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Digital Adoption – What it is & Why it is Important

By April 16, 2020August 26th, 2024Blog, Digital Adoption26 min read

Digital Adoption – What it is & Why it is Important

Getting employees to use a software how you want them to in the age of technology sound be simple, right? Sadly, the reality is far from that. The exponential growth of software applications has made it easier for companies to purchase new software, increasing the need for effective Digital Adoption, training, and adherence to processes.

As companies add more software, they struggle to train and equip users. Software purchases alone don’t make employees productive – effective onboarding and digital adoption do.

According to a report by McKinsey, 70% of digital transformation efforts fail due to lack of user adoption and resistance to change. If an application is not leveraged properly, then your investment in a new application will go in vain.

To see a return on their investment in technology, companies must:

  • Fully utilize new software and digital tools.
  • Leverage technology to update their processes.
  • Change the way they interact with customers and employees.

In short, enabling your users and employees to adopt a software is an essential part of business success. And the best way to do that is with digital adoption.

Understanding what digital adoption is and why it is important is crucial for maximizing your technology investments.

In this guide, we are going to discuss digital adoption in detail – benefits, challenges, and how to realize success.

What is Digital Adoption?

Digital adoption means attaining a state where an individual is capable enough to utilize an application, software, or tool to its fullest capacity or potential to carry out a variety of digital processes. This is crucial in the context of technology adoption and implementing a successful digital adoption strategy.

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For example, let’s say you are using an iPad. You are utilizing it to browse the internet and nothing else. The same tablet could be used to find directions, book resorts, order food, play games, or complete work from spreadsheets to coding.

In this case, Digital Adoption is not being achieved as the device is not being utilized to its fullest potential; it is just being utilized for Google searches.

Similarly, if a business’s software and tech stack are not leveraged to their fullest potential, then digital adoption is not achieved.

According to a report by Deloitte, an overwhelming majority (87%) said that digital technologies will disrupt their industries to either a great or moderate extent. Yet, only 44% believe that their companies are adequately preparing to respond effectively.

Implementing an effective digital adoption program helps ensure that technology is used effectively, improving overall productivity and return on investment.

Digital Adoption Journey of a User

Once users achieve digital adoption, they become power users. It’s more than just adopting the software.

Software adoption is about learning to use new software.

Digital adoption, however, involves learning how to use it to transform the way you do business.

To unlock the potential of new technology, the user has to understand the following:

  • Why is the application or technology required in the first place?
  • How will it be useful for our business processes?
  • How do our processes need to change to utilize the technology?
  • How do you use the technology to achieve the end goals?
  • How can processes be optimized?
  • What are the potential challenges in using the technology, and how can they be overcome?
  • How does the new technology integrate with existing systems and workflows?
  • What training and support are available to ensure effective use?
  • How can the technology be customized to meet specific business needs?
  • What metrics will be used to measure the success of technology adoption?
  • How will continuous improvement and updates be managed?

If the user can answer the above questions and show how the software addresses those challenges, then they have achieved digital adoption.

This comprehensive understanding ensures the technology is used to its fullest potential, transforming business processes and driving digital transformation adoption.

Implementing an effective digital adoption strategy and leveraging digital adoption platforms are crucial to facilitate this journey.

Why is Digital Adoption Needed Now?

We have seen a lot of changes in recent times with regards to how business is being conducted due to technological advancements and natural calamities.

Today, organizations are more interested than ever in utilizing new tools and applications to optimize their business processes and enhance their performance to get more out of their investment.

These new changes often occur when an organization undergoes digital transformation. As the name suggests, it enables transformation across the organization to shift from the old way of doing things to new, more efficient methods.

This can only be achieved if an organization understands the technical and cultural needs of different departments and implements the necessary changes accordingly. To enable a smooth transition, organizations will need to consider deploying:

  • Classroom training
  • Online training
  • Knowledge transfer
  • Documentation
  • A digital adoption platform

A digital adoption platform plays a crucial role in facilitating this transition by providing the tools and support needed to ensure that employees can fully utilize new technologies.

According to Gartner, by 2025, 70% of organizations will use a digital adoption platform within their technology stack to overcome still insufficient application user experiences. 

This comprehensive approach helps organizations to not only implement new software and technologies but also to ensure that these tools are effectively adopted and leveraged to their fullest potential, driving digital transformation adoption.

Why is Digital Adoption Needed Now?

Businesses have faced unforeseen challenges and disruptions in the last 2-3 years, which have forced organizations to opt for a digital first approach.

