Enterprise software is seen as “mission-critical” for modern organizations, with entire operations built upon foundational applications like CRMs, ERPs, HCMs, etc.
However, we at Whatfix conducted research that found 33% of employees said they received less than an hour of training on the software they’re expected to use each day and that 78% of software users lacked the expertise in these tools to fully take advantage of their capabilities. We often see enterprise companies taking around six months to train employees on new software.
Ineffective technology usage leads to errors that risk your reputation, customer experience, and internal operations. Simply failing to follow correct procedures inflates process completion times, harms business outcomes, and reduces technology ROI.
In this article, we explore how companies can enable their technology users with in-app guidance to provide “just-in-time” training. By enabling employees with in-app guided experiences, software end-users can learn in the flow of work and receive contextual help embedded in their tasks, driving productivity and helping organizations realize true digital transformation ROI.
What Is Technology Enablement?
Technology enablement is how businesses use specific technology tools to boost operational efficiency and meet business outcomes. Organizations use these tools to amplify their team’s strengths and capabilities. Employees can optimize business processes for the highest output levels by investing in new technology – known as digital transformation – to eliminate manual work, analyze business trends and data, and accelerate decision-making.
In an article on Medium, Agamemnon Papazoglou — co-founder of the app MyJobNow — describes tech-enabled businesses as those “that leverage new technologies to offer better or (and) cheaper products for established market needs.”
He empowered his sales team with a technology stack comprising customer relationship management (CRM), help desk software, a data transformation platform, and machine learning models. Technology enablement often leads to the introduction and integration of new tools. Employee training is critical to help teams shorten the learning curve and quickly maximize the technology at their disposal. Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) are a significant asset to enablement initiatives because they give companies the speed, resources, and agility to bridge software proficiency gaps and build digital dexterity.
Technology Enablement vs. Digital Enablement
If technology enablement is about applying tools and digital solutions to business processes, then digital enablement is the strategy that makes this application happen.
Digital enablement refers to transforming business operations with a digital-first approach. Unlike technology enablement, which focuses on identifying and implementing specific tools, digital enablement involves seeking opportunities to derive new business value through technology adoption.
An article in the Harvard Business Review explains that successful digital transformation happens when companies focus on changing internal mindsets, cultures, and processes before deciding on digital tools. Simply put, you should get buy-in from stakeholders on digital enablement strategies before investing in technology enablement.
The Importance of Technology Enablement
Let’s dive into a real-world example showcasing the benefits of technology enablement.
Procurement software provider Marketboomer, typically conducted in-person training to help customers become proficient at using its platform. Even before COVID hit, they found that their training process was incredibly fragmented and drawn out — even with remote sessions conducted through online video conferences.
After the pandemic, they decided to use Whatfix’s digital adoption platform to enable their training process with self-service content delivered at high-impact points of the customer journey. Intuitive in-app support content—like guided workflows, task lists, and step-by-step instructions—was automatically triggered at moments of need. These resources were delivered continuously and without any dependencies, allowing the team to save 1,760 hours in elearning and 216 hours in offline training.
Marketboomer is an example of one of the many ways technology enablement lets companies scale processes to avoid unnecessarily high resource expenditure. Here are a few other benefits of technology enablement:
1. Accelerate time-to-value
Many business processes take a much longer time to complete because of inefficient planning and production along the way. Poor employee training, outdated documentation, delays in hand-off, and manual administrative work can hold projects back. Technology enablement helps companies automate repetitive operational tasks that have little to do with the actual outcomes of a project.
For example, the hours your customer support teams spend in online training courses don’t directly contribute to customer satisfaction and retention, so teams may not be as engaged and receptive during training. But by transforming training into automated self-serve workflows, teams get more hours back in their day to execute customer success strategies and accelerate time-to-value with digital tools.
2. Empower stronger decision-making
Technology enablement gives companies visibility into business data and trends that would have otherwise been impossible or incredibly difficult to obtain. Some processes simply can’t be analyzed at scale without the intervention of digital tools. Technology helps companies capture and interpret data from thousands of interactions in real-time.
You can see how users interact with different features and adopt new digital-first behavior, whether tracking customer adoption or measuring employee engagement. With software integrations, this data can be easily synchronized with other business platforms and even transformed into new formats for further analysis.
3. Drive industry-leading customer experiences
Your customers and employees alike value having user experiences that are clear, convenient, and agile. Technology enablement helps companies strive for flexibility, whether it’s through supporting multi-channel communication and feedback, personalized messaging, or even algorithms to predict and recommend content or features.
