What Is a Digital Adoption Platform?
Digital adoption platform (DAP, DAP platform or DAP software) is layered on top of other software products, apps, or websites and helps to accelerate proficiency by directing users through key tasks and providing interpretive and evaluative information as users navigate their way through a product.
Digital Adoption Platforms are software platforms designed to facilitate seamless software learning by simplifying both the employee & user experience and ensuring proficiency on any software platform, website, or app.
These platforms were developed to ensure successful digital transformation and to increase ROI on software investments.
The digital transformation market is growing quickly, the market is projected to reach USD 6.78 trillion, at a CAGR of 20.9% during the forecast period, 2022-2029. This growth is driven by the increasing adoption of digital technologies across various industries and the need for organizations to transform their operations to stay competitive.
Digital adoption platforms are becoming increasingly important as enablers of digital transformations in organizations. As a result, the digital adoption platforms market will experience faster growth than the overall digital transformation market.
Digital adoption platforms can also help prevent software paralysis by ensuring that employees are proficient in using software tools and are able to adapt quickly to new technologies. This can prevent delays and productivity losses caused by employees struggling to use new software tools, ultimately contributing to the success of digital transformations in organizations.
Digital Adoption Platforms can be customized to address any specific needs. Powered by AI and machine learning, DAPs use contextual information to provide tailored guidance in real-time based on each individual user’s needs.
They promote digital adoption in a few ways:
- Automate aspects of employee or customer onboarding
- Provide in-app software training and guidance
- Collect and analyze usage data
- Provides proactive support to solve any user challenge
Implementing digital adoption platforms provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Reduced onboarding time
- Reduced burden on IT support
- Lowered user resistance to new software technology, increased user satisfaction, and higher morale
- Deeper insight into what works, what doesn’t, and why
WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform is platform-agnostic, allowing it to be used in any work environment, on top of any software or technology.
Digital Adoption Platforms cost less and produce better results than alternatives.
Why Is Digital Adoption Platform Software Important?
When software that is fluent and efficient is utilized by organizations, it helps drive employee productivity and growth.
In most cases, a
platform adoption is a key component in ensuring that businesses make the most of their apps and integrated software solutions. One of the quickest and most efficient ways to achieve this is through
in-app guidance and user onboarding process that warrants and facilitates new hires to achieve more in a time-effective manner with more efficient employee training.
Digital adoption platforms provide enhanced, robust analytics that helps businesses to ensure effective internal governance and staking measures. These measures support best practices and have been proven to increase employee productivity tenfold, which eventually results in improved customer-centric experiences.
The Top Digital Adoption Platforms
Many companies consider themselves true digital adoption platforms (DAPs). However, it can be challenging to identify which platform is the best for your organization. This is because each DAP has different features and benefits that may or may not suit your business.
To help you make a decision, we have compiled a list of the top 6 digital adoption platforms investments considerations you ought to check before choosing the right platform.
Analytics
The first thing you should consider when looking for a DAP is whether it offers analytics capabilities. It’s essential to track user behavior and understand how your employees use the software. This way, you can make changes to improve the user experience.
Subject Matter Expertise
A good DAP should offer SME training to help your employees master the software. This type of training can be delivered in various ways, such as video tutorials, webinars, and step-by-step guides. A global organization offering local consultation from subject matter experts who work with the most significant subset of transformation-focused G2Ks in the industry proves to be a precious resource.
Self Sufficiency
The platform should offer a high degree of self-sufficiency so that you don’t have to rely on the vendor for support.
This includes in-app chat, searchable knowledge bases, and video tutorials. Technology agile enough to handle complex business initiatives without constant reliance on professional services teams is key to successful digital adoption.
Time to Value
The sooner solutions are live, the less maintenance (downtime) they require, and the shorter the time to value. A DAP that doesn’t take weeks or months to get started is a good investment.
Community Ecosystem
Access to broader solutions ecosystems from the largest community of DAP Professionals, certified by the organization, ensures innovation. The community should also have vetted, stabilized software development kits (SDKs) from certified integration partners, making it simple to expand the capabilities of your DAP rapidly.
Patented Technology
Patented technological innovations require a significant engineering investment. This ensures that the technology is always up-to-date, scales to meet customer demands, and offers a competitive edge.
Walkme’s six investment considerations are based on our eleven years of experience working with G2K companies before choosing your digital adoption platform.
However, every company has different needs, so it’s essential to research and choose the right DAP for your business.