Today, over 69% of the world’s economy is digital, reflecting the critical role of digital technologies in modern business operations​​. Moreover, global spending on digital transformation is projected to reach $3.4 trillion by 2026, underscoring the significant investments companies are making to stay competitive​​.

The number of applications used by these organizations in the last few years has increased drastically, and the rate of acquiring software is not going to reduce any time soon.

These new applications are enabling efficiency, agility, productivity, and, most importantly, improvement in ROI.

However, enterprises use about 371 SaaS applications annually, but only around 45% of these applications are actively used by employees.​

Further, companies are wasting 37% of their software spending. In the US alone, the cost of unused software is $30 billion​​. This clearly shows that organizations are unable to make the most of their application stack.

Many people might say the problem is with the onboarding, training, or even with the software itself, but that isn’t the full picture.

Organizations must create a digital adoption strategy as it can help them to use their application stack to the fullest potential.

If your employees are using only a few elements of an enterprise application, then the business might fail to realize the value that they intend to generate from the application investment.

The benefits of having a digital adoption strategy are- 

  • Helps employees to focus on their actual job: By minimizing the time spent on figuring out how to use various applications, employees can dedicate more time to their core responsibilities.
  • Eliminates the need to remember every step to accomplish a task: Digital adoption platforms often include guided workflows and automation, reducing the cognitive load on employees.
  • Ensures quicker onboarding and training: Effective digital adoption strategies shorten the learning curve for new employees, enabling them to become productive faster.
  • Boosts the software adoption rate: A well-planned adoption strategy ensures that new software is not just implemented but also fully utilized.
  • Helps organizations to stay competitive: Leveraging the full capabilities of digital tools allows companies to innovate and stay ahead of the competition.
  • Enables organizations to use any application to its fullest: Maximizing the use of software features ensures a better return on investment and improved operational efficiency.

Digital adoption is crucial for organizations to fully leverage their technology investments, enhance productivity, and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Implementing a digital adoption solution and a comprehensive digital adoption program can significantly boost the adoption of technology within the organization.

Digital Adoption – Why and How to Facilitate it

In the digital era, business and customer requirements change rapidly. Companies usually face a plethora of problems such as:

  • Resistance across the board while implementing change: Employees may resist new technologies due to fear of the unknown or disruption to their routines.
  • The workforce generally feels inertia towards transformation: There is often a reluctance to change established processes and workflows.
    Lack of collaboration among departments: Siloed operations can hinder the smooth adoption of new technologies.
  • Poor mindset and lack of preparedness: Without a proactive approach to change, organizations struggle to implement digital tools effectively.

All these problems contribute to the failure of digital adoption in more than 70% of organizations, according to McKinsey research​ (BEA)​. The cycle for change is getting shorter and shorter as we speak.

Organizations must speed up to adopt new applications and master the existing ones as soon as possible. But doing so will require skills that an organization’s users may lack.

To counter these problems, companies must focus on upskilling existing employees and enabling tools that make digital adoption rapid, smooth, and seamless for each job function.

One effective way to enable digital adoption is through the use of a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP). A digital adoption platform work alongside your web-based applications to help users with on-screen guidance and contextual help. These platforms provide several benefits:

  • On-Screen Guidance: Provides step-by-step instructions directly within the application, reducing the learning curve for new users.
  • Contextual Help: Offers relevant assistance based on the user’s current task, enhancing understanding and productivity.
  • Analytics and Insights: Tracks user interactions to identify areas where users struggle and need additional support, enabling continuous improvement.
  • Customization: Tailors the learning experience to the specific needs of different job roles and departments.

Implementing a digital adoption platform, organizations can address the common barriers to digital adoption and ensure that their workforce can fully leverage the capabilities of new technologies. This approach not only improves the efficiency and effectiveness of digital tools but also helps in achieving a higher return on investment.

In summary, to facilitate digital adoption, organizations should focus on: 

  • Upskilling Employees: Provide training and resources to help employees develop the necessary skills to use new technologies, thereby enhancing their technology adoption and digital transformation adoption.
  • Implementing Digital adoption platforms: Utilize tools that offer on-screen guidance and contextual help to streamline the adoption process, ensuring a higher software adoption rate.
  • Fostering a Collaborative Environment: Encourage cross-departmental collaboration to break down silos and ensure a unified approach to digital adoption.
  • Cultivating a Positive Mindset Towards Change: Promote a culture that embraces innovation and is prepared to adapt to new technologies, which is critical for any digital adoption program.

Addressing these key areas, companies can overcome the challenges associated with digital adoption and ensure a smoother, more successful transformation.

