Ensuring digital adoption in digital transformation is critical for transformation efforts to deliver the expected outcomes.
With the goal of being future-ready and more competitive, many organizations are currently planning or undergoing digital transformation projects. Research shows that more than 70% of digital transformations fail, one of the common pitfalls for this, poor digital adoption.
What is Digital Adoption?
According to a Forbes article, digital adoption, quite simply, refers to “achieving a state within your company where all of your digital tools and assets are leveraged to the fullest extent”.
This will essentially allow you to get a full ROI (return on investment) on your technology investments as you will not only own the latest tools but actually, you’ll be using them to the fullest and maximizing their beneficial impact on your business operations.
This is not an easy goal to achieve. Throughout their lifecycle, digital transformation initiatives involve managing multiple elements like technologies, processes, departments, and people; making it really challenging for your workforce to keep up with everything that’s going on and adopt all the new changes and technologies.
Digital Adoption Solutions
Digital adoption solutions, also called DAS, refer to a new type of technology used to improve the adoption of multiple tools across the organization. Given the number of applications and the complexity of today’s market, employees are faced with multiple challenges to adapt and use all these tools. To address this adoption gap, many organizations have doubled down on traditional training approaches, but have fallen short of the mark. This is where a new category of technology has emerged, with a different approach and methodology, to help employees make the most out of their application stack with a digital adoption platform. End-users are guided through a clear path with several business procedures across multiple applications toward task completion, reducing time and costs of training.
Basic Features in Digital Adoption Solutions
Although the features may vary from tool to tool, in general, Digital Adoption Solutions check the following boxes:
Contextual
Employees use multiple and varying applications to complete their functions. Digital Adoption Solutions provide contextual and automated training that is specific to the user’s role, location, task, and behavior within the application. The learning experience is always personalized.
Interactive
Learning how to use a new application is particularly difficult when traditional training methods like, reading a manual or sitting through a training presentation are used. Digital Adoption Solutions address this problem by delivering engaging hands-on learning by “in application” practicing.
Real-time
Digital Adoption Solutions provide real-time training to guide users at the exact time they are performing tasks or seeking guidance, avoiding the burden on users to remember how to accomplish complex tasks.
Progressive
Employees have varying skill sets, learning styles, and needs. Digital Adoption Solutions provide users different guidance on information, instruction, and validation.
Autonomous
Repeated processes can become burdensome. Digital Adoption Solutions auto-execute repetitive tasks on the user’s behalf, leading to higher productivity.
Benefits of Digital Adoption Solutions
Digital Adoption solutions bring significant benefits to support user adoption. Here is a list of their benefits:
- Assist employees with complex business processes, tasks that are rarely performed, and change management activities.
- Enable new employees to onboard more quickly and Shorten the learning curve.
- Centralize the training content in one location, the app itself.
- Help companies with new feature/functionality releases within internal systems.
- Reduces the money spent on additional training.
- Increase software adoption and adequate usage.
- Increase knowledge retention.
- Minimize support costs.
- Solve queries in real-time.
- Provide a consistent user experience.
Key Digital Adoption Strategies
Before buying a new software solution, take the necessary steps to prepare your employees for the change by:
1. Educating Your Employees Before Go-Live
To achieve a smooth transition and digital adoption, employees need to know what digital changes are happening, why they are happening, and how these changes will make their jobs easier.
2. Investing in Proper Training and Ongoing Support
Successful digital adoption requires to implement of modern training approaches and software solutions, like DAS, that can keep up with the training demands of complex business software and the digital age.
3. Train within the Application
Providing on-screen and in-app guidance while the employees are using the tool, is the best way your employees can learn how to use new software.
4. Provide Contextual and Personalized Training to Each User
Employees need to be trained at the individual need level, based on their role, the features they will be using, their specific learning needs are, their preferred content formats, and in their native language.
5. Define a Continuous Training Strategy
Keep your employees up to date with the latest features released on the software that you implement through ongoing training and support.
6. Track Digital Adoption Progress
The only way to ensure digital adoption is to track the progress of your training efforts in its totality. DAS can provide useful insights on the features that are being used and how well they are being used by your employees, and the features that are underutilized or being avoided. Having access to this information makes it easier to identify problems, improve training effectiveness, understand what motivates users and find ways to boost user engagement.
Challenges of Digital Adoption in Digital Transformation
From the workforce’s perspective, the common obstacles for digital adoption can be:
Complexity and/or Quantity of New Software: Sometimes business leaders are eager to bring in the best and latest tools in the market into their operations. But when there are too many of them, it could get confusing and difficult for your workforce to learn how to fully use all of the new software, especially if the new software is complex. On top of this, if employees need to continue using some previously-existing software, it can turn overwhelming.- Poor Training: With all the changes and new tools, companies need to define effective training and change management strategies to ensure digital adoption. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations still rely on traditional training methods that just don’t make the cut in the digital era and don’t’ address the needs of today’s workforce. Companies succeeding at this, are using Digital Adoption Solutions (DAS) like Whatfix, to improve digital adoption by providing.
- Poor Communication or Unclear Goals: In order to reduce change resistance and accelerate digital adoption, organizations should ensure they clearly communicate the business goals of the digital transformation project, promote the benefits of change, set clear expectations, and establish communication channels for ongoing interaction.
- Role and Processes Change: Digital transformations are not only about adopting the latest technologies but also about transforming the way you do things. In order to have significant outcomes out of digital transformation, companies need to restructure some of their processes and functions, to make them efficient and enable them to make the most of new technologies. This directly impacts employees, as they might be required to change roles.
- Motivation: Companies must create a strategy for a smooth change management in digital transformation so that the employees are motivated to follow along with the company’s efforts, even if the changes (in processes, roles, and tools) don’t sit well with them.
Ensure Digital Adoption
Digital adoption is something that goes beyond IT and CIOs. Digital transformations affect every business function and require org-wide coordination and collaboration like never before.
Business leaders need to get hands-on in the implementation of digital adoption strategies to ensure buy-in from every single employee, including those working outside the company’s physical space, and shape their organizational culture into a digital one.
