Improve Data Integrity and Compliance
Poor data quality doesn't just create internal headaches -it has costly implications. Inaccurate, incomplete, or non-compliant data leads to operational delays, missed business opportunities, and in regulated industries, serious compliance risks.
WalkMe can change that. This guide shows how to use WalkMe to reduce data errors, ensure compliance, and improve the accuracy of information entered across your systems. We'll walk through each step using our 4 Ps framework for business value alignment: Problem, Possible, Probable, and Provable.
Problem
What are the challenges and issues your business faces?
Despite investments in digital systems, many organizations struggle with poor data quality. Employees often work within complex, unintuitive workflows that lead to incorrect or incomplete data. Fixing these mistakes cost time and money; and in highly regulated industries, even minor mistakes can result in serious compliance violations.
Without the right support, employees will continue to make preventable mistakes, causing a ripple effect across your organization.
Possible
What should you focus on to address this problem, and how might you solve it?
Improving data integrity starts by minimizing the opportunity for error. With WalkMe, you can pinpoint where users struggle, guide them through high-risk workflows, validate inputs in real time, and automate complex steps to improve consistency and compliance.
To uncover where to focus your efforts, ask:
- Where are data-related support tickets or rework happening most often?
- Which forms have high abandonment rates or error rates?
- Where do compliance risks stem from incorrect or incomplete inputs?
- Are employees misusing generative AI tools in ways that could create problems?
Your answers will help uncover opportunities for WalkMe intervention. Continue reading for tactical guidance on how to address those opportunities.
Step 1: Identify Where Errors Happen
Start by identifying the workflows where poor data quality is a known issue. Work with SMEs to determine the “happy path” – the elements users should click and pages they should visit. Then, define those events using Tracked Events or Engaged Elements, and create a funnel in Flow Analytics to monitor how users move through the process from start to finish. As a best practice, we recommend setting up Tracked Events or Engaged Elements and collecting data for approximately 30 days to establish a baseline. Without baseline data, it becomes much more challenging to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of your content over time.
Your funnel will show you where users abandon a process or spend more time than expected. This data reveals not just where issues occur, but how common and severe they are.
If you're working with a system supported by UI Intelligence, enable this feature to dig even deeper. UI Intelligence identifies high-traffic forms and highlights where users struggle, such as which fields generate the most errors, how long forms take to complete, and which fields users frequently skip. These insights help prioritize where WalkMe guidance and automation will have the biggest impact.
Step 2: Guide and Validate in the Flow
Once you've pinpointed where users make mistakes, implement targeted in-app support to prevent errors before they happen.
Take the guesswork out of form fields with SmartTips
Use SmartTips to clarify formatting rules, validate inputs in real time, and offer inline instructions. These tips act as guardrails, helping users input data correctly without leaving the workflow. Validation SmartTips help maintain clean, accurate data by flagging formatting issues, like incorrect date or email formats, and ensure required fields aren't left blank. You can even pair Validation SmartTips with an invisible Launcher that prevents users from submitting incomplete forms.
To improve data validation for open-text form fields, use AI SmartTips. AI SmartTips leverage generative AI to analyze user inputs and check whether they meet your validation criteria.
Guidance SmartTips offer users helpful context as they fill out forms, such as pre-filled templates or instructions, so users know exactly what type of information belongs in each field.
Support complex workflows with Smart Walk-Thrus
Use Smart Walk-Thrus with auto-play to automatically guide users through more complex processes where human error is likely. These are especially helpful for tasks that involve strict formatting, regulatory requirements, or dependencies between steps. For example, onboarding a new vendor in your ERP system, submitting a capital expense request, or entering sales contract data into a CRM often involves multiple fields and precise inputs. Smart Walk-Thrus give users the step-by-step guidance they need, minimizing skipped steps and confusion about what's required.