Your Digital Adoption Strategy Guide
Digital software adoption and user adoption is without a doubt the most prominent part of the modern digital business environment. There is a growing list of smart and robust technologies that allow businesses to rapidly streamline their processes, grow at exponential rates, and remain highly competitive. Meeting the demands of regulatory standards is notoriously difficult, with
38% of digital transformation efforts over the last year failed to meet their objectives due to a lack of adoption by end users. For medium sized enterprises, that number increased to almost 46%, amounting to $12.7 million in wasted spend according to
WalkMe’s state of digital adoption report.
That being said, companies that recognize the importance of digital enhancements and user adoption are still failing at a rate higher than they’d like to admit. Only 7% of companies have fully implemented digital transformation strategies, and even those that have been successful in the early stages fail to fully digitize their business processes.
The simple answer is to prioritize digital adoption at every stage of the user adoption and implementation cycle. In this comprehensive guide, we will provide a detailed outline of what digital adoption is and provide an overview of the seven core digital adoption strategies that will impact your bottom line, boost productivity, and enable businesses to drive business transformation.
Eliminate Employee Resistance To Change
In the digital era, it doesn’t matter if you have the best digital adoption platform and tools in the world. If employees don’t understand the intricacies involved, how it works, or simply don’t care about it, digital adoption won’t be easy.
According to Gartner, one of the most common hurdles that businesses will face when implementing digital transformation is internal resistance to change. Most businesses don’t take into account the amount of time and effort involved in proper employee training. An onboarding checklist helps to guide users through the various onboarding processes and helps to keep user struggles to a minimum.
Digital adoption solutions (DAS) are being utilized to help businesses upskill new employees and eliminate user confusion. Users struggle when they are not fully educated about the benefits of a successful digital adoption platform (DAP).The best digital adoption methods emphasize
employee retention,
employee learning and training, learning materials, learning processes, project management, and interactive product tours.
Provide Enhanced In-App Training Materials
Businesses that want to get the most out of their employees and learn how to use and develop new software need to provide enhanced on-screen, in-app guidance before, during, and after the integration of digital adoption tools.
According to McKinsey, business users need to ensure that the subtle interactions between machines and humans are as natural as possible in order for enterprise organizations to fully reap the benefits of digital adoption. This means that when employees are subject to a new learning platform, in-app training is essential.
Provide Contextual & Personalized Training To Each User
Businesses shouldn’t expect all of their employees to have the same comprehensive
knowledge of enterprise applications. People learn in a multitude of different ways and utilizing the correct resources to enact positive change is essential for an effective digital adoption process to take place.
Remote workers, for example, will have many different needs from those of users that are based in the office. Enterprise organizations are beginning to train their employees at the point of individual need, which is based on the functionality of the role they are performing in-app, the features they are using, and whatever their personalized individual learning needs may be. New
digital adoption solutions now provide personalized, interactive, and multifaceted solutions and guidance that employees can easily access within the user interface. Interactive product tours help to boost user productivity and enable businesses to take full control of their digital assets.
Equip Learners With Content In Multiple Formats
The digital adoption process is often convoluted and complicated to the point where new users struggle to fully understand and comprehend every aspect of the methodology. This is why it is more important than ever for new users to consume new content in multiple different formats, which can be in video format or even in slide share.
The following formats can help your users ease into the onboarding process and help to facilitate a smooth learning process:
- In-App
- LMS Courses (SCORM & xApi Compliant)
- Videos
- PDFs
- Hot URLs
- Articles
- SlideShare
Expansive digital adoption platforms work to provide a distinct and comprehensive set of learning tools and widgets that offer employee analytics, self-help and guidance, task lists, broadcast messages, guided discovery software applications, clickable instructions, and smart tips to highlight and emphasize new features and vital information. This creates personalized experiences that enhance product adoption and facilitate long-term process changes that train employees to the best of their ability.
Increase Engagement & Adoption Of Preexisting Content
Learning and development teams, as well as the support team and functional SMEs, often develop powerful training materials and guides that have little to no effect on the bigger picture of employee training. This is because they often have little to no engagement. After all, the content isn’t readily available in-app when users need it most. Smart DAPs also enable support tickets to be distributed in-app, which helps to give businesses valuable insights into the overall picture of digital adoption at the various different stages. In addition, support tickets can be utilized to create triage-based priority lists at the task or individual level to determine the most effective order in which to deal with them.
