Digital Adoption Platform: The Path To A User-Friendly Tomorrow

Technology

We are truly living in the 21st century since most of the businesses are being operated online through the means of websites, software, apps, and other tools. The majority of interaction between customers and businesses also happens through digital means like emails, social media, websites, or any customer support software. It’s not wrong to say that we are on the path to become truly digital.

Since software is being deployed for each and every task and function in the company, their complexity has become too complex. This has made it hard for companies to train their employees with the latest software every other day.

That’s where digital adoption platforms come into the picture. These platforms or software are deployed on top of other software to make it easier for organizations to onboard their employees and help them attain digital adoption for business success. On the other side, such platforms also help organizations to onboard their customers in case they are using a set of complex software and apps.

With the help of these platforms, organizations are able to realize the true potential of their software, apps, and tools and truly change the way different stakeholders interact with each other.

Considering the importance of digital adoption platforms in today’s world, we are going to explore every aspect of it in this article.

What Is A Digital Adoption Platform?

A digital adoption platform can be defined as a software that integrates with your other software, apps, and tools. The main function of a DAP is to help your users get acquainted with all your software, apps, and tools by walking them through these apps and tools with step-by-step guides to complete specific tasks.

Digital Adoption

For example, in the screenshot below, you can see a specific instruction in blue stating ‘Click on Settings’ with a detailed note suggesting that it’s step 2 of 5.

Apart from user walk-through guides, DAPs can also integrate self-help menus with links to your articles, walk-through videos, user manuals, and more. DAPs are created to help new members learn how to interact with new software, website, or app so they can quickly adapt to the necessary tools. They are also used to assist the returning users in case they get stuck or new functionalities are added.

DAPs essentially make learning new software and tools more impactful as the users are using them in real-time following the step-by-step instructions.

A digital adoption platform can be seen as an invisible cloak that overlays your company’s software and tools that eliminates all the road bumps for your employees, customers, and other stakeholders.

DAPs Creating Power Users

Digital adoption is not only about assisting users while they learn how to operate a software but it goes way beyond. It essentially empowers users by helping them explore the true potential of a software and then use the knowledge to transform the old way of doing things.

If your employees become the power users, then they become proactive and take initiatives to optimize current processes and operations. Whereas if your customers become the power users, then they can explore more use cases of your products and services which can open new customer segments for your business.

Digital Adoption – A Path Towards User-Friendly Tomorrow

A recent study by Forrester revealed that the companies that are investing in improving customer experience have 200% higher conversion rates.

Customer experience is one of the crucial differentiators in today’s digital age. Every exchange, every interaction between you and your customers accumulates into their experience as more and more shift to online purchases.

If you want to provide a seamless experience to your customers, then digital adoption is the way to go. In addition to introducing advanced tools, software, and analytics that makes your team’s job easier, digital adoption also transforms the mindset of digital-first.

Let’s explore how digital adoption is changing the businesses unforgettable create customer experiences:

- Better Understanding of Analytics – Even though many organizations have adopted robust analytics tools, most of them fall short at properly gathering, interpreting, and applying this analytical data in their strategies. With successful digital adoption, teams are properly trained and equipped to make the most of these analytical tools. As they explore different sets of customer data, the findings can help you create an experience that’s more customer-centric with better usability.

Behavioral Insights – Analytical data can predict customer needs, wants, and desires but it falls short on the behavioral insights – the why behind customers’ actions which can skew the interpretation. But by employing digital adoption throughout your business, you are able to collect behavioral datasets which can be turned into actionable insights.

Better Customer Support – Customer support and service plays a crucial role in the user experience scheme of things. If the customer support and service data is not collected, measured, and analyzed properly, then the chances of missing out on high-valued opportunities increase drastically. On the other hand, digital adoption enables your support and service teams to centralize customer data, keep it updated in real-time, and easily share it with the concerned teams. Using technology to its true potential makes everyone’s life easier – customers as well as your teams.

Personalization at Scale – Marketers don’t have the right tools and insights to execute personalization at scale. And personalization is kind of a big deal considering 88% of customers expect personalized experiences from businesses. Digital adoption is the solution to the personalization problem as it helps users explore tools properly and thereby equipping them with the right knowledge to use the tools to their true potential.

Benefits Of Digital Adoption Platforms

In addition to empowering all your stakeholders with the right training, digital adoption platforms are helping organizations improve their user-adoption rates. For example, using WhatFix, a digital adoption platform, a British nonprofit improved its three-month user adoption rate from 10% to 50%. That’s right – they were able to improve their user adoption rate by 4x just by employing a digital adoption platform.