For instance, PlayOJO is a gaming company that used Whatfix to narrow down players that completed a specific guided product flow. They delivered a pop-up to these players with a survey link and collected 800 responses in under 48 hours. Driving this strong feedback loop is critical for businesses to iterate on their product strategy and boost customer loyalty.
4. Emphasize competitive differentiators
Companies that use technology effectively can execute exciting and innovative new strategies faster than others in the market. Through optimizations like automating manual work and hand-offs, increasing data visibility, and delivering personalization, your business has the upper hand in delivering true value for customers. You can delegate more time, cost, and talent to develop customer-centric initiatives and prevent customer churn.
It’s important to note that your product or service alone isn’t enough to guarantee growth and customer retention. In addition to high-quality solutions, you can stand out from the competition by delivering a technology-led user experience and customer support engine.
Stages of Technology Enablement
Digital enablement happens across the application lifecycle, and organizations must support technology end-users with contextual help at each stage to fully drive adoption and enable end-users.
1. Application implementation and end-user onboarding
As you implement your new software and migrate data from your old systems to your new ones, start introducing your team to end-user training materials and the changes they can expect. Let them get familiar with the latest tools they’ll be using before they’re expected to start using them.
This should be part of a larger onboarding strategy. Focus on easing your team into the new technology to prevent them from feeling overwhelmed or confused. A custom onboarding process based on job roles or other segments can make it easier to quickly bring team members up to speed.
Your user training should be contextual to the different roles and persona that will be tasked with using the application to achieve their responsibilities. For example, a CRM implementation plan should provide user training and onboarding to account executives, BDRs, customer service agents, customer success managers, and marketers – all contextual to their roles and how they will use it.
With a tool like Whatfix Mirror, L&D leaders can create replicate sandbox environments of their critical applications, tasks, and workflows. This provides a fully interactive, cloned application environment that allows employees to learn via hands-on training in a risk-free setting.
2. IT alignment and advocacy
New technology often means new processes, tasks, standards, and issues. It’s essential to designate the specific teams or roles responsible for overseeing each component of digital enablement implementation, onboarding, and ongoing management.
At this stage, you should also outline what internal teams, departments, or markets will have access to new data and stored information. Get clear on permissions, application governance, and responsibilities.
3. End-user training and support
Initial onboarding is just the start of bringing end-users up to speed on making the most of your new software. Ongoing training and end-user support help users stay on track, take advantage of new features, or find additional value in your product.
Use different user adoption strategies to create a holistic training and support experience, including:
- In-app guidance: Adding contextual tips or information with in-app guidance gives your users help exactly when they need it.
- On-demand support: Ensure your end-users can get personalized, self-help assistance.
- Documentation: Process documentation of internal processes and step-by-step instructions gives your employees something to refer back to if they encounter a problem, experience an issue, or forget what is expected. Document and share best practices to set your users up for success and get them started on the right foot.
- Self-service help: Give your users the ability to answer their own questions with an internal wiki, knowledge base, AI support tools, or other self-service options.
- In-person training: Hands-on, in-person training makes grasping complex topics or processes easier.
Learning is not linear. Your employees will require “just-in-time” training at various points in their application lifecycle. While they may master basic, routine tasks, they will need in-app guidance on complex workflows and contextual support when completing infrequently done tasks.
With a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix, organizations can enable their end-users in the flow of work with Self Help. Self Help provides contextual help directly inside your applications, integrating with your knowledge repositories like your LMS, end-user training, SOP documentation, procedures, policies, and more.
End-users can search for any issue they’re facing, are recommended help based on their location in the app and their user role, can prompt in-app tutorials to guide them through their tasks and processes and utilize Whatfix Self Help’s conversational AI to help find answers buried in your user documentation.
4. User adoption
End-user adoption happens when users realize the value of the tool or software they’re using — and it’s a crucial part of digital enablement.
Your users reach adoption when they start taking advantage of advanced features, integrating it with other tools in their tech stack, or viewing it as a “must-have” to do their jobs effectively.
Proper onboarding, training, and product integration eventually lead to technology adoption. Refine your training and support strategy to ensure your users’ needs are met improve adoption rates and reduce time to adoption.
5. User flow optimization
Modern organizations have potentially thousands of employees using internal applications, often with heavy customization. Examples include:
- A large sales organization using Salesforce.
- An insurance provider with hundreds of insurance agents managing claims and approving policies in an insurance application.
- An enterprise staffing company with hundreds of recruiting using Bullhorn ATS.
- A hospital network with its nurses, doctors, patients, and administration workers all using an EHR system.