Effective digital adoption strategies and tools are essential to navigate the complexities of digital transformation and improve overall technology adoption within the organization.

Three Sides of Digital Adoption

An organization works with its employees, partners, and customers. Digital adoption may look different depending on the touchpoints within these verticals. Here, we are going to talk about the challenges and how a digital adoption platform can help with:

1. Digital Adoption for Customers

As companies add digital channels and experiences to their customer relationships, some customers may struggle to adapt. This is especially true for tech products.

As companies focus on making their application better for customers, they also risk confusing them with numerous updates that change the product’s user experience. The very thing that was initiated to make the product better for customers becomes one of the biggest hurdles for the end-users.

This can be averted by providing relevant online training to your customers for each update, but doing so will not necessarily solve the adoption challenges because:

  • These trainings are usually avoided by customers who think it will take too much time.
  • Even if they attend training, they’ll likely forget it.
  • Customers may find the training irrelevant if not tailored to their specific needs.
  • The asynchronous nature of training might lead to gaps in understanding due to a lack of real-time support.

For example, a stock trading platform app usually makes regular updates to its product to make it more effective for its customers. Onboarding new and existing customers to every update will drain their resources as they have to allocate dedicated support.

In most cases, if customers can’t figure something out on their own, they will reach out to customer support, resulting in an increase in support queries and tickets.

This also presents a challenge for customers. They may be trying to execute a time-sensitive transaction and don’t have time to wait on a response from a support team. These tickets can be drastically reduced by implementing a digital adoption platform (DAP). A DAP can provide on-screen guidance to walk people through the updates so they can execute their trades quickly and timely.

2. Digital Adoption for Employees

Every organization depends on its employees to leverage the full power of enterprise applications and other supporting software. Many organizations customize their ERP, HCM, and CRM solutions, making it challenging for end-users. For example, even if a new hire has used Salesforce before, they won’t have used it with your configurations and processes.

In most cases, companies rely on traditional training such as classroom sessions or video series. Unfortunately, according to the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, 70% of what is taught to employees is forgotten in 24 hours, and 90% is forgotten in a month.

As a result, classroom training is also not sufficient for complete Digital Adoption.

Creating digital training courses can be effective but takes a lot of time and effort. Any form of training can be complemented using digital adoption platforms like Apty to counter the forgetting curve and enhance your organization’s digital adoption rate.

The Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) will help employees use the software as it is intended to be used and utilize most of the features by showing them what to do while they’re working in the application.

3. Digital Adoption for Partners

Resellers and other partners are another important stakeholder group in a digital adoption plan. If you’re changing your system, you need to make sure your partners can use the new system – especially in the case of resellers or distributors. Without them, your product is not going to sell.

For example, an auto manufacturer may have thousands of dealers around the globe. These dealers usually place their parts orders based on customer demands. The manufacturer needs inventory management, eCommerce, and logistics systems to handle just their parts division.

Training each individual dealership could be a daunting task, but if the company used a digital adoption solution, they can decrease the time and money they’re spending on training. The digital adoption platform will guide the user from one step to another with the help of walkthroughs. This will make the job of both partners and the organization simple and easy.

Addressing the digital adoption needs of customers, employees, and partners through targeted strategies and the implementation of Digital Adoption Platforms ensures a comprehensive approach to achieving successful digital adoption.

Digital Adoption Challenges

Digital Adoption challenges can significantly slow down your business transformation process. It’s crucial to identify these challenges and develop strategies to overcome them.

 Here are some common digital adoption challenges and how to address them: 

  • Ineffective Onboarding and Poor Training
  • Lack of Support
  • Integrated Application Used by a User
  • Resistance to Change
  • Lack of Attention

a. Ineffective Onboarding and Poor Training

Successful onboarding and training are vital for the success of digital adoption, whether for employees or users. Good onboarding is essential for any organization, as poor onboarding can cost up to 213% of an employee’s salary.

Effective training ensures employee retention, with 69% of employees likely to stay for three years if they experience good onboarding. For users, lengthy and complicated onboarding processes can lead to the abandonment of the application.

Strategies to Overcome This Challenge: 

  • Implement interactive and engaging onboarding programs.
  • Use a Digital Adoption Platforms (DAP) to provide step-by-step guidance and contextual help.
  • Continuously update training materials to reflect the latest changes and updates in the software.

b. Lack of Support

Customer support is a critical component of digital adoption. Customers often rely on support to navigate new technologies. Studies show that 78% of customers have backed out of a purchase due to a poor customer experience, highlighting its importance.

