Digital Adoption platforms (DAP) are the latest innovation to shake the world of technology. It’s recently become recognized as a technology category in its own right.
In this article, we will conduct a brief Digital Adoption Platform comparison — examining how things were before the recognition of the digital adoption platforms category and afterward.
What Are Digital Adoption platforms?
digital adoption platforms (DAP) or Digital adoption solution (DAS) are pieces of software that are specifically designed to initiate in-app learning and development. Distinct visual overlays are used to provide real-time training and best practice guidance to enhance user experience.
Gartner recognizes DAPs as an emerging technology that simplifies user adoption throughout the entire digital transformation process. This software typically uses contextual data to provide straightforward tutorials on personal user requirements in real-time.
Some experts think that there isn’t a replacement for specialist interactive training. But, as you are about to find out, DAPs are the go-to solution for enterprises hoping to save time onboarding, retraining, and managing complex process changes.
There are several digital adoption platforms on the market today that deliver highly informative and customizable training to both business-to-business and business-to-consumer platforms. Most software vendors have versatility, adaptability, and utility in mind when creating these types of products.
But, it’s worth mentioning that not all software is created equally. Depending on user requirements, you need to do the necessary due diligence to get the most out of your DAP. For example, users who require constant updates, enhanced analytics, and expert guidance are best placed to choose a DAP solution like WalkMe. They offer round-the-clock support and dedicated walk-throughs targeting business users’ problem areas.
Why Should Your Organization Implement A Digital Adoption Solution?
In today’s overwhelming digital world, digital adoption platforms increase productivity, reduce costs, enable swift user onboarding and enhance project management capabilities.
Most modern businesses now see the inherent value in learning, development, and customer success associated with DAP platforms. The best digital adoption platforms enable their customers and employees to utilize the applications and resources available to them fully. They do this by building and disseminating knowledge in a way that supports individual learning styles.
Why Are Digital Adoption Platforms Important?
Digital adoption platforms are key to streamlining the user onboarding process and increasing adoption rates cross-departmentally. They work to ensure that both employees and customers utilize the power of the applications they have on hand and to their full extent.
One of the biggest goals for businesses operating in the digital age is increasing ROI for new technology investments. The only way to achieve this is through a high rate of digital adoption. Take the statistics below, for example.
Over 35% of new users within enterprise organizations said that they required more training and cited low rates of digital adoption as the prime cause for the non-utilization of proprietary hardware. This demonstrates that businesses waste vast sums of money on hardware and software systems that most employees don’t fully understand.
Digital adoption platforms aim to circumvent the problems associated with outdated training procedures by providing new and innovative ways to educate in the long term. When users are encouraged to find platforms to their problems in-app and receive seamless step-by-step guidance, they are more likely to remember what they are being taught and find answers themselves.
The Benefits Of A Digital Adoption Platforms Solution
A business’s most powerful benefit from implementing a digital adoption solution (DAS) is increased end-user adoption rates. When businesses realize the full potential of new technology that fosters ongoing training and guidance for their employees, they are already halfway to the finish line.
Digital adoption platforms take the hard work out of learning new and often complex enterprise applications through beneficial in-app guidance, significantly reducing the amount of time spent on certain exercises, such as content creation.
DAP platforms have the following benefits:
Employee Benefits
- A better employee onboarding experience
- Increased overall digital transformation
- The ability to train teams asynchronously
- High end-user confidence in training processes
Customer Benefits
- Increased customer adoption of technical enterprise applications
- Reduction in IT support tickets
- A better understanding of new software and technology
- Increased customer satisfaction and better customer feedback
Platform Benefits
- A consistent, streamlined experience across multiple enterprise applications
- Self-paced training
- The ability to analyze and collect usage data
- Data-driven insights
- The ability to improve ROI
What Are The Functions Of Digital Adoption platforms?
According to Gartner, one of the main functions of digital adoption platforms is sales enablement. This is why CRM systems are purchased by businesses who want to help their sales teams quickly and efficiently manage leads and customer relationships.
That being said, a third of all CRM implementations fail within the first year because of low adoption rates. This means that some businesses aren’t utilizing the power of DAS and are wasting valuable time, money, and effort in the process. Even if employees have the best intentions, they won’t get any of the associated benefits if they don’t understand the basic nature of the software they are using.
If you leverage your CRM alongside your digital adoption solution, you can prevent low adoption rates among sales reps and analyze useful reports that support data-driven decision-making.
Apart from sales, digital adoption platforms have a variety of use cases which we’ve listed below:
- Increasing customer adoption of enterprise applications
- Decreasing new employee onboarding time
- Reducing time to value for new customers
- Increasing the success of cross-departmental digital transformation efforts
How Do Digital Adoption platforms Boost Sales Productivity?
Sales are seen as a specific use case for digital adoption platforms because when CRMs are successfully implemented, they can drastically boost the motivation and productivity of sales teams. Businesses that have achieved total adoption of CRM platforms have reported a 30% spike in productivity rates.
