Foregoing Software ‘Insurance’ is Your Most Expensive Mistake
By WalkMe Team
Updated May 2, 2023
When danger is inevitable, you know preparation is critical.
If you live in a region that gets hit by hurricanes, wildfires, or tornados every year, insurance is a no-brainer. But when a threat feels less eminent, the need to invest in protective measures doesn’t seem as crucial. It’s easier to justify the risk. Why not just handle it if and when a problem arises?
We all know this attitude evaporates as soon as disaster strikes. Even if the risk was small, you think, how could I have been so unprepared?
For businesses in the digital age, the consequences of this foolishness far exceed the costs of restoring what was broken. Failing to insure your technological assets can wreak irreparable damage to your bottom line, especially when employee or customer trust is at stake.
Insurance for digital investments must rise to the top of your agenda
As a leader, it’s your responsibility to understand your company’s investments, identify potential threats, and take the necessary measures to protect them.
For example, let’s say you just bought a new customer relationship management (CRM) software. The capabilities and features this software offers have the potential to revolutionize your sales, customer support, and marketing departments. The range of functionality is higher than any other tool you’ve come across.
But usability problems are preventing your employees from completing the processes they need. A complex interface combined with an outdated employee training model is leading to lower productivity, more errors, and rising employee frustration.
Lack of adoption is making it impossible to achieve a return on this software investment. That’s why you need software insurance — to make adoption a guarantee.
What does software insurance cover?
The modern workplace is saturated with technology. The typical employee uses a dozen systems and apps a day. Now, ensuring your digital investments promote your business goals — not hurt them — is a primary need.
I’m not talking about a warranty or a 100-page insurance policy. I’m talking about a digital adoption solution.
This breed of software helps companies protect their tech investments by making sure they achieve digital adoption.
Digital adoption means your employees or customers can use your digital tools to their fullest capabilities as they are intended. It’s not a one-time goal. It’s an ongoing endeavor that requires a 24/7 solution. Every time your user needs to complete a process, they need the guidance and support to do it efficiently.
With a digital adoption solution, you can do more than defend your investments against danger. You are taking the most proactive step to prevent it.
Without one, you expose your business to a range of risks.
1. Lost ROI
The consequence that will get pinned on you first is lost ROI. Enterprise software doesn’t come cheap. Most likely, you’ve poured tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into it.
To the rest of the C-suite, a digital adoption solution might seem like just another budget item. Besides, if you’re already paying for such an advanced CRM system, shouldn’t that be enough?
To put it bluntly, no, it’s not.
The reality is emerging workplace technology is often complex and not intuitive. Your brightest employees will struggle to gain proficiency. They won’t be able to complete the processes they need or maintain productivity. When your entire workforce goes through this at the same time, you not only lose your return on your software investment, your whole business suffers.
2. Diminished data integrity
If an employee doesn’t know how to enter data correctly or which fields to fill out, they will try to do what they think makes sense or just guess. This can compromise data integrity, which is costly to fix and can quickly erode customer trust.
Imagine after transitioning to a new CRM, poor usability is preventing your account managers and customer support from complying with standards for customer data. One data entry error leads to another and another. Over time, your customer data is riddled with mistakes. This puts a strain on the client relationship and makes them distrustful. Eventually, it leads to churn.
In these scenarios, a digital adoption solution not only insures high-level usability for your employees but also reliability for your customer base.
3. Lowered leadership credibility
Your workforce is looking at you to ensure stability and a positive experience at work. In the age of all things digital, software usability is inextricable from this.
When employees feel like leadership isn’t giving them the right tools they need to do their jobs, they begin to lose faith in the company. This is a place you really don’t want to be in.
Once you lose your credibility, it will be hard to move the needle on anything. Instead of trusting your decisions and embracing them, your employees’ will be skeptical and resist them.
Imagine your CIO came to you and told you the whole company was transitioning to a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform next week. Well, it seems like you don’t have much choice in the matter, so you say okay. Next week comes, the new ERP has been launched, and you’re expected to do your work as usual.
But suddenly you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re responsible for the same work and deadlines, but the processes and interface are completely different. Not only are you stressed about falling behind, you feel incompetent and frustrated.
Employee frustration has the potential to destroy employee engagement and thwart your software implementation. If you don’t find a solution to boost usability, your employees will suffer — and so will business performance.
Before you understand the true risk of foregoing software insurance, it’s easy to misevaluate the cost-benefit analysis.
But not having a digital adoption solution makes you vulnerable to a range of threats. Unlike a tornado or hurricane, these problems don’t come once and knock you over.
They are subtle and exist under the radar. They may not be catastrophic in nature, but they can drain your resources at catastrophic proportions.
Without a digital adoption solution, it’s impossible to guarantee your investment dollars will achieve the results you’re seeking. Your software is only as meaningful as the way people use it. Without a high level of adoption, your digital tools will fast devolve into shelfware.
__________
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.
5/5(5
votes )
By WalkMe Team
WalkMe pioneered the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) for organizations to utilize the full potential of their digital assets. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning and contextual guidance, WalkMe adds a dynamic user interface layer to raise the digital literacy of all users.
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For example, let’s say you just bought a new customer relationship management (CRM) software. The capabilities and features this software offers have the potential to revolutionize your sales, customer support, and marketing departments. The range of functionality is higher than any other tool you’ve come across.
But usability problems are preventing your employees from completing the processes they need. A complex interface combined with an outdated employee training model is leading to lower productivity, more errors, and rising employee frustration.
Lack of adoption is making it impossible to achieve a return on this software investment. That’s why you need software insurance — to make adoption a guarantee.
For example, let’s say you just bought a new customer relationship management (CRM) software. The capabilities and features this software offers have the potential to revolutionize your sales, customer support, and marketing departments. The range of functionality is higher than any other tool you’ve come across.
But usability problems are preventing your employees from completing the processes they need. A complex interface combined with an outdated employee training model is leading to lower productivity, more errors, and rising employee frustration.
Lack of adoption is making it impossible to achieve a return on this software investment. That’s why you need software insurance — to make adoption a guarantee.
The consequence that will get pinned on you first is lost ROI. Enterprise software doesn’t come cheap. Most likely, you’ve poured tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into it.
To the rest of the C-suite, a digital adoption solution might seem like just another budget item. Besides, if you’re already paying for such an advanced CRM system, shouldn’t that be enough?
To put it bluntly, no, it’s not.
The reality is emerging workplace technology is often complex and not intuitive. Your brightest employees will struggle to gain proficiency. They won’t be able to complete the processes they need or maintain productivity. When your entire workforce goes through this at the same time, you not only lose your return on your software investment, your whole business suffers.
Imagine your CIO came to you and told you the whole company was transitioning to a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform next week. Well, it seems like you don’t have much choice in the matter, so you say okay. Next week comes, the new ERP has been launched, and you’re expected to do your work as usual.
But suddenly you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re responsible for the same work and deadlines, but the processes and interface are completely different. Not only are you stressed about falling behind, you feel incompetent and frustrated.
Employee frustration has the potential to destroy employee engagement and thwart your software implementation. If you don’t find a solution to boost usability, your employees will suffer — and so will business performance.