Make Sure Employees Are Up-To-Date
Software applications need to be continually updated in order to keep up with the fast-paced, digitized world of technology. Salesforce updates its software multiple times throughout the year and introduces new features with every update. This means that employee training is not a one-off process and is instead an innovation-led approach that needs constant attention. Each new employee will need to be kept up-to-date on current software updates, new technology, and trends with ongoing and adequate support when they need it the most. A digital adoption solution (DAS) is a one-stop solution that enables training to take place with the software. This helps employees adjust to new features by utilizing personalized content, in-app walkthroughs, and web applications which enable users to effectively utilize new functionality at their own pace.
Effectively Monitor User Progress, Usage Insights & Motivation Rates
One of the best ways to ensure effective digital adoption is by allowing learning and development teams to track user progress and new technology adoption. This is extremely important for large corporations with any number of different app users, functionalities, and needs. Employee usage analytics is a great way to understand and track user progress and provide valuable insights into what features are being utilized correctly, and consumed by employees and which features are being ignored.
This information provides corporate teams with vital data that allows them to create walkthroughs, identify and improve training problems, train employees effectively, and boost user engagement.
In-app surveys and feature announcements are another great way to record the success of your DAP implementation by gauging valuable insights, analytics, and information from employees about their uptake of new tools, new technology, and user experience.
This creates a pool of power users that can be used as a focus group to identify the needs of particular teams or subdivisions within your organization.
Why Is A Digital Adoption Platform Important?
Digital Adoption is among the most challenging processes a business will face in the digital age. Businesses have even gone as far as to create a new role that goes beyond the CIO called a Chief Transformation Officer. The best digital adoption platforms help businesses effectively facilitate seamless adoption and onboarding.
Today, Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are an essential piece of enterprise software that is essential for digital transformation. When applications go through their various modes of updates, the number of applications needed by a single user increases and becomes a headache for admins, users, and learning and development professionals who have to essentially train each individual based on their unique job role.
In order to reduce dependencies, businesses are working hard to streamline the onboarding process and a digital adoption platform (DAP) is the best way to achieve this. A digital adoption platform also helps to save time and money, increases employee productivity, and uses enhanced data and analytics to provide a seamless user experience.
Choosing The Right Digital Adoption Platform
Choosing the right digital adoption platform can be notoriously difficult. With digital adoption at the top of boardroom agendas and worldwide spending on enterprise software estimated to be around $424 billion. It’s no wonder businesses are racing towards the finishing line at an expedited pace, all hoping to be the first digital adoption champions.
Digital adoption platform is still a relatively new term and is an emerging category with a growing vendor rate year on year. There are a number of choices to consider when choosing the right digital adoption platform for your unique business needs. Solutions have been designed by multiple software companies and some are better than others.
Follow our three-step guide of the best features you should look for in digital adoption platforms to get the most out of your digital adoption solution:
- Easy Content Management & Creation
Most digital-based organizations know how complex business applications can be. The diverse set of features and functionalities are there to help solve the complex business problems associated with digital adoption platforms. Digital adoption platforms are used primarily to help with software adoption, user onboarding and help navigate business applications efficiently. They require an enormous amount of complex content creation and utilize smart tools that enable you to quickly publish resources that aren’t dependent on technical resources. Codeless authoring is a key component of digital adoption platforms and enables your business to quickly streamline and update existing content and release it to primary users within a given timeframe.
- Easy Of Integration & Scalability
It’s a given that enterprises manage multiple functions across different business applications, which means that digital adoption platforms should be seamless and integrate with business applications that cater to the requirements of your end-users. Another important point when talking about ease of integration and scalability is that digital adoption platforms don’t have many significant bugs, issues, or functionality drops when scaled across multiple departments and teams. This means that digital tools must be effective, enterprise-grade, and functional in their value proposition to get the most out of the software solution.
- Security Compliance & Certifications
Digital adoption platforms will need to integrate with any number of enterprise applications, which means that they will contain a vast amount of sensitive information. And so your adoption platform must have security policies that conform to proper data security processes. An example could be a browser-based extension that is essential for collecting various data on web applications. Users will need to make sure that the browser extension is not collecting data associated with data on an employee’s personal or business activities outside of the key applications required for adoption.
How Digital Adoption Supports Digital Transformation Efforts
By now you should be aware that digital adoption is a change and learning mechanism that enables employees to understand and comprehend digital assets. It encourages individuals to accept and utilize often complex digital resources to achieve their goals and leverage resourceful technologies to drive long-term digital innovation.