These applications are mission-critical to each organization’s success. If processes aren’t followed, tasks aren’t completed, and data is entered incorrectly, these organizations are unable to achieve business outcomes, often because of a failure to maximize the ROI of these applications. While it may be because a lack of end-user enablement, it’s often because of fractured application workflows, complex tasks, and user friction that causes end-users to drop out of an application or take longer to complete a process.
Application owners should invest in a product analytics tool like Whatfix Product Analytics to track software usage, analyze end-user behavior, and identify areas of user friction. This data enables application owners with end-user engagement data to provide insights on how to optimize your application tasks and processes. With Whatfix Product Analytics, you can track any user event, allowing application owners to identify:
- What users, departments, teams, or roles are/aren’t using the platform.
- How frequently your users are engaging with the platform.
- What features are/aren’t being used or used correctly.
- What features are/aren’t being used correctly.
- Where users are experiencing friction in your processes that cause dropoffs.
- The optimal flows and journeys users should take when completing a workflows.
Application owners can use these insights to take a data-driven approach to UX improvements, gaps in application knowledge, new IT process documentation to create, and new in-app guidance to launch to better support end-users.
Challenges of Technical Enablement
Empowering your organization with technology enablement can be a long and complex process. From motivating stakeholder adoption to ensure technology accessibility and maintaining consistent procedures, many things can get in the way of impactful technology implementation.
By keeping the challenges below in mind during your planning process, you can equip your team with efficient solutions to overcome bottlenecks before they even happen.
1. Evolving software and technology landscape
Over the past decade, we’ve seen many emerging technologies disrupt how companies conduct business and develop solutions. Think cloud computing, virtual reality, machine learning, and the race we’re seeing today with companies creating features powered by the language production model, GPT-3.
You can’t afford to lag behind the new technology trends attracting customer engagement. By dedicating resources to technology enablement, companies can proactively identify and continuously map new technologies to existing gaps. Use this insight to inform decisions when selecting IT vendors or consultative partners you can work with to empower digital advocacy internally. You can also future-proof your workforce by introducing consistent on-demand technology training and learning opportunities.
2. Multi-generational workforce with varied technology experience
Our workforce now consists of five generations working together — and understandably, each generation has different levels of experience with technology. One-third of Generation Z employees expect their employers to provide them with modern technology in the workplace.
These employees and those from the Millennial generation have higher levels of digital literacy. They will also make up more than half of the US workforce by 2030.
There’s no running away from modern technologies, but that doesn’t mean employees less proficient with digital tools must be left behind. Companies need to adopt a flexible technology enablement strategy that is accessible and user-friendly for employees across all generations to address skills gaps with targeted reskilling programs.
Invest in employee training programs and resources that can be easily customized for the needs of different groups of users. Companies must also involve all leaders and managers to spearhead a culture that encourages knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and learning.
3. Contextual, role-based enablement
Learning the A to Z of a technology platform can be overwhelming, especially if it’s rich in features and capabilities. Not every little aspect of a tool may be relevant for all roles. For example, different teams often use Salesforce differently depending on how they leverage customer data in their strategic work. Your sales representatives may find little value in learning about actions and dashboards tailored toward retaining and upselling existing customers.
Contextual, role-based training and enablement lets organizations reduce training and ramp-up time. Each team and function should be able to focus on how technology empowers them in their roles instead of having to understand complex applications that have little impact on their KPIs. Role-based enablement means investing in training tools and content that can be customized to fit the needs of each function’s workflows, goals, and expectations.
4. Outdated training practices
If you’re implementing a new modern technology stack, your training practices must be also relevant and up-to-date with current digital trends. You won’t motivate employees to adopt tools if they have to sit through hours of in-person classes or digital training courses with no interactive elements.
Your training solutions should also be technology-enabled. Automated self-serve content, AI-powered help centers, training gamification, and virtual reality activities are some of the many ways you can tie your training to real-world technology applications. This makes it easier for your team to become more proficient and, importantly, excited to adopt new and improved workflows.
Technology Enablement Best Practices
Now, on to the fun part — what are a few tips to help you maintain and improve the impact of your technology enablement program?
1. Hire a technical and technology enablement manager
Your tech enablement managers are the ones that will lead the charge in getting your enablement program organized and ready for execution. This role may also be called a digital adoption manager.
Their responsibilities will include working with managers to identify opportunities for technology in different workflows, communicating the value of technology to employees, developing software implementation plans, and managing ongoing adoption and metrics. Having a point of accountability for tech enablement projects prevents tasks from getting deprioritized and pushed around to different stakeholders.
2. Create helpful how-to technical documentation
Your technical documentation is a single source of truth for all technology-related tutorials, standard operation procedures, and frequently asked questions. Content should be simple to read, enhanced with visual examples, and clearly organized by roles, departments, and use cases.
