How To Design A Winning Digital Adoption Process

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone adopted new technology as easily as an excited four-year-old with an iPad? Sadly, navigating the complexities of a sophisticated CRM is not as easy as figuring out consumer-grade tech. According to the Rogers’ Bell Curve for technology adoption, just 16% of people are considered “innovators” or “early adopters,” while 50% are considered the “late majority” or “laggards.” When half of your employees are struggling to adopt your software, designing an effective digital adoption process is critical.

What is the cost of digital adoption failure?

As business transformation specialist Abhik Sengupta writes: Failing to achieve sustainable digital adoption leads to several consequences that drag down the pace of business and harm the employee experience:

• Lack of productivity on digital tools
• Lower overall employee performance
• Rising employee frustration and declining morale
• Resistance to new digital tools
• No return on your software investment

Dive deeper: The 4 Digital Adoption Mistakes That Destroy Employee Performance

An effective digital adoption process is paramount to avoiding these effects.

The solution is a solid digital adoption process

The goal of your digital adoption process is high-level user adoption. This means your employees don’t just gain basic proficiency on a platform, but they can use it to its highest capabilities. By taking advantage of advanced functionality, your employees should be able to use your technology to create new opportunities. Successful digital adoption drives your organization down more innovative pathways.

8 tips for designing your digital adoption process

At a bare minimum, a successful digital adoption process needs:

• Coordination between leaders and stakeholders
• Honest communication with end users
• An agile approach to execution

To achieve each requirement, apply the following tips each time new technology is added to your organization, you can maintain high-level digital adoption and improve employee productivity.

1. Start with your goals

Always start with your business goals. Clearly define what you are trying to achieve, and how a new tool will help you get there. Remember, adding a new digital tool should always support these goals. If you aren’t strategic about the technology you choose in the first place, it will be difficult to adopt.

2. Open a feedback loop 

Open communication is critical at every stage of your software implementation. First, know what your users’ needs are. Then collect feedback about how well the tool fulfills those needs, where friction occurs, and what changes need to be made. This is critical to lowering employee frustration and raising productivity.

3. Use a timeline 

Create a digital adoption timeline that is both realistic and ambitious. How long will implementation take? How long will the transition period be? How will you measure the adoption rate increases over time, and at what points during the process? Formalize these steps and stay vigilant throughout the process.

4. Be open to making changes 

Make sure you incorporate changes based on feedback and any problems or opportunities that arise. Your digital adoption process should be agile, not rigid. Consider how you’re going to incorporate changes and make sure you have the resources to do it.

5. Use technology to your advantage 

A huge barrier to digital adoption is the archaic training process still used by many companies. To achieve true digital adoption, you should approach onboarding and training with the same innovation as digitization itself. Many leading organizations have turned to digital on-screen guidance systems that use contextual learning to provide real-time guidance. With contextual learning, even brand new users can easily complete tasks with efficiency and accuracy.

6. Lead from the top down 

Strong leadership has a huge role to play in overcoming employee resistance to change — one of the biggest obstacles to digital adoption. Make sure managers and executives lead from the front. By demonstrating their commitment to the adoption process, the can encourage the rest of the organization to adopt the changes.

Next on your reading list: How Transformational CIOs Drive Digital Innovation

7. Work smarter, not harder 

Digital adoption should make everything else simple, not more complicated. Make sure you’re not adding new digital tools just for the sake of it. Users need better — not more — tools.

8. Make it easy 

If users are finding the adoption process difficult, think about how you can make it easier for them. There are huge benefits to adding a digital adoption solution. In the nonprofit sector alone, workers reported efficiency gains of up to 91%. Imagine what a strong digital adoption process could do for your organization.

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WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) transforms the user experience in today’s overwhelming digital world. Using artificial intelligence, engagement, guidance, and automation, WalkMe’s transparent overlay assists users to complete tasks easily within any enterprise software, mobile application or website. Discover how a DAP can revolutionize your business — request a demo today.