The main forces behind digital transformation are people, knowledge, and company culture. Businesses that invest in people, user onboarding are able to guarantee digital scalability and sustainability across the entire organization. The first step in the digital transformation process is investing in a digital adoption strategy that makes sure that each and every individual within an organization complies with new Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that enable an effective transition.
The reason why digital adoption platforms are an essential part of modern support and organizational functionality is that they can guarantee productivity and a better overall employee experience with practical learning materials, access to software vendors, and the ability to share clickable instructions.
Businesses face a lot of resistance when training and onboarding employees on multiple applications that aren’t digitally native. Digital adoption isn’t easy, and for most businesses, it’s a steep learning curve that requires employees to break down red tape and obstacles associated with push-backs in order for the entire organization to be comfortable with new and complex digital processes without the need for overwhelmingly convoluted training processes.
Digital Adoption For Sales Ops Professionals
Its the responsibility of the sales operations director to implement and oversee the successful adoption of digital technology. Sales professionals have to be formidable and strategic with their intentions and find new and innovative ways of connecting with prospects and increasing sales figures by finding new ways of selling products and services.
Sales representatives have their hands in many different technology pools and are often required to learn and implement as many as 13 digital tools, which can sometimes become overwhelming, even for the hardiest individuals. According to Gartner, “a digital adoption solution will help guide a new user who isn’t in the software every minute of every day to do important tasks with confidence. “Digital Adoption Platforms For Remote Teams.
In WalkMe’s report on sales trends based on social media insights, 60% of sales reps commenters said that the focus on CRM data reporting detracts from their job. This reinforces the need to give sales reps more guidance and in-app assistance when using CRM or other applications necessary to their jobs.
How Digital Adoption Platforms Support Employee Productivity
In the age of digital, typical enterprise organizations can use as many as 280 applications to successfully run their everyday business processes. This number is typically rising by 30% year on year and shows no signs of slowing down, even amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The modern workforce is advancing and developing at breakneck speed, with employees being asked to take on more dynamic responsibilities and use new and innovative applications as they work from home.
Digital software adoption and product adoption don’t only affect employees. Vendors and customers are also intrinsically linked to the various training mechanics involved with DAP adoption. It’s now widely believed that the more traditional methods of training and onboarding employees are vastly outdated and not fit for purpose in the turbulent, ever-evolving digital age.
Meeting the demands of the new world of work takes time, significant investment, and patience, with the most successful businesses taking advantage of digital adoption platforms (DAPs) to boost the effectiveness of training and employee productivity in new and innovative ways. In 2019, Gartner recognized digital adoption as a completely separate software category.
The future of digital adoption is still up for debate. But we believe that leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) will make training content more appealing, valuable, and intuitive with contextualized personalization in real-time. The growth of digital adoption will undoubtedly continue to accelerate in the near future and investing in the right solution could mean the difference between comprehensive digital transformation and failure.
WalkMe DAP Overview
WalkMe is a digital adoption platform and acknowledgment management software system that integrates an innovative suite of DAP tools with artificial intelligence (AI) to help steer the sales team, increase productivity and increase visibility across multiple platforms.
One of the key components of WalkMe’s digital adoption platform is its ingenious integration with hundreds of tools such as Salesforce. WalkMe’s digital adoption solutions are one of the most advanced Salesforce adoption platforms in the world that help users adopt all of Salesforce’s core processes and features.
WalkMe’s software is simple to implement and easy to use. It gives users the opportunity to find unique ways to improve data integrity, save precious employee hours, enhance communication, extricate valuable resources and increase long-term revenue goals.
The benefits of WalkMe’s digital adoption platform and solutions are as follows:
- Seamless walkthroughs with the ability to share them with your users.
- break alerts that notify champions when a step-by-step walkthrough breaks.
- Powerful AI systems that make knowledgeable, actionable, and useful suggestions.
- Effortless and unique UI that allows for simple integration of tools to create a speedy onboarding process.
The benefits of a successful digital adoption implementation are vast and include seamless business process automation, increased productivity, a better customer experience, and more practical workplace learning. Digital technologies, when utilized correctly, provide smooth automation of tasks and help to streamline critical processes that affect employees’ day-to-day activities. This includes effortlessly scheduling social media posts, automating important customer emails, and even setting up periodic reports.
Digital adoption platforms are without a doubt the best chance a business has at increasing employee productivity because it allows people to teach themselves new and valuable skills while independently finding answers. Customer analytics and product analytics are also an important part of effective communication, which creates more resources, increased product adoption, and better interactions because employees have sufficient knowledge to effectively respond to customer queries.