Strategies to Overcome This Challenge:

  • Enhance support systems by integrating AI-powered chatbots and self-service portals.
  • Offer 24/7 support to address issues promptly.
  • Use feedback from support interactions to improve the user experience continuously.

c. Numerous Applications Used by a User

Employees often use multiple applications to complete their work, leading to confusion and decreased productivity. The time spent navigating through different software can be costly for organizations.

A proper strategy must be in place to make employees comfortable with an application.

Strategies to Overcome This Challenge:

  • Consolidate applications to reduce the number of tools employees need to use.
  • Provide comprehensive training on how to use each application efficiently.
  • Implement digital adoption platform to offer in-app guidance and streamline workflows.

d. Resistance to Change

Resistance to change is one of the biggest barriers to digital adoption. Employees may be reluctant to adopt new technologies due to fear of the unknown or disrupting their routines. This resistance can hinder the organization’s ability to stay competitive.

If they do not change just because they are not comfortable, the reliance on old technology will become a significant disadvantage for the organization.

It is the responsibility of an organization to make sure that employees are on board with the organization’s vision. The organization should further set the expectation and enable resources to make these processes smooth.

Strategies to Overcome This Challenge:

  • Communicate the benefits of new technologies clearly and consistently.
  • Involve employees in the decision-making process to increase buy-in.
  • Provide ongoing support and resources to help employees adapt to new tools.

e. Lack of Attention

With attention spans shorter than ever, capturing and maintaining user attention is a significant challenge. The average attention span is now less than 8 seconds, making it crucial to engage users quickly.

Strategies to Overcome This Challenge:

  • Design user-friendly and engaging interfaces.
  • Use gamification techniques to make the learning process enjoyable.
  • Implement DAPs to provide interactive and immediate guidance, reducing the cognitive load on users.

The Ultimate 4 Steps Digital Adoption Plan

A digital adoption strategy is the backbone of any digital transformation. Many organizations focus heavily on rolling out their transformation initiatives but often neglect creating a comprehensive digital adoption plan.

Digital adoption is a continuous process, as organizations constantly evolve and how and their functions change regularly. Regular training and onboarding can provide a comprehensive outlook but cannot empower employees to accomplish their tasks effectively in the long run.

To solve this problem, we have prepared a four-step digital adoption plan to ensure the successful adoption of applications:

  • Understand the users: Analyzing user behavior before creating training and onboarding content is essential. With a digital adoption platform (DAP), businesses can gain insights into how their employees interact with new applications and processes. This helps to identify whether the problem lies in the process or with the users. Based on these insights, the organization can improve the existing process or create knowledge content that helps employees overcome digital adoption challenges. 
  • Additional Insights:
    Leveraging analytics from digital adoption tools can help pinpoint specific areas where users struggle, allowing for targeted interventions.
    Understanding user behavior also aids in tailoring software adoption strategies that align with user needs and preferences.
    Create knowledge content: The analysis in the first step helps the organization understand the training content requirements of different user groups. By creating personalized content, you can enhance the employee experience and their performance. With a DAP, you can immediately convert walkthroughs into PDFs, PPTs, SCORM, and videos. This empowers the workforce with various content formats and caters to different types of learners.
  • Additional Insights:
    Personalized content can significantly improve the efficiency of technology adoption by addressing the unique needs of different user segments.
    Utilizing various content formats ensures that training materials are accessible and engaging for all employees, which is crucial for successful digital adoption solutions.
    Ensure self-support: Digital transformation brings much change, and the core responsibility heavily relies on the IT team to make it a success. This leads to numerous support calls, often repetitive and generic. Organizations can use tools like a digital adoption platform to house onboarding checklists. This helps users keep track of their progress and complete tasks efficiently. It reduces reliance on traditional forms of training and reinforces knowledge repeatedly. Employees feel more confident as they do not need to rely on others for assistance.
  • Additional Insights:
    Implementing self-support mechanisms through digital adoption. platforms reduces the burden on IT support and allows for more scalable training solutions.
    Ensuring self-support enhances user autonomy and confidence essential for sustaining high software adoption rates and overall technology adoption.
  • Measure the outcome:
    After implementing the digital adoption strategy, it is crucial to monitor its impact. With a DAP like Apty, you can create goals for all the tasks the organization expects its employees to complete within the application. You can segment users based on their job profile, location, and other factors. This allows organizations to easily track employees’ hurdles and optimize processes or guide employees with walkthroughs to overcome challenges.
  • Additional Insights:
    Measuring outcomes is vital for continuous improvement and ensuring the long-term success of digital adoption programs.
    Regularly assessing the effectiveness of the digital adoption process helps identify areas for improvement and ensures that the digital transformation strategy remains aligned with organizational goals.

