7 Digital Adoption Strategies That Have the Biggest Impact
- Published:
- Updated: May 30, 2024
It’s no secret that digital is the name of the modern business game.
With a robust list of smart technologies that help enterprises streamline processes, grow more rapidly, remain competitive, and meet new regulatory standards, it makes sense why 89% of businesses are spending over $2 trillion a year to go digital.
But, here is the crazy thing.
Even though companies recognize the need for digital enhancements, only 7% of companies have fully implemented their digital transformations. And, the majority of companies that have implemented digital technologies have seen high failure rates.
So, what does a company do in this situation?
The answer is to prioritize and drive digital adoption at every stage in the implementation cycle. This article will provide an overview of what digital adoption is, and review seven key digital adoption strategies that will have the most significant impact on successful business transformation.
What are the best digital adoption strategies in 2024?
- Eliminate employee resistance to change
- Provide in-app training
- Provide contextual and personalized training to each user
- Provide users with learning content in multiple formats
- Maximize engagement and adoption of pre-existing content
- Keep your employees up-to-date
- Track user progress, usage insights, and motivation
What Is Digital Adoption and Why Does it Matter?
Digital adoption is a state where all of an enterprise’s digital assets, especially applications, are being used optimally to deliver business value, enhance employee experience, and increase user productivity. Full adoption happens when your employees are tapping into the complete range of features and making use of the software as an automatic response, not as an afterthought.
Gartner offers an additional perspective by asserting the only way an organization will see the benefits of a new software is when they embrace the application and use them productively.
Luckily, ensuring digital adoption doesn’t have to be a gamble. Success is a matter of proper planning, training at the point of need, and developing a strategy for ongoing support. Here’s a closer look at six important digital adoption strategies.
7 Key Strategies to Drive Digital Adoption
Here are seven successful strategies to follow to drive digital adoption in 2024:
1. Eliminate employee resistance to change
It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your new software tool is. If your employees don’t care about it or understand how it works, adoption won’t happen.
Gartner states that one of the most common hurdles in digital transformation is dealing with internal resistance to change. This means before you even think about buying a new software solution, you have to take the necessary steps to prepare your employees.
Here are some ways you can help your employees go through the process of change smoothly:
Educate your employees before go-live
Sometimes leaders keep the discussion of industry updates at a management level, come up with solutions in silos, and then spring the news upon their employees without any preparation or proper education.
To have any chance at a smooth transition, employees need to know what digital changes are happening in the business world, why they are happening, and how getting on board with these changes will make their jobs easier.
Creating a culture of acceptance of change through preparation and education will create an atmosphere of excitement instead of fear.
Invest in proper training and ongoing support
New software programs can sometimes be intuitive, but they are also robust and full of features. It can be scary, especially for a staff that isn’t inherently tech-savvy, to try and navigate new software without proper training.
When you implement your software, it’s important to remember this. Just like there have been updates in business technology, there have also been advancements in training methodology and technology. Now there are software programs—including Digital Adoption Solutions (DAS) that are designed to upskill employees on new technology upon go-live.
Gone are the days of in-class training, relying on a coach, or providing a full training manual and leaving employees to figure it out themselves.
Successful digital transformation requires enterprises to implement new training approaches and software solutions that can keep up with the training demands of sophisticated business software.
2. Provide in-app training
If you want employees to learn how to use a new software, you need to provide on-screen and in-app guidance while the employees are using the tool. If you want users to learn additional features, they need that same on-screen, in-app, contextual walkthrough as they encounter new features.
In-class training, training manuals, or simply giving your employees an account login and hoping for the best will not result in proper digital adoption.
McKinsey says companies must ensure the interaction between humans and machines is as natural as possible. As far as learning a new software program is concerned, this means training employees within the app to drive user adoption.
3. Provide contextual and personalized training to each user
Not every employee at your company has the same levels of technological proficiency, the same learning styles, or the same role. If you’re a global company, you’ll also need to provide training in multiple languages. All of these factors make traditional training complicated.
Instead of a generic, in-class training where instructors present every employee with all the same information relevant to every job (and sometimes with a translator), employees need to be trained at the point of individual need, based on what functions (or role) they are performing in the app, what features (or in-app location) they are using, and what their individualized learning needs are (based on their search history, click behavior, demographic information, and device types), and in their native language.
