What is a Digital Adoption Platform?

How to Leverage a DAP to Increase Software Adoption

Different types of digital adoption platforms fall under two overarching use cases: digital adoption within your company, and customers’ adoption of your product.

• Using a DAP within the company:  Implement a DAP within your company to help onboard and train employees to use new technology. Create task lists and microlearning plans to keep employees on track and ensure that they learn the most essential features for their work. Monitor user analytics to see whether employees are getting stuck, and create additional walk-throughs or self-help articles, if needed.
• Using a DAP with customers:  For enterprise application software, first-year adoption rates are often just 30-40%. Leveraging a DAP can help prevent customer frustration. Integrate the DAP with your knowledge base so customers have access to self-help materials and can find answers to their questions without waiting for support tickets. Check analytics regularly. This will help you find out where customers are having trouble so you can add to the knowledge base or set up alerts to guide users to relevant self-help materials.

Digital Adoption Platforms for Enterprises

Enterprise businesses need digital adoption platforms to reduce the workload on customer support staff and ensure that employees fully embrace any internally adopted technology. To achieve this, a DAP built for enterprises must work within high-volume, multifeature applications.

Whatfix, for example, is engineered to increase adoption for multiple enterprise software solutions, including Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow. Whatfix’s DAP can handle the volumes of users and the numerous use cases that enterprise-scale software serves.

Digital Adoption Everywhere

Enterprises often have multiple interrelated applications, each of which has a variety of features. Enterprise software users need a way to find relevant self-help materials wherever they are. Digital adoption platforms like Whatfix address this problem by employing “digital adoption everywhere.”

“Adoption everywhere” means users can access learning materials from anywhere in the application. The DAP will surface walk-throughs, articles, and videos directly relevant to the user’s role and where they are in the application. This saves the user from having to search through unrelated sections of the knowledge base to find help.

In addition, when you create content with Whatfix, the software automatically generates the content in multiple formats, including articles, slideshows, and walk-throughs. Employees or customers can easily access self-help materials wherever they are, in the form that is easiest for them.

The Impact of Low Digital Adoption on TCO for Enterprise Software

Though the impacts of low digital adoption rates can be hard to calculate, low adoption has significant negative effects on the total cost of ownership (TCO) for enterprise software. TCO includes direct costs, such as hardware and monthly payments for the software. It also covers indirect costs, such as the time and personnel needed to train employees.

Low adoption rates lead to an increased cost of ownership as a result of the following:

• Increased retraining costs after initial adoption fails
• Cost of developing features that remain unused
• Higher workload for customer support staff
• Low ROI for technology that would increase efficiency and reduce operational costs
• Lost productivity from the employee trying to learn the new technology
• Lost productivity from managers and other employees offering support and training

Implementing a digital adoption platform can help mitigate these impacts and decrease the total cost of ownership.

Strategies to Implement a DAP

Implement your digital adoption platform successfully and effectively by following these simple strategies:

• Educate employees about the adoption.  Talk to employees about the new technology you are adopting and the digital adoption platform you’ll use. Educate them on the benefits of a DAP and the increased access to self-help materials that it will provide.
• Integrate your existing knowledge base.  Save time on content creation by integrating your current articles into the digital adoption platform. The DAP can then access these materials and surface them in-app, where it is relevant for the user.
• Monitor user analytics.  Watch how employees are using the DAP, and see where in the application they are still struggling. Use this information to create additional content and help streamline the onboarding and training processes for other users.
• Ask for feedback.  Use in-app surveys to see what employees think of the digital adoption platform and how you can improve it. Ask whether there are features or topics where employees would like to see more training content.

The Role of a Digital Adoption Manager in the Successful Implementation of a DAP

One other key strategy for implementing a DAP is to designate a digital adoption manager. This role oversees the implementation of new technology within the company and ensures that the process goes smoothly. This includes oversight of a digital adoption platform.

A digital adoption manager serves as a single point of contact for employees during the transition. The manager would explain the platform and collect user analytics and feedback to make recommendations to upper management. A digital adoption manager helps with the successful implementation of a DAP and ensures that regular updates are made to training materials to continually improve training.