limited to the execution of the specific task itself, without explaining what the software does or what a user needs to get themselves set up with an account. It uses screenshots to give users more accurate context along with a visible mouse cursor to highlight clicks.
AbleTo is an online mental health care provider that scaled drastically during COVID-19. This led to challenges in onboarding therapists and coaches to its e-portal.
To overcome this challenge, AbleTo used Whatfix to create in-app user guides for its mental health providers to help onboard them to the system, provide a self-help support system for AbleTo-related product questions, and meet evolving customer demand.
Whatfix empowered AbleTo with a no-code editor to create in-app product tours, tooltips, and a self-help wiki that help its community of therapists grow from 200 to 2,000 rapidly – helping overcome training, onboarding, and support challenges.
“Contextual walkthroughs and relevant smart tips personalize the learning processes and provide 24/7 provider self-support. All training content is available and easy to find,” says Claire Griswold, Learning Technology Manager, AbleTo.
In the months following its Whatfix implementation, AbleTo improved its physician onboarding time, reduced provider churn, and grew its network of doctors. It launched in-app smart tips and pop-ups that have been engaged with more than 500k times in the first six months of launch.
“In two years, our provider community has grown from 200 to 2,000. It was vital to train this growing therapist community quickly and effectively, to meet demand, deliver top quality care, and improve outcomes. Whatfix's contextual walkthroughs and smart tips personalize the learning process and provide 24/7 provider self-support. Whatfix enabled AbleTo to innovate, meet the growing demand for virtual behavioral healthcare, and ensure our providers are successful."
Regina Owens, Director, Operations Learning and Development at AbleTo.
Marketboomer is a SaaS procurement platform for digital transformation in the hospitality industry. It’s used by 2,500 buyers across 12 countries, and needed a solution to create multi-language user guides contextual to different types of end-users and customer types.
With Whatfix, Marketboomer was able to create in-app user guides for multiple types of customers (buyers like hotels and clubs, as well as suppliers like wholesalers), as well as in-app guidance and support for different types of end-users (like CFOs, AEs, or hotel managers). Each required contextual guidance depending on the intended business outcomes, the language preference, and the level of technical expertise.
“Training was becoming a bottleneck to growth. We have hundreds of hotels worldwide using PurchasePlus – and that number is rising fast. We could no longer host the increasing number of Zoom training calls. It was also putting pressure on our support network to manage the incoming enquiries” said Drew Nixon, Head of Customer Success at Marketboom.
Marketboomer deployed Whatfix to support customer training in Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Singapore, and Europe.
The platform provided interactive guidance within its PurchasePlus product, delivered contextual self-support, and collected in-app feedback – ultimately improving application proficiency with continuous training at the moment of need.
“Whatfix is the ideal way for Marketboomer to communicate training to customers. We can easily target use case types and countries, pushing relevant, personalized content to customers. We particularly like the Whatfix task lists which create roadmaps to progress by our PurchasePlus experts and monitor efficiency in real time.”