Add auto-steps to automate simple interactions like opening menus, clicking buttons, or navigating to the right screen. This minimizes skipped clicks and ensures consistency, especially in compliance-critical workflows like employee offboarding, legal document submission, or audit preparation.
Assign Goals to each Smart Walk-Thru to track whether users complete the process successfully. This data can help you pinpoint where users get stuck, drop off, or make frequent corrections. Use these insights to review and improve both the Walk-Thru and the underlying process itself.
Surface key documents just in time
Enhance data integrity by pairing Resources with Launchers to deliver critical content at the moment it's needed. Resources let you include key documents, like policy manuals or compliance guidelines, and make them instantly accessible within the workflow via a Launcher. Launchers are clickable buttons you can place wherever users are most likely to need additional information. For example, if sales reps often pause to look up SKUs and discount policies while preparing a quote, a well-placed Launcher can surface the right documentation instantly without disrupting the flow of work.
Step 3: Control and Monitor AI Use
If your teams are integrating generative AI tools into daily workflows, oversight is essential. WalkMe Discovery's Shadow AI feature helps promote responsible use while also restricting access to non-approved tools. Many generative AI tools require access to sensitive company or customer data. Without oversight, that data could be stored, used, or shared in non-compliant ways.
Shadow AI lets you apply guardrails using WalkMe content like SmartTips, ShoutOuts, and surveys to remind users of company policies or block risky actions in real time. This level of oversight helps organizations embrace AI confidently, without compromising security or compliance.
Probable
What are the outcomes you can expect from your solution?
Now that you know what's possible and how to achieve it, your organization can expect meaningful improvements in data integrity and compliance:
- Improved data accuracy, as users are guided through error-prone workflows with real-time validation and contextual support
- Fewer compliance risks, thanks to proactive enforcement of data standards and visibility into how AI tools are used
- Faster process completion, as employees spend less time correcting mistakes or searching for clarification
- Reduced rework and support tickets, driven by clearer instructions and automated error prevention
- Increased audit readiness, with cleaner data and digital records that align with regulatory expectations
Provable
How do you measure whether your solution achieved the desired outcomes?
At this stage, you'll measure the impact of your WalkMe solutions using both WalkMe data and broader business KPIs.
Here are some low-effort ways to start gauging the effectiveness of your WalkMe content:
- Analyze content engagement metrics using the Insights Apps tab to see an overview of how users engage with your content.
- Review Engaged Elements to get baseline data on how users interact with your underlying application.
- Collect user feedback via surveys to assess user confidence in data-heavy processes.
Follow these steps to get deeper insights about user behavior:
- Use Goals to measure the effectiveness of your WalkMe content, and uncover whether users complete desired actions after interacting with your guidance flows.
- Use Flow Analytics to see how conversion has improved over the initial baseline data you collected at the start of the “Possible” phase. This helps you compare the drop-off rates before and after adding WalkMe guidance.
- Leverage UI Intelligence to track improvements in form usage, such as reduced time spent and lower error rates.
- Tag your content to workflows, then create custom dashboards to view the performance of all your data integrity content in one place.
- Use Insights Reports to review, export, and subscribe to comprehensive reports covering user behavior, content interactions, goal completions, and more.
Use these best-in-class methods to truly understand the business impact of your WalkMe solution.
- Connect your systems and business data to WalkMe to enhance your analytics capabilities, making it easier to measure WalkMe's impact across your organization. WalkMe supports both outgoing data integrations and incoming data integrations.
- In the Content Manager, use metrics like Total Interaction, Unique Users, and Goals Reached, as well as custom metadata fields to organize, filter, and report on your WalkMe content. Tag content by business objective (in this case, data integrity, and assign ROI to content using numeric fields like estimated time saved and cost saved. Then, use CSV exports and saved views for a more holistic view of your content's ROI, so you can see what's working and what needs to be optimized.
- Quantify results using a value equation such as Savings = (errors prevented per month × average time to correct each error × average hourly wage)