How Embedded Tools Are the GPS for Navigating Modern Challenges

The year was 2010 and I had just started my first professional job out of college. I was working as a Customer Success Manager for a software company that had me traveling multiple weeks each month. A relocation to New Hampshire was also part of this new role, making many of these client visits cross-country. Armed with my Blackberry and laptop I hit the road!

One investment made all the difference at this time in my life – a Garmin GPS device for my car (including the windshield suction cup mount). 

My wife and I loved New England and went exploring as often as we could. While we enjoyed all of the beautiful trees (especially when they would change color in Autumn), they made it very difficult to navigate in a new and unfamiliar place. The GPS device saved us on more than one occasion. 

Fast forward a few years to 2014 to find me and my wife in the Honda dealership purchasing a new Odyssey. The sales rep showed us two different trim packages: one with a flip down TV screen entertainment system, and one with built-in GPS navigation. With almost no hesitation, we said, “the entertainment system”.

Wait…what? How could we go from being completely dependent on our dash-mounted GPS in 2010, to quickly dismissing the idea of an embedded GPS system just four years later? 

The answer: December 13, 2012. On this day, Google Maps launched in the iOS AppStore and had over 10 million downloads in just two days. 

The answer: December 13, 2012. On this day, Google Maps launched in the iOS AppStore and had over 10 million downloads in just two days.

While Honda and other automakers were on the right track, embedding GPS software directly into their vehicles, Apple simply did it better with the iPhone. The rapid popularity growth of the iPhone was directly fueled by the increase of apps available in the AppStore. Having an embedded app that does exactly what you need, when you need it, has changed our lives forever! 

Take a moment to think about how this changed our behavior. Don’t worry about bringing your binder of CDs to listen to music, you can just play music on your favorite music app. No need to buy a GPS if you have Google Maps on your phone. Forget to add your new insurance card into your glove box, don’t fret, you can pull up your proof of insurance through an app. The list goes on and on. 

I share this story not to say buy a van with an entertainment system rather than one with GPS navigation, nor to suggest that phones are the answer to all our problems, but rather to illustrate that we are living in a new age where we’re surrounded by integrated solutions and embedded technology. Most of us don’t think twice about it because this tech integrates so seamlessly into our personal lives. However, when it comes to business solutions and software, we still feel the sting of using a collection of tools that often don’t play nice with each other. 

Enter GUIDEcx: the customer onboarding solution that plays nice with others. Customer engagement is one of the hallmarks at GUIDEcx – we want your customers to engage with you and your onboarding team, not spend time trying to learn third-party software. Our customer onboarding portal (Compass) was designed to give customers a place to focus specifically on their tasks and deliverables, a centralized communication center, and a document and attachment hub. We have also recently enhanced the portal by adding a fully customizable resource repository that can have embedded content including training videos and help links.

Now remember what we learned from Apple? The”embedded” experience of accessing GPS navigation directly from an app on your phone drove massive adoption (10 million downloads in just 2 days — and now over 2.6 billion iPhones sold).

The onboarding experience is no longer this appendage to your product, but is now deeply integrated and has the look and feel of your native product or platform. 

GUIDEcx allows you to embed our customer onboarding portal directly into your own product or software. The onboarding experience is no longer this appendage to your product, but is now deeply integrated and has the look and feel of your native product or platform. 

This is a very deliberate approach to our product strategy here at GUIDEcx: embedding tools and features to provide the best experience possible. In addition to making large investments on the customer engagement front, we have also embraced the attitude of leveraging specialized partners and embedding their tools into our product. 

Throughout our application you can see where we have used this strategy. Our GUIDEcx Report Builder is powered by DOMO. Our Recipe Builder is powered by Workato. The success and adoption we have seen from this approach prompted us to make GUIDEcx embeddable into your applications.

In the future you will continue to see this strategy evolve and improve. We know that not every customer has the same needs. Some of you want to have robust customer facing reporting dashboards that are more easily accessible. Others want to have a centralized landing page that organizes and displays all of your training materials and assets in one place. Still others might be looking for a better way to gather feedback from your customers with interactive forms that can trigger actions within GUIDEcx. One of our goals is to provide you flexibility when it comes to working in GUIDEcx, and reduce the need to work outside of our solution. We’re excited to give that same flexibility to your customers – with an application that can be directly embedded into your product for more seamless onboarding! 

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