What Is Digital Adoption?
Digital adoption is the process of learning how to use new technology that enables you to take advantage of its full benefits and potential. In a business setting, digital adoption is achieved when an organization facilitates the widespread use of new technology by its employees or customers during implementation with contextually guided onboarding and training, as well as on-demand performance support.
Why to Prioritize Digital Adoption
Digital adoption ensures you get the most out of your technology investments. If customers use only part of your product, they don’t see its full value. Similarly, if employees use only bits and pieces of the software you purchase, your company will not see the improvements you intended.
This haphazard software usage stems from two problems – the proliferation of SaaS and custom apps, and the rise of shadow IT (aka unsanctioned apps.)
The longer companies remain in business, the more apps they use, resulting in poor software license management – among other IT and technology-related challenges.
To further complicate this, technology today is highly customized for their enterprise customers, depending on their industry, challenges, and intended outcomes they hope to achieve with a technology provider.
According to BetterCloud, new companies start out with 29 apps on average, and by the time they’re 3-6 years old, that number shoots up to 103.
In fact, organizations with over 1,000 employees use over 177 different SaaS apps and custom apps. Companies also often underestimate just how many apps they use because many apps are purchased by business units or individual employees.
Too many apps lead to app fatigue and redundancy. Plus, there’s no visibility on the ROI of unsanctioned apps. Employees must undergo upskill training to use the different apps constantly, which keeps them from doing actual work.
The internal chaos translates into poor customer experience. With data scattered across multiple apps, support agents can’t resolve queries quickly and efficiently to help users take full advantage of the platform.
In fact, a Bain & Company study found that only 8% of global companies ever achieve their targeted business outcomes from their digital technology investments. Gartner reported that only about 15% of planning organizations report a digital adoption rate above 75% in 2024.
Despite economic turbulence, Gartner’s forecast suggests that worldwide IT spending is predicted to grow to $5 trillion in 2024 — an increase of 8.6% from 2023. To justify that burgeoning budget, companies have to drive digital adoption simultaneously.
What's the benefits of a digital adoption strategy?
The most significant benefit of driving digital adoption for your employees and customers is maximizing ROI for new technology.
Companies typically invest in digital adoption in order to increase efficiency, reduce costs, or solve other business problems. For example, a bank might implement automated form-generation software to save valuable time.
The advantages your company gains from the digital adoption process will depend on the technology you implement. For example, adopting automation technology increases efficiency and frees employees for more strategic tasks.
Here’s a quick look at the most significant benefits of an enterprise digital adoption program:
- Maximizing digital transformation ROI and helping companies achieve business outcomes.
- Increasing overall internal efficiency and improving business-specific metrics and KPIs like process completion rates.
- Accelerating time-to-proficiency for new employees and during change projects.
- Enabling employees with guidance and performance support in the flow of work.
- Decreasing technology-related frustration for employees or customers
- Enabling customers and users with product-led onboarding experiences.
- Decreasing time to value for new customers by helping them reach their “aha” moment faster – reducing churn and driving account expansion.
- Decreasing the need for internal technical support teams, reducing support tickets, and empowering your employees to be technology experts.
What's the impact and risk association with poor digital adoption?
Enterprise software and technology have a high cost. A low digital adoption rate cuts into the ROI of these technologies through:
- Loss of productivity due to searching for performance support documentation and information.
- Procedural mistakes that result in a lack of compliance and inefficiency processes.
- Additional costs of re-training programs and poor overall training ROI.
- Lack of adoption or awareness of new product features or company services resulting in poor product knowledge across company’s marketing and sales teams.
- Failure to achieve ROI from enterprise transformation investments.
What are the challenges of digital adoption?
Organizations working to drive up digital adoption rates have to overcome many enterprise challenges, including:
- Overall noise for customers and employees, resulting in it being difficult to capture their attention.
- Lack of contextual customer onboarding and education for their use cases and intended outcomes.
- Poor customer support.
- Complex software.
- Overuse of software.
- Lack of change management strategy for employees
- Little emphasis on corporate learning and development strategy or employee performance support.
- Difficult to onboard new employees to complicated, poorly adopted software tools and digital processes.
