A digital adoption platform (DAP) is no-code software that integrates completely with applications in order to help the user learn the application. Digital adoption platforms use in-app guidance such as walkthroughs, task lists, smart tips, self-help menus, and more to guide the user through every aspect of an application. This empowers organizations to find true ROI of their internally-used software applications and digital transformation, onboard users and customers to their custom apps, understand how employees and users are adopting and engaging with applications, and create a more intuitive technology experience for their employees, customers, and users.
Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) are a type of digital adoption solution that integrates fully with enterprise applications. The software walks users through different parts of the application, offering step-by-step instructions to help them complete specific tasks.
DAPs also have self-help menus with links to articles, videos, and guided walk-throughs so that users can effectively learn every aspect of the application.
The role of a DAP is to facilitate digital adoption, either by customers or within a company. DAPs help people quickly and easily learn to use new technology by guiding them throughout the application and offering extensive resources to answer any questions. The software helps ensure that users won’t get stuck when trying to learn certain tasks in the platform and won’t overlook vital features.
Inappropriate software use and issues with onboarding and other user processes cause more than 91% of enterprise software errors. Digital adoption platforms help prevent user error in the application by walking people step-by-step through different processes and tasks.
DAPs also help increase end-user adoption. When you invest in new technology for your company or as part of your product, you want your customers and employees to use the technology to its fullest extent. DAPs show people each feature of the technology and how to use it, guiding them to their aha moment faster. This helps ensure that your company gets maximum value (and therefore maximum ROI) from the application.
One of the top benefits of digital adoption platforms is increasing end-user adoption rates. Dimensions UK, a British nonprofit, increased its three-month user-adoption rate from 10% to 50% using Whatfix’s DAP. Having a DAP helps ensure that everyone in your company is taking advantage of the new technology and that your customers see maximum value from tech investments in your product.
Other benefits of DAPs include:
There are three major types of digital adoption. A DAP can be used to drive adoption in the following ways:
Implement a DAP within your company to help onboard and train employees to use new technology, as well as provide on-demand support.
Create task lists and in-app guidance 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 where needed.
With Self-Help, employees always have an in-app knowledge base that allows them to search for and find all relevant documentation and answers to their questions – which pulls from a company’s intranet, Google Drive, and other contextual links.
For enterprise application software, first-year customer 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.
Similarly to customer adoption, apps and websites can utilize a DAP to create onboarding flows, in-app guidance, and support help for users of a product. This helps get users to their aha moment faster, drives overall adoption, and reduces application frustration.
There are many digital adoption platforms to choose from. For this list, we looked for the most highly rated DAPs and for ones that offered the widest selection of helpful features for business applications.
Here are some of the best digital adoption platforms:
This article provides an in-depth breakdown of the best digital adoption platforms.
Choosing a DAP that is specific to the needs of your organization can be a complicated task. The best method is to consider the potential features of a digital adoption platform and choose the platform that offers features that address your business’s core concerns.
To make this easier, we put together a list of features to consider when choosing a platform for your company:
DAPs core functions are their in-app guided content and learning experiences. DAPs provide organizations with the tools to create multiple types of guided content, including:
When choosing a DAP, be sure to check the various features included in their platforms to align their content creation capabilities with your in-app learning needs.
DAPs require various levels of content creation skills. Some require teams to know coding, while tools like Whatfix are a complete no-code content creation platform.
Once you create and publish the training content, you still might need to make updates on a regular basis. Your DAP should allow you to quickly update your existing content and release it to your users within as short a time frame as possible.
One of the most powerful features of digital adoption platforms is contextual self-help widgets that are embedded into your applications. This provides end-users with a repository of help content and support documentation, in the flow of work.
These self-help widgets integrate with your knowledge base, intranet, file storage system, and online links to provide users with a searchable self-help assistant to find answers and documentation to contextual application support questions.
DAPs provide various levels of employee and user behavior data by capturing how applications are being used, and how your in-app content is being consumed – without requiring engineers to create a technical user event tracking framework.
This empowers product managers to own product analytics, enabling them to track critical product adoption metrics, experiment and iterate with product improvements, and understand how users engage with their product.
This allows for teams to understand gaps in their learning content and improve onboarding and training.
Some DAPs like Whatfix automatically repurposes in-app content in various content formats, allowing employees and users to download and export the training content as PDF documentation, slide decks, and videos.
Some DAPs such as Whatfix provide organizations with the ability to capture employee feedback, customer feedback, and end-user feedback in real-time, embedded directly in applications. This includes gathering data and feedback from:
DAPs are enterprise-grade applications, which means they could be time-consuming and tedious in nature during implementation. It’s critical to research and select a DAP that offers implementation services and/or implementation through partners.
You’ll also need to confirm that the DAP you select will integrate with both your other learning software (ie. your LMS), as well as the enterprise applications and custom apps you want to deploy in-app content on.
When we talk about support, it is important to note that we mean all-round customer support. What this means is that you need to look for assistance that starts right from the time you consider purchasing a DAP to its implementation and throughout the customer lifecycle. Ideally, it should cover technical assistance, implementation support, and client success. Support in the broadest sense is making sure that your customer derives the full potential from your solution. It needs to be 24/7, interactive, and more importantly, immediate.
We would suggest that you look for customer reviews on multiple software listing sites such as Capterra, G2, TrustPilot etc. that speak about the support and customer service offered by a vendor.
More than just technical support, what you need is continuous guidance on the value derived by using the platform. A point of contact who understands your organizational setup, your goals with the platform and accordingly provides end-to-end assistance to your users to ensure that you hit the intended milestone.
Implement your digital adoption platform successfully and effectively by following these simple strategies:
Digital adoption platforms are invaluable for distributed or fully remote teams. Here are a few of the ways a DAP can help with remote work:
Learn more about how digital adoption platforms simplify remote work.
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Absolutely. Here are a few of our DAP comparison guides:
Whatfix supports both cloud and on-premise implementations.
For our cloud offering, you just need to install our Whatfix Editor extension on Chrome or Firefox and you are ready to get started. The user experience of our editor is so simple that you can create interactive guides easily, with no technical setup required.
We also offer full support on on-premise setups. Whatfix guides can be exported and deployed on your own web server with our on-premises export version.
Our customers use Whatfix for a variety of use cases, including:
Our customers range from SMBs, large enterprises, and Fortune 100 companies across verticals, including:
…and many more – all solving their digital adoption challenges by empowering their employees, customers, and end-users with Whatfix.
Whatfix is the DAP provider for 100+ Fortune 1,000 companies, including:
You can see how hundreds of global companies across industries are using Whatfix to drive technology adoption – including customer stories on Whatfix partners including Cardinal Health, Sentry Insurnace, ManpowerGroup, PlayOJO, and more – on our case studies section here.
You can read Whatfix reviews on G2, where we have 180+ reviews and have been named a Leader in the DAP category in 8 consecutive reports.
Request a demo to see how Whatfix empowers organizations to scale enterprise-wide changes, improve user productivity, and drive user adoption fast.