Push it real good
Achim Kümmerle
Changes to rules and guidelines
Push notifications can really help when business processes change or new rules and guidelines are being rolled out.
- Imagine, for instance, that your company has changed its travel guidelines, and an employee opens the Lufthansa website as usual to book a domestic flight. You can notify them to encourage them to travel by rail instead. The push notification would appear as soon as the staff member opens the site. You can also explain why the guidelines have been changed – either in the notification itself or in QuickAccess – so they can see the reason behind the move and don’t feel like they’re being constantly hounded.
- Perhaps you’ve introduced new rules about expenses? Putting together a well-timed push notification that pops up at just the right point is a good way of eliminating the risks of countless incorrectly completed travel expense reports, repeat work and, ultimately, even issues with the tax authorities. As soon as a member of staff sets out to complete the relevant form in Excel or some other tool, they will see the notification and therefore – thanks to shorter processing times – won’t have to wait weeks for their money any more.
Changes in SaaS and cloud applications
Push notifications play an important part in improving user adoption in the case of software-as-a-service and cloud applications by making users aware of new functions and process changes, which now crop up so often that training courses simply can’t keep up with them.
- Suppose, for example, that SAP transaction code MB03 is being changed over to MIGO. In this case, it is relatively easy to create a push notification that will inform the end user about the change precisely when they set out to start work in transaction MB03 as usual.
- Is GDPR still causing doubt among many of your staff when they are using the CRM application? By issuing an appropriate push notification at the relevant point in the program, you can give them clear guidance on which option to activate when, or when nothing is required.
- When the user interface in MS Office, Salesforce or another software package has changed yet again, all you need to do is set up a short notification with a message along the lines of “Don’t worry – if you need assistance with the new Lightning interface in Salesforce, you can find support and guidance in QuickAccess.”
Availability of new content
Authors and project managers who need to make users aware of newly available content in QuickAccess will find a staunch ally in push notifications. Say, for example, that performance support with context-sensitive assistance suddenly becomes available for business applications that weren’t covered in the past. In this case, you can use a push notification to make users aware of this fact exactly when they are working with the application in question and will therefore find the pointer useful.
Even these few examples show that push notifications offer a really easy way of alerting your staff to important changes right on cue. Yet this is just a taster of their huge potential – after all, every company has its own ideas. Why not see for yourself?