The Role of Digital Adoption in Achieving Digital Transformation
Digital transformation refers to companies using and implementing new digital technologies to improve their customer experiences, internal processes, and overall services.
Examples may include adopting new cloud software for legacy application modernization, launching a new online self-service customer portal, or implementing new technology like an enterprise CRM or ERP system,.
While new software and digital processes can dramatically improve and innovate a company’s product and service offerings, organizations must create an implementation plan that enables end-users – whether that’s employees or customers – continuous, contextual training and on-demand support to use it correctly and effectively.
That is where a digital adoption strategy comes into play.
Digital adoption drives organizational change by empowering individual end-users – both employees and customers – to become expert technology users and embrace new digital processes and tools with contextual onboarding, training, and performance support.
REG’s L&D and IT team faced challenges training employees to its highly customized Salesforce CRM and JD Edwards ERP instances. New employees took upwards of six months to become proficient with the system, leading to frequent account errors and incorrect process usage. Existing users were failing to adapt to new processes and adopt new features.
Whatfix enabled REG to standardize its end-user training via contextual in-app guidance in the flow of work. With Whatfix, REG reduced its time-to-proficiency for its CRM and ERP by 50%, equally a 3-month faster onboarding time for new employees. It also reduced daily IT support tickets by 600% by deflecting issues with in-app support.
8 Digital Adoption Strategies to Enable Users
Even though companies recognize the need for digital enhancements, only 7% have fully implemented their digital transformations. Most companies that have implemented digital technologies have seen high failure rates. The answer is to prioritize and drive digital adoption at every stage in the implementation cycle.
Here are eight digital adoption strategies and tactics for CIOs, IT teams, L&D leaders, and application owners to drive end-user adoption and maximize technology ROI:
1. Identify and eliminate employee resistance to change
It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your new software tool is. If your employees don’t care about it or understand how it works, adoption won’t happen.
Gartner states that one of the most common hurdles in digital transformation is dealing with internal resistance to change. This means before you even think about buying a new software solution, you have to take the necessary steps to prepare your employees.
Here are some ways you can help your employees go through the process of change smoothly:
- Involve employees in the change planning and implementation project: Create a cross-functional change team with representation from teams that will be most impacted by the new technology. Encourage them to share what the most significant challenges and areas of friction are, and where they need support.
- Communicate to employees or customers before the change goes live: Sometimes leaders keep the discussion of industry updates at a management level, come up with solutions in silos, and then spring the news upon their employees without any preparation or proper education. To have any chance at a smooth transition, employees need to know what digital changes are happening in the business world, why they are happening, and how getting on board with these changes will make their jobs easier. Creating a culture of acceptance of change through preparation and education will create an atmosphere of excitement instead of fear.
- Provide role-based end-user training and on-demand performance support: New software programs can sometimes be intuitive, but they are also robust and full of features. It can be scary, especially for a staff that isn’t inherently tech-savvy, to try and navigate new software without proper training. When you implement your software, it’s important to remember this. Just like there have been updates in business technology, there have also been advancements in training methodology and technology. Now, there are software programs, including digital adoption platforms (DAP) like Whatfix, that are designed to train and support employees in the flow of work with in-app guidance and on-demand help. Successful digital transformation requires enterprises to implement new training approaches and software solutions that can keep up with the training demands of sophisticated business software.
2. Provide in-app training and hands-on learning
The 70-20-10 rule of learning states that 70% of learning and skill mastery comes from hands-on learning and real-life experiences, 20% from social interaction, and 10% from traditional training.
If you want employees to learn how to use new software, you need to provide on-screen and in-app guidance while they are using the tool. To drive advanced feature adoption, they need that exact on-screen, in-app, contextual walkthrough as they encounter new features.
With Whatfix DAP, organizations can use a no-code editor to create in-app guided training experiences like:
- Tours and Task Lists to onboard new employees or facilitate change adoption to accelerate time-to-proficiency.
- Flows to guide users through complex workflows.
- Smart Tips to support employees on infrequently done tasks, provide additional context or information, and nudge them to take a specific action.
- Pop-Ups to alert users of change, announce company news, drive adoption of new features or process updates, and more.