Other Benefits Of Digital Adoption Platforms

DAPs help organizations decrease time spent in employee training and customer onboarding and thereby saving a lot of resources as well. They also don’t have to have a big separate team to help customers onboard – instead, they can employ a digital adoption platform and a small team that helps customers only when needed.
DAPs essentially eliminate the need for long, tedious training materials saving resources for the organization and making training more hands-on and engaging for the employees and customers.
Once you employ a digital adoption platform for your organization, you will experience fewer IT support tickets. A DAP comes equipped with various self-help options and the fact is that customers would rather go for a self-help option than email or call your team – a win-win!
Most importantly, a DAP provides invaluable insights into how your customers using your products or employees are using software and tools. Based on these insights, you can make necessary changes to your products, website, and apps which can directly improve your customer satisfaction levels.

Challenges Associated With Digital Adoption Platform

It’s true that a digital adoption platform can supercharge your business transformation process but if not done right, it can also slow down the process. This is why it’s important for any business to know the challenges associated with digital adoption and the ways to overcome them.

A Few Common Challenges Faced While Employing Digital Adoption

Resistance to Change: Whenever a major change is happening, it’s quite natural that people might resist it. Change is not the only constant, the human nature to resist change is also a constant.

To overcome this challenge, give your teams and other stakeholders enough time to digest the change. Give them detailed information about the digital adoption platform and the reason why it’s being employed in the system.

Communicate your vision to them for your organization and the part of the digital adoption platform in that vision.

Lack of Support: It’s quite possible that the person in charge of implementing digital adoption throughout your business might not be acquainted with the digital adoption platform. This is why it’s important to invest in a DAP that provides 24/7 support and quality informative material for everyone involved in the process to get acquainted with the platform.

Here are a few digital adoption platforms that provide impeccable support: Whatfix, Appcues, Apty, etc. You can also explore some Appcues competitors.

Too Many Applications: While the addition of a digital adoption platform is invaluable, it can become confusing and overwhelming for your stakeholders if you are using too many applications and software at the same time.

Remember, technology should be used to simplify processes and not add steps to the processes to make them complex. So, before investing in a digital adoption platform, make sure to declutter your technology and tool stack.

Digital Adoption For All Stakeholders

An organization works with multiple stakeholders like customers, employees, business partners, vendors, and other third parties. The interaction between these stakeholders and organizations happens across multiple touchpoints. These interactions usually have a level of friction and a certain amount of challenges that can be eliminated using a digital adoption platform.

Let’s explore how!

For Customers: Companies are adding digital channels and experiences to interact and connect with customers. While your internal people might be acquainted with these channels, tools, and software, your customers might not.

And if your tools, website, or apps are complex, then it becomes imperative to have a digital adoption platform that’ll educate and train your customers. This saves time for customers, builds trust between you and your customers, and makes it easier for your tools to become a part of their ecosystem.

For Employees: What’s the point of investing in enterprise-level solutions if your team isn’t able to leverage its full potential? A digital adoption platform enables you to create engaging training courses that are deployed inside the enterprise solutions to give your employees hands-on training.

These courses need to be created only once and can be used to onboard and upskill your employees as and when required. And more importantly, your employees won’t forget their training as they had engaging hands-on experience and also they can always opt to activate the step-by-step guides to get retrained whenever they want.

For Partners: Your vendors, resellers, suppliers, etc. also have a majority of stake in your business since they are the reason behind the quality of your products and services. So, it’s only natural that you’ll want them to be a part of your technology ecosystem and use your software and tools to interact and conduct business with you.

It’s quite possible that these parties are not well-accustomed to the world of software and tools which is why it becomes important to leverage the power of digital adoption platforms to make them a part of your ecosystem.

This makes it easier for them to do business with you, eliminates the need for redundant communication, and most importantly, enables you to create long-term relationships with them.

Is Digital Adoption Platform Right For My Business?

A Digital Adoption Platform is for every business regardless of its size, industry, and target segments. If your customers or employees or third parties need to access a certain website, application, web app, software, or any technology in general, then a digital adoption platform is right for your business.

DAPs are being used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-market enterprises as well as small organizations – the reason behind this is DAP’s completely customizable and versatile nature. They can be customized to fit each and every company’s specific needs.

So, the answer to this question would be yes. Yes, a digital adoption platform is right for your business.

Digital Adoption For The Future

Businesses are transforming, customers’ needs and behaviors are transforming, and so is the landscape of the majority of markets.

To be a future-proof business, you’ll need to step up your game and transform your business and get it digital-ready with a digital adoption platform.

Because digital adoption is the future.

Author Bio

Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.