Tool Tips & Walkthroughs: The In-App Functionality That’s Reimagining Compliance Platform Training
Whether it’s training new employees on the STAR Platform or helping infrequent users remember how to complete a task, Star’s innovative in-app guides makes compliance software adoption stick
Everything we’ve ever learned to do in our lives—every skill, every process—corresponds to a neural pathway that exists in our brain. This is a piece of physiological hardwiring, one we literally create when we learn to do something and repeat it over and over. The more we repeat that something, the stronger the neural pathway becomes and the easier the task becomes. Thus, learning anything new can be hard, and people don’t want to do hard things, like learn new software. This is the situation compliance officers face when they’re onboarding employees onto the firm’s compliance platform. The software itself may be fabulously intuitive and easy to use, but when it comes to compliance slow or low adoption means firm risk. What if there was in-app help in the compliance software itself? Strategically placed user tips and process-walkthroughs that were ready and waiting to be accessed precisely when and where users needed them? It would be as if the compliance platform itself was training its users—helping them blaze those new neural trails—and saving the firm a lot of its compliance officers’ time and attention. This is what Star’s new Tool Tips & Walkthroughs do. Here’s how they work.
MAKING COMPLIANCE SIMPLER, FOR EVERYONE
“Tool Tips & Walkthroughs will allow employees to more easily complete their compliance tasks. If somebody is logging in to the STAR Platform—Star’s employee conflicts of interest solution—for the first time, they’ll be able to immediately start doing what they need to do, as opposed to finding a guide or tracking down a compliance officer—all of which could delay them submitting something to compliance or outright forgetting about it.” So offered Will Haggerty, Product Manager at StarCompliance.
Tool Tips & Walkthroughs existed before this new incarnation, though it hadn’t been aimed at employee end users; it had been aimed at compliance officers. Haggerty: “We rolled out Tool Tips & Walkthroughs in 2020 on the compliance side of the application. The goal was to help compliance and administrative users navigate through more complex areas of the application, or areas that are maybe less frequently used. If you imagine sending out annual or quarterly certifications, it’s not something compliance officers do every day. We wanted to strategically place tips that would let compliance officers more quickly complete a process, and now we’ve done the same thing on the employee side of STAR.”
MAKING EMPLOYEE ONBOARDING A BREEZE
For firms that are rolling out the STAR Platform for the first time—en masse to a large employee population—Tool Tips & Walkthroughs makes the user onboarding process easier than ever. Rolling out new software, no matter how simple it is to use, is never without its challenges. Tool Tips & Walkthroughs make it easy to get people up and running on STAR, reducing the time compliance officers need to spend training employees. These perfectly positioned insights mean it won’t take long to get a firm up and running on STAR so it can meet its regulatory obligations efficiently and effectively.
ESTABLISHING GOOD HABITS FROM DAY ONE
This is the dream, not just for compliance departments in enterprise financial firms, but for any company that has to get one person or 1000 persons up to speed on a given software system as quickly as possible. To wit, the idea that whoever needs to execute a task can do so on the first try. With Tool Tips & Walkthroughs, employees are expertly guided through their initial system interaction on the STAR Platform, and then provided with module level guidance to help ensure a smooth overall first experience. Employees who feel comfortable and confident using STAR will be more likely to fulfill their compliance responsibilities on time, meaning a more compliant employee population for the firm and, in the end, less firm risk.
SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF INFREQUENT USERS
If Tool Tips & Walkthroughs encourage program adoption by helping first-time users feel comfortable and confident using the STAR Platform, they also help maintain adoption—and therefore consistent program participation—by being there for infrequent users. Haggerty: “There’s something called the 80/20 rule: 20% of end users use the software 80% of the time. This means you’ve got a large population that logs on maybe once a quarter or once a year to complete something, like a cert, and then sporadically when they decide to, say, place a trade. Having Tool Tips & Walkthroughs waiting to help any user at any time means a better end-user experience, which means a more compliant employee population and more employees completing tasks on time.”
REMOVING THE BURDEN OF UNNECESSARY TECH SUPPORT
Today’s compliance officers have less capability to offer time and attention to any given task. The financial crash saw to it that compliance budgets and department sizes increased significantly, but regulations have kept pace if not outpaced—in number and complexity—these personnel and budget upticks. The pandemic also saw to it that, at least in the US, the average personal trader became very active in the markets in 2020.
Compliance officers are busier than ever, in other words, and don’t have time to be tech support on top of everything else they do. That’s why Tool Tips & Walkthroughs have been strategically placed throughout the STAR Platform. They deftly anticipate user questions: putting answers in the places they’re needed most, and ultimately providing the assistance firm employees need without compliance having to lift a finger. Haggerty: “This is meant to be a real time-saver for compliance teams. It’s another way automation benefits compliance: freeing them up for higher-value, higher-cognition activities.”
TAKING PLATFORM KNOWLEDGE TO THE NEXT LEVEL
It’s not just employee end users who get their STAR Platform functionality questions answered faster. Compliance officers do, too, which means they in turn quickly become more comfortable completing all of their assigned tasks in STAR. With Tool Tips & Walkthroughs, they won’t have to go looking elsewhere for further clarification. They’ll also get help optimizing their own STAR experience. Setting aside time to learn new features and take full advantage of a software tool can seem all too much. Walkthroughs make it easy to master new, complex, or advanced areas of STAR. And new guides will be added frequently, which means as new features are added to the STAR Platform, compliance officers will be able to take full advantage of them immediately.
Haggerty: “It’s also important to remember that these in-app tips are an addition to the support options Star already offers. Our implementations include extensive initial software training. We offer software guides, how-to resources accessible through a client portal, and follow-up training whenever it’s requested. We also run free monthly webinars, with best practices and ways to optimize STAR. Tool Tips & Walkthroughs simply make STAR Platform users even more self-sufficient than they already are.”
Learn more about Tool Tips & Walkthroughs here.