With Whatfix Mirror, create sandbox environments of your web apps and enterprise software to enable users with hands-on training that doesn’t risk live software usage,
3. Provide contextual and personalized training to each user
Not every employee at your company has the same levels of technological proficiency, the same learning styles, or the same role. If you’re a global company, you’ll also need to provide training in multiple languages. All of these factors make traditional training complicated.
Instead of a generic, in-class training where instructors present every employee with all the same information relevant to every job (and sometimes with a translator), employees need to be trained at the point of individual need, based on what functions (or role) they are performing in the app, what features (or in-app location) they are using, and what their individualized learning needs are (based on their search history, click behavior, demographic information, and device types), and in their native language.
With the help of solutions that provide personalized, interactive walkthroughs, different employees can access interactive guidance directly within the user interface, no matter what part of the app they are using, where geographically they are accessing the app, what time they are using the app, or what their job responsibility is.
4. Enable end-users with performance support in the flow of work
Learning isn’t linear. Knowledge will be forgotten, and employees will need to seek out additional support to relearn processes, especially those that are more complex or infrequently done.
With a DAP like Whatfix, enable employees and customers with Self Help, an in-app resource center that overlays your digital workplace, enterprise software, and web apps. Self Help integrates with your knowledge repositories, job aids, process documentation, training resources, video tutorials, and more, aggregating and curating them into your Self Help assitant.
Users can search for any contextual issue they’re facing and prompt in-app guided Flows to show them how to complete tasks or workflows.
5. Provide learners with content in multiple formats
When it comes to consuming large amounts of new information, learners also often have strong preferences for how they like to consume new content. Some learners prefer videos and SlideShare, while others may prefer In-App Easy Flows.
To cater to various learning preferences, especially if you have already developed this content, it’s smart to provide learners with as many formats to do initial and reinforcement learning via the following methods:
- In-app guidance like Flows, Tours, Smart Tips and Task Lists
- LMS training courses.
- Videos, webinars, and podcasts.
- External links to articles, reference guides, FAQs, process docs, support communities, PDFs, third-party resources.
- Powerpoints and slide decks.
A robust Digital Adoption Platform should also provide a comprehensive set of learning widgets such as Self Help, Tours, Task Lists, Flows, Smart Tips, and Beacons that highlight new information. Whatfix allows L&D teams to include training content in various widgets and formats.
6. Maximize engagement and adoption of pre-existing content
Additionally, many L&D teams and functional SMEs at enterprises have already developed strong training programs, but these training sessions may have little to no engagement. Low engagement rates are because this content is not accessible to the users inside the app at the moment of need.
With DAPs, trainers can expose this content to users within Whatfix widgets, increasing user views by up to 3X.
With the Whatfix no-code editor, IT teams, L&D teams, and application owners can take pre-developed, outside content—content that already exists in MS Word, Adobe Captivate, PDFs, Video Editors, an LMS or LEPS, sales enablement platforms, employee platforms, etc. and use those content modalities in Whatfix.
Also, once a learning manager authors in-App EasyFlows in Whatfix, these automatically get converted to LMS Course (SCORM and xAPI compliant), videos, PDFs, Hot URLs, article, and SlideShares. These Multi-Format content modalities are linked to the updates made to in-app Flows. Any time changes are made, these additional multi-format content gets automatically updated, reducing the burden to maintain the content manually.
7. Track user adoption, application usage, and process completion with analytics
A large part of ensuring digital adoption is solidifying a way for L&D teams to track user progress and measure your digital adoption level. This is especially important for large enterprises with hundreds of app users.
The only way to understand user progress is to track it in totality. Usage analytics will provide insights on what features are crystal clear and well consumed by your employees, and which features are underutilized or being avoided by them. When corporate training teams access this information, it’s easy to identify problems, improve training effectiveness, and boost user engagement.
Trainers can also track learners’ progress in real time, providing opportunities to understand what motivates users and find ways to incentivize them to keep learning and utilize the platform. Organizations should hire a digital adoption manager to own and manage an entire adoption strategy.