All documentation should also be centralized within a single cloud-based database. Not only does this make it easier for your team to access and share information on the fly, but it also simplifies updating user documentation to reflect new tools and processes. The last thing you want is to have your time lose time navigating a database full of outdated and uneditable PDFs.
3. Invest in a digital adoption platform
Digital adoption platforms integrate self-support training directly into the in-app experience. Companies can automatically surface tailored content at specific points of the user journey to nudge them toward the right next step, or to provide more context about an on-screen element.
Whatfix’s digital adoption platform shortens the technology curve through interactive learning like guided step-by-step workflows, beacons, and task lists. Its built-in analytics platform lets companies monitor and track user behavior for training optimization. Companies get added visibility into user friction and can deploy training content in-app to a specific subset of users at the right time.
4. Provide continuous education and on-demand support
Technology training shouldn’t end as soon as a user is onboarded. On the contrary, it should be dynamic and constantly evolving to reflect new changes within the tool and even opportunities to get more mileage out of its functionalities. Employees and customers will be more motivated to use technology if they’re equipped with the proficiency to guide others and advocate for software internally.
Open the door for them to learn new skills and improve existing ones through consistently available training resources. You can also do this by removing any dependencies in the training process through on-demand resources that users can explore independently, learning in the flow of work.
5. Monitor technology adoption with end-user analytics
The great news about technology enablement is that you don’t have to go in blind when measuring impact and identifying areas for improvement. You can track end-user analytics to see how customers or employees behave within a platform, whether through the number of actions completed, drop-off rates, customer satisfaction scores, or time spent on the platform.
Make it a priority to use these digital adoption metrics to analyze what users struggle with and how they typically maximize a platform’s core features. This helps you stay ahead of the game regarding ensuring ROI and preventing low adoption rates.
How DAPs Enable Technology Users
A digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix supports your digital enablement initiative at every stage by enabling employees and end-users with in-app guidance and self-help support.
Here’s how a tool like Whatfix can help you connect with users, onboard and train, and improve adoption rates:
1. Contextual user onboarding
A one-size-fits-all onboarding experience rarely works well for an entire company. Each role will have different needs and you want to avoid overwhelming your users with information they don’t need to know.
Contextual onboarding with a DAP gives your users a unique experience to learn exactly what they need to know when that information is most valuable to them. New information is displayed to users after they take a specific action, such as clicking a button or engaging with a feature.
Contextual onboarding includes:
- Product tours and new feature guidance
- Task lists
- Modal popups
2. In-app guidance
In-app guidance, such as interactive walkthroughs and self-help widgets, introduce users to software capabilities as the user engages with the platform. Users don’t need to switch screens, search for help, or attend in-person training to learn how to get the most out of a product.
Adding in-app guidance with a DAP enables your users to learn by doing. Your users will master your platform faster and reduce your number of support tickets. In-app guidance might include:
- Product tours
- Interactive walkthroughs
- Beacons, tooltips, alerts
- Field validation
3. Contextual in-app help
Traditional, one-off training isn’t sufficient for modern organizations that rely on enterprise software to achieve business outcomes. It requires organizations to support end-users with just-in-time training and contextual, on-demand support, at the moment of need.
With Self Help, enable end-users anywhere in your applications with a searchable help center that connects to your knowledge repositories. End-users are recommended contextual documentation and support depending on where they are in an application and their user role. Users can use Self Help’s search to find any specific issue they’re facing or documentation to a task they need help on, and can prompt in-app Flows that walk through through the process with step-by-step guidance.
4. In-app user feedback
To appropriately optimize your technology enablement strategy, you need feedback from your users. But it’s hard to collect user feedback when they’re expected to open new pages or engage via email or a separate platform.
In-app feedback reduces friction to gathering insights, increasing the chances your users will answer questions or share their opinion. Users can respond right on screen.
5. End-user analytics and event tracking
A DAP can also make it easy to collect indirect user feedback through its product analytics and user behavior event tracking. These deeper insights give you a better understanding of user behavior and engagements so you can improve digital enablement.
With a DAP, tracking and analytics can be done without complex coding. With a DAP, you can actively measure digital adoption and identify areas where your users need more support or what features they’re finding most beneficial so you can improve content. Track the steps in your processes that make the most significant impact and understand where end-users struggle. Use this data to create new in-app guidance and support content to enable your application end-users and drive technology ROI.
Whatfix supports end-user technology enablement end-to-end, helping you deliver more value to employees and customers with your new software and platforms. Create better onboarding processes, drive user adoption, and provide better user experiences — all while helping your company better prepare for the future of work.
Ready to learn more? Request your Whatfix demo today!