With the help of solutions that provide personalized, interactive walkthroughs, different employees can access interactive guidance directly within the user interface, no matter what part of the app they are using, where geographically they are accessing the app, what time they are using the app, or what their job responsibility is.
4. Provide learners with content in multiple formats
When it comes to consuming large amounts of new information, learners also often have strong preferences for how they like to consume new content. Some learners prefer videos and SlideShare, while others may prefer In-App Easy Flows.
To cater to various learning preferences, especially if you have already developed this content, it’s smart to provide learners with as many formats to do initial and reinforcement learning via the following methods:
- In-App EasyFlows
- LMS Course (SCORM and xAPI compliant)
- Videos
- Hot URL
- Article
- SlideShare
A robust Digital Adoption Platform should also provide a comprehensive set of learning widgets such as self-help, task lists, broadcast messages, guided discovery, smart-tips, and beacons that highlight new information. Whatfix allows L&D teams to include training content in various widgets and formats.
5. Maximize engagement and adoption of pre-existing content
Additionally, many L&D teams and functional SMEs at enterprises have already developed strong training programs, but these training sessions may have little to no engagement. The reason for low engagement rates is because this content is not accessible to the users inside the app at the moment of need.
With DAPs, trainers can expose this content to users within Whatfix widgets, increasing user views by up to 3X.
With the WhatfixEditor, L&D teams can take pre-developed, outside content—content that already exists in MS Word, Adobe Captivate, PDFs, Video Editors, an LMS or LEPS, sales enablement platforms, employee platforms, etc. and use those content modalities in Whatfix.
Also, once a learning manager authors in-App EasyFlows in Whatfix, these automatically get converted to LMS Course (SCORM and xAPI compliant), videos, PDFs, Hot URLs, article, and SlideShares. These Multi-Format content modalities are linked to the updates made to the EasyFlows. Any time changes are made, these additional multi-format content gets automatically updated, reducing the burden to maintain the content manually.
6. Keep your employees up-to-date
Software applications continually update and add new features to keep up with the fast-paced world of tech.
Salesforce alone updates its software three times a year, introducing many new features with each update. So, this clearly proves that training isn’t a one-and-done job, especially when it comes to learning software solutions that are always innovating.
To keep your employees current on the software that you implement and subsequent updates, they need ongoing alerts and adequate support.
With the help of a Digital Adoption Solution (DAS), all the training takes place within the software. This means, every time there is a new feature, you can add a new in-app walkthrough, showing users how to utilize the new functionality.
7. Track user progress, usage insights, and motivation
A large part of ensuring digital adoption is solidifying a way for L&D teams to track user progress and measure your digital adoption level. This is especially important for large enterprises with hundreds of app users.
The only way to understand user progress is to track it in totality. Usage analytics will provide insights on what features are crystal clear and well consumed by your employees, and which features are underutilized or being avoided by them.
When corporate training teams have access to this information, it’s easy to identify problems, improve training effectiveness, and boost user engagement.
Trainers can also track learners’ progress in real-time, providing opportunities to understand what motivates users and find ways to incentivize them to keep learning and utilizing the platform.
Organizations should hire a digital adoption manager to own and manage an entire adoption strategy.
Invest in a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) like Whatfix
A digital adoption platform (DAP), like Whatfix, is a current software training program that ensures the digital adoption of any new enterprise-wide tool.
The Whatfix DAS incorporates modern learning strategies and technologies by providing in-app, training walkthroughs that are:
- In-app. All training takes place at the point of use, or within the actual app.
- Contextual. Whatfix allows you to personalize training messages with dynamic content for your full range of users.
- Interactive. Employees learn by completing tasks and walkthroughs within the app.
- Real-time. Users get on-demand answers to questions based on their needs. L&D managers can also track user progress and performance in real-time.
- Automation. Whatfix auto executes tasks, resulting in productivity gains.
For more information on how to ensure digital adoption, start your free trial of Whatfix today.
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What Is a Digital Adoption Platform?
DAPs enable technology users with contextual in-app guidance and real-time support to guide them through business processes and to learn in the flow of work.