PRO TIP
Whatfix enables organizations to take a data-driven approach to digital adoption with Guidance Analytics, which comes standard with Whatfix DAP. It tracks and analyzes in-app content consumption and usage, allowing IT and L&D teams to understand who is engaging with in-app Flows, track Task List completion rates, and understand what Self Help queries are searched most commonly.
8. Keep employees updated on process changes, new features, and product updates
Software applications continually update and add new features to keep up with the fast-paced world of enterprise software. Vendors launch multiple product updates a year, often with new features. Enterprises typically have customized implementations and continuously update their internal applications to create better workflows.
This proves that training isn’t a one-and-done job, especially when it comes to learning software solutions that are always innovating. To keep your employees current on the software that you implement and subsequent updates, they need ongoing alerts and adequate support.
With the help of a DAP like Whatfix, training takes place within the software. This means that every new feature can be introduced with an in-app walkthrough that shows users how to utilize it. If you have a product update, you can create an in-app Pop-Up that alerts users to the change and prompts them to complete an in-app guided Flow that takes them step-by-step through the new process. Use Smart Tips and Beacons to provide additional context and support. to employees each time they work through a new task or updated workflow.
Examples of Digital Adoption
Digital adoption has far-reaching benefits that span multiple use cases for companies across industries. Below, we put together examples of successful digital adoption by top companies.
| Company | Industry | Digital Adoption Use Case | Brief Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| MarketBoomer | SaaS, Hospitality | Customer Onboarding | MarketBoomer transforms its outdated customer training and onboarding with a digital adoption platform, providing interactive guidance and on-demand support for its hospitality procurement software customers. |
| Vanquis Bank | Finance | Customer Communication & Support | Vanquis Bank adopted an automated system of calls and texts to remind customers of payments due. The bank’s digital adoption increased customer contact, with 60% less direct input from agents. |
| Sentry Insurance | Insurance | Employee Performance Support, Employee Onboarding, Customer Experience | Sentry Insurance uses a DAP to enable employees on its internal applications and end-user policyholders on its claims center with in-app guidance and contextual user support across its suite of digital investments. |
| The Home Depot | Retail | Employee training | Home Depot’s training system was outdated, and it needed a way for employees to learn while on the sales floor. To solve this, the company worked with Udemy and adopted a knowledge application that enabled employees to train while working. |
| Experian | Data and analytics | Sales | Experian adopted Salesforce for its global sales team and heavily customized the app to suit Experian’s business needs. The customization led to some adoption challenges, but Experian implemented Whatfix to drive digital adoption across sales teams. |
| REG | Energy | Employee Performance Support | REG reduced its time-to-proficiency for its employees across its enterprise CRM and ERP software with Whatfix’s in-app guidance and self-help user support. |
| Mayo Clinic | Health care | Data storage and analytics | Mayo Clinic partnered with Google to host its data and analytics in the cloud. This has enabled Mayo Clinic to store, organize, and access patient data from a single secure location. |
| AbleTo | Virtual Healthcare | Physician Onboarding & Support | AbleTo launched a new virtual platform for its mental health providers to offer on-demand virtual care to patients. With Whatfix, AbleTo was able to train, onboard, and support its vast network of doctors on how to best use its new online platform. |
The Biggest Digital Adoption Trends to Watch
We recently surveyed 1,100+ enterprise software users to understand how they’re being supported on new digital tools and processes, and to identify overall trends impacting digital adoption. According to our data, those seven digital adoption trends to be aware of include:
- Building inclusive software experiences
- Integrating applications with cross-application experiences
- Smart user segmentation
- Outcome-based adoption strategies
- Asynchronous learning and real-time user support
- Self-reliant software users
- Data-driven adoption strategies and end-user analytics
Drive Digital Adoption With Whatfix DAP
A digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix is designed to guide your employees or customers as they navigate through an application, provide on-demand support for continuous training, and analyze user behavior to improve product usage.
A DAP walks the user step-by-step through different sections of the application. Leveraging a DAP helps ensure a smooth and complete training and support process. In addition, digital adoption platforms have self-help features that allow users to find answers to their questions quickly without needing additional customer support. This saves time both for them and for your support team.
