Not all data is equal. Do you know how to measure the true business impact your digital transformation efforts and investments?

Meet Billy Smith. Billy’s 6 month ERP implementation just went live this month and a deep sigh of relief was in the air. 7,159 people just attended a training session in the past week and the project even came in on budget. Even the initial in-app CSAT survey scores are coming back positive. Billy reaches out