Following these four steps, organizations can create a robust digital adoption plan that ensures successful adoption and maximizes the benefits of digital transformation.

Digital Adoption Best Practices

Digital adoption can become complicated and there is no one thing to go about it but it is always ideal to have a checklist or best practice document by your side to stay on track.

  • Analyze the current adoption rate
  •  Measure the existing process efficiency
  • Ensure buy-in from all the stakeholders
  • Start with a strategic plan
  • Use training and onboarding tools
  • Create a digital adoption program
  • Track, and measure the outcomes
  • Optimize the digital adoption process

Why a Digital Adoption Platform is Important

Digital Transformation is one of the most challenging jobs for organizations today. To achieve this, many companies have gone beyond the role of CIO and created a new role called Chief Transformation Officer (CTO). In this role, the executive ensures that technology is being transformed as intended by the organization.

An organization should have a well-defined agenda, goal, and digital adoption plan to achieve proper transformation. Digital transformation fails if the implemented application or software is not adopted properly. This makes CTOs and CIOs look for solutions that ensure the implemented business process is followed correctly and that the application is used to its fullest extent. Hence, the digital adoption platform (DAP) comes into the picture.

Digital adoption platforms are intelligent tools that seamlessly enable digital transformation in any organization.

Never heard of DAP? 

Digital adoption platforms have developed over the last 5 to 10 years as more companies need ways to facilitate adoption and user onboarding. Most DAP products started by offering on-screen guidance on top of web-based applications.

Today, DAP solutions are essential for digital transformation. As applications undergo numerous updates and the number of applications needed by one user increases, it becomes challenging for admins, users, and trainers to regularly train each individual based on their job role for each application.

As a result, DAP solutions play a major and vital role in reducing dependencies and making the onboarding process smooth. Digital adoption solutions offer many benefits, such as saving time and money, improving employee productivity, and using analytics to provide a better user experience.

You may have, by now, understood the importance of a digital adoption platform and how it can solve your problems. Given the many options available today, finding a suitable DAP for your business needs can be daunting.

Apty has a different approach than its peers. Apty has a data-centric approach, analyzing how the implemented application is being used and then creating walkthroughs based on the bottlenecks faced by the users.

Not All Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) Are Enterprise Grade

Reactive

The entry-level tier of DAPs provides on-screen guidance for simple SaaS apps, focusing on helping users navigate the app interface. However, these DAPs are reactive—simply teaching people to use software. Many DAP tools fall into this category and are more of a one-and-done tool than a platform that enables ongoing business transformation.

Proactive

At the next level, DAPs onboard and enable users to complete tasks on simple and complex apps with on-screen help. With enough users, organizations can use their DAP to proactively track and monitor whether employees complete tasks and use software correctly, enhancing overall software adoption and technology adoption.

Predictive

Enterprise-level DAPs not only make it easier and faster to onboard and train users on complex enterprise software, but they also help to simplify and streamline enterprise-wide digital processes. DAPs in this category are integrated into every level of an organization, helping to identify and avoid adoption challenges across applications and workflows, thus supporting comprehensive digital transformation and digital adoption.

The Way Ahead for Digital Adoption Platforms

Digital adoption strategies are necessary for any business to maintain a competitive edge over its peers. Digital assistance or walkthroughs are becoming integral to onboarding for employees and customers.

Organizations are ensuring their efforts towards digital transformation are not wasted. Hence, they are moving from LMS (Learning Management Systems) to LXP (Learning Experience Platforms). They are further making sure there is a guide right next to the user in the form of a digital adoption platform (DAP).

DAPs will become increasingly prevalent in the fast-changing world. Whether remote or within the organization, users can be guided seamlessly using DAP solutions like Apty.

With solutions like these, your organization is fully prepared for today and tomorrow. The future looks exciting for digital transformation as digital adoption can be achieved easily with a Digital Adoption Platform like Apty.

Do you want to know more about the Digital Adoption Platform?

FAQs on Digital Adoption

1. What is digital adoption?
Digital Adoption is the process of attaining a state where an individual is capable enough to utilize an application, software, or tools to its fullest capacity or the potential to carry out a variety of digital processes.

2. Why is digital adoption important?
Digital Adoption is significant as it helps companies realize the value of the software investments made. It optimizes business processes, enhances employee performance and improves ROI.

3. When can we say digital adoption is successful?
Digital Adoption is said to be successful when each individual in your organization is effectively onboarded and uses the organization’s entire tech stack to its fullest potential.

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