Whatfix incorporates modern enablement and learning practices to drive technology adoption and maximize digital transformation ROI with end-user training that is:
- In-app. All training occurs at the point of use, within the app, with guided experiences.
- In the flow of work: Enable users to learn by doing with hands-on, guided training and support experiences.
- Contextual. Whatfix allows you to personalize training messages with dynamic content for your entire range of users.
- Interactive. Employees learn by completing tasks and walkthroughs within the app.
- Real-time. Users get on-demand answers to questions based on their needs. L&D managers can also track user progress and performance in real-time.
- Data-driven: Track, analyze, and test in-app guidance, end-user training, and support experiences by taking an iterative, data-driven, continuous approach to digital adoption.
- Automation. Whatfix auto executes tasks, resulting in productivity gains.
Software clicks better with Whatfix's digital adoption platform
Enable your employees with in-app guidance, self-help support, process changes alerts, pop-ups for department announcements, and field validations to improve data accuracy.
Digital Adoption FAQs
What is a digital adoption manager?
A digital adoption manager acts as a single source of truth for the company’s digital adoption strategy. They are committed to maximizing adoption and ensuring the implementation and adoption process goes as smoothly as possible.
A digital adoption manager is responsible for making sure people in the company are using new technology to its full potential. A core goal of digital adoption managers is to secure buy-in from employees by educating them about the potential benefits of the new software – helping to reduce resistance to change.
These managers also organize an employee learning and development strategy, both for new hires and existing employees. They monitor software usage analytics and watch for problems. When they see issues in the training process, they address them right away and help get employees back on track to become an expert technology user.
What's the objective of digital adoption?
Digital adoption has 3 main objectives: to increase user productivity, improve UX, and optimize software.
What is a digital adoption strategy?
A digital adoption strategy helps you understand how you want to use technology in your company and how you want to interact with internal and external stakeholders. This strategy helps you create a plan to use new technology and integrate them into your current tech stack.
How does a digital adoption platform work?
A digital adoption platform or solution is software that sits on top of another product, app or site that helps guide users through key tasks and provides contextual information to help users navigate the platform.
What is a Digital Adoption Solution (DAS)?
Digital adoption solutions (DAS), officially recognized as a new category of software in a 2019 Gartner report, is another term for digital adoption platforms (DAPs) and is a way to improve end-user adoption rates. DAS platforms work within enterprise applications to help train employees or customers – directly in the app. DAS can be used across multiple products to provide a consistent user experience, making it easier for your team to adjust to newly implemented technology.
One particularly useful feature of digital adoption solutions is they provide contextual support – depending on the type of user, as well as where the user is within the application. DAS platforms provide in-app contextual guidance such as
- Interactive walkthroughs
- Product tours
- Task lists
- Tooltips and Beacons
- Embedded self-help widgets that are integrated with a company’s knowledge base that allows users to search for answers to FAQs and find process documentation on complex features.
A user’s guidance also differs depending on the user’s role, as well as their level of training and expertise.
Implement a DAS/DAP or other solution as soon as you acquire new technology. That way, your team can effectively and efficiently learn to use the new application right from the start.
How do you promote digital adoption?
Here are a few digital adoption strategies that can have a big impact:
- Address internal resistance to change with proper communication, support, and reskilling.
- Provide in-app guided onboarding and training.
- Provide contextual and personalized training to each user.
- Provide users with learning content in formats they prefer.
- Maximize engagement and adoption of pre-existing content.
- Ensure your employees stay updated on new tech.
Monitor user progress, usage insights, and motivation with product analytics.
What are the five stages of technology adoption?
Technology adoption has 5 stages, including:
- Innovators (those willing to take huge risks)
- Early adopters (trendsetters who are comfortable taking risks)
- Early majority (those who want proof of concepts)
- Late majority (those who want a data-driven reason)
- Laggards (wary of new technology)
What is the difference between digital adoption and technology adoption?
While digital adoption can be measured, technology adoption does not have any measurable criteria. The term digital adoption signals the adoption of new technology within an organization, whereas technology adoption refers to adopting new technology by the wider society.
Request a demo to see how Whatfix empowers organizations to scale enterprise-wide changes, improve user productivity, and drive digital adoption fast.