Digital adoption platforms contribute to overall sales productivity in the following ways:
- They provide a dependable, logical, and persistent experience across multiple applications. When a DAS is implemented across multiple applications, it enables sales representatives to navigate through self-help materials for every app they use easily. This streamlines the training process and empowers employees to increase their productivity through the use of innate experiences.
- One of the best things about complete DAS is that they encourage self-paced training. Employees can quickly learn at their own pace and gain access to innovative guided walkthroughs and training materials when they need them the most. This reduces the need for IT support tickets because employees are empowered to find the answers themselves quickly. The end result is a dramatic increase in productivity, better time management practices, and a healthier IT department that can spend its time building integrated platforms rather than focusing on individual problems.
- Digital adoption platforms employ data and analytics that allow you to immediately address barriers, obstacles, and blocks. One of the best use cases for this is the capacity to curtail unproductive behavior. DAS will enable managers to see where sales reps are getting stuck or underutilizing certain application features. Once the data has been analyzed, you can act fast to prevent the same mistakes from happening again by updating training materials or hosting one-to-one and team-specific training sessions.
Digital Adoption platforms For Enterprise Customers
It should come as no surprise that digital adoption platforms are extremely beneficial for enterprise businesses because of the sheer amount of training and onboarding that takes place at any one time. In recent years, customer support staff have been overloaded with an onslaught of new software users, each from a different background and with differing needs.
For example, companies with multinational offices in different countries could benefit from implementing a complete digital adoption solution and reduce the number of IT support tickets by providing in-app guidance available to all employees using a certain application or feature. A community group or internal forum could be set up to help users troubleshoot their problems and learn from the experience of their colleagues from around the world. This way, fewer IT support tickets will be registered, and employees will be empowered by finding platforms on their own.
Another reason why DAS are perfect for large enterprise organizations is that they are compatible with the existing technology that they use. Most big organizations already have to learn management systems (LMS), and existing knowledge bases, among other products and tools. It would be counterproductive to migrate their existing training modules over to an entirely new system.
In the digital age, there is a growing need for training platforms that integrate with multiple applications and offer enhanced customization. When choosing to implement a DAS, it’s important to consider all the different use cases and choose platforms built to endure the changing needs of your business over a given time frame.
The great thing about complete digital adoption platforms is that they can seamlessly integrate with existing technology, allowing a quick and easy transition and consolidation of new learning materials.
What Are Some Of The Basic Features You’d Expect To Find In A Digital Adoption Solution? A Software User’s Guide
A digital adoption solution will likely be one of the most significant costs your business will undertake to support its staff, training abilities, and long-term digital transformation efforts. As we mentioned earlier, there is no point in spending vast amounts of money on software applications that your employees don’t understand. If your employees don’t understand the benefits and intricacies that relate to the software they are equipped with, most won’t find a relevant use case, and the software will be left underutilized.
To help you get the most out of your digital adoption solution, we have put together a checklist that will help you make the right decision when choosing a software provider:
Contextual
It’s a given that employees will use varying types of applications to complete their daily tasks. Digital adoption platforms deliver high-quality, contextual, and automated training that is role, location, and task-specific. This personalized approach to learning has been proven to have a higher impact than traditional training methods because it puts the power back into the hands of users who feel like they’ve accomplished something on their own.
When learning takes place in a way that encourages employees to construct deeper meaning based on individual experiences, it enables better self-expression with more resounding precision and confidence. With DASs, professional development is put back into the hands of the individual, which helps businesses to focus on long-term strategic achievement of goals and KPIs.
Interactive
Learning how to use a new application can be difficult—especially when traditional training methods are used, which often involve classroom-based activities such as presentations and tests. The truth is that people tend to forget what they are taught in traditional environments and are much better suited to a personalized approach that uses digital innovations such as in-app guidance and structured digital training.
Employees can use a DAS to easily keep track of their training modules and revisit any units they are having trouble with at the click of a button. Analytics can further enhance employee training by providing managers with an in-depth analysis of pain points and by directing data-driven outcomes that support the specific, long-term needs of individual employees, teams, or groups of users.
Real-Time
Digital adoption platforms are the only way to provide real-time training that effortlessly guides users through problems exactly when they need it the most. This is a benefit that most organizations tend to underutilize when implementing their DAS. One of the most important things to remember here is that expecting your employees to remember every detail from a training session held months ago isn’t practical and makes for an unproductive and inefficient workforce.
The right DASs effortlessly allow managers to pinpoint where their employees are going wrong in real-time. There’s no point in scheduling a training session that takes place in three weeks when employees are suffering right now. The interactive guides incorporated within digital adoption platforms are available 24/7 to support the long-term needs of employees.
Simply ticking a box or answering a multiple-choice questionnaire isn’t enough to guarantee the ongoing development of your employees. Investing in a complete DAS solution also limits further training requirements because training modules are regularly updated to support the latest features or newest applications, all at the same price.
Progressive
Not everyone learns in the same way. There are seven different types of learning styles that engage people in different ways. These include auditory, visual, verbal, logical, and physical. Depending on the different learning styles of your employees, you can customize your DAS to reflect their varying skill sets and needs.
The best digital adoption platforms provide a wealth of knowledge in different learning styles by allowing users to experience various in-app educational environments specifically designed to enhance learning. Studies have shown that people taught in settings that suit their specific learning needs are more likely to retain critical information.
Another study by Brain Rules revealed that visual learning (like that provided in DASs) is 65% more effective on average than verbal or auditory learning. DAS providers are aware of this and coordinate their in-app learning efforts to be as visually compelling as possible to get the best response from learners.
Autonomous
Hiring someone just to complete monotonous, burdensome processes is ill-advised in the digital age. It doesn’t create a lot of satisfaction for your employees, and more importantly, it can be done using the autonomous power of a DAS.
Digital adoption platforms can auto-execute repetitive daily tasks on behalf of the user or team they serve. This leads to higher productivity, increased efficiency, cost savings, better compliance, and reduced margins for error.
Autonomy leads to empowerment and gives employees better freedoms in their job roles. Technology such as DASs equips employees with the necessary tools to make the right decisions and promotes self-enablement.
DIGITAL ADOPTION PLATFORMS FROM 2012 UNTIL 2022
No digital adoption platform comparison would be complete without mentioning WalkMe.
KNOW THE FACTORS AFFECTING EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE
WalkMe Inc. was founded in 2011 by Raphael Sweary, Dan Adika, Eyal Cohen, and Yuval Shalom Ozanna.
In April 2012, they launched the product WalkMe — a revolutionary piece of software designed to assist technology users with helpful information exactly when needed. It was the world’s first Digital Adoption Platform (DAP).
It was born from the idea that technology should be an enabler, not a hindrance. However, increasingly, technology users were becoming frustrated and demoralized by the complexities and frequent changes occurring in the digital space.
Market revenue for enterprise applications has grown from 166 billion US dollars in 2011 to 206 billion US dollars in 2019.
Smartphone penetration has grown. The number of connected devices on the Internet of Things has grown. And technology usage overall in the corporate and consumer world has increased.
But people’s capacity to learn how to use and become efficient at using technology has not grown at the same rate.
Suddenly, technology became a problem, a source of frustration, and for some, it was a reason to switch off and never return.
Of course, it wasn’t actually the technology that was the issue. It was the user experience (UX).
With new technology, updates, and upgrades came changes — to the navigation, functionality, and workflow. People weren’t able to use technology effectively or efficiently.
This was particularly troubling in the enterprise world, where organizations increasingly relied on digital tools and processes to stay ahead of the competition.
Then the Digital Adoption Platform came along. WalkMe pioneered the DAP, introducing it to more and more enterprises, enabling them to experience the benefits to both customer satisfaction and employee productivity.
WalkMe was the first. They paved the way for enterprise customers to perform their own Digital Adoption Platform comparisons as more and more challengers to WalkMe’s DAP came onto the market.
In fact, this was a great thing because the concept of “digital adoption” — defined by WalkMe as “achieving a state in which users gain the ability to use digital tools as they are intended and to the fullest extent” — gathered sufficient momentum to inspire the recognition of DAS as a category of technology by Gartner in 2019.
DIGITAL ADOPTION PLATFORMS AFTER GARTNER’S DAS REPORT
On 21 May 2019, Gartner released a report entitled, Increase Sales Productivity With Digital Adoption platforms. In the report, WalkMe, the creator of the Digital Adoption Platform, was recognized as a Digital Adoption platforms provider.
To understand why the DAS category was created, let’s look at the context of today’s work environment.
- Digital technology is progressing at a frightening pace. It’s getting increasingly difficult for companies to keep up. Investments in digital transformation are soaring in an attempt for businesses to modernize.
- McKinsey tells us that digital disruption impacts industry after industry, and organizations just can’t keep pace.
- Digital adoption is more important than ever. Organizations that fail to adopt digital technology fully will not survive. Think Blockbuster, HMV, et al.
- Continuous training is essential, expensive, yet ineffective. Given the rate of digital change today, traditional training methods don’t cut it. This has created a digital skills crisis on a global scale.
- User acquisition gets harder and harder, while customers become pickier about their experiences and more prone to “serial switching.”
Digital Adoption platforms, like WalkMe’s DAP, are the future of employee productivity and retention, customer acquisition and care, not to mention organizational agility and competitiveness.
The Future Of Business
To conclude this before and after the Digital Adoption Platform comparison, let’s reflect on the past and look to the future.
Over 2,000 enterprises across all industries already use WalkMe’s DAP. But the demand for such enterprise-class guidance, engagement, insights, and automation platforms to improve digital adoption will only increase.
The future of business is in AI, automation, robotics, and cloud computing. Employees and customers can expect more digital interactions in their daily lives, not less. And while this might seem overwhelming, the important thing to focus on is not the complexity or volume of the technology but the efficiency with which it’s used.
Boosting employee productivity and customer engagement is the key to businesses fully enjoying their digital assets. This has become evident in Gartner’s recognition of the DAS category.
It’s time to enter the 21st century — the century of digital adoption — by arming yourself with a Digital Adoption Platform to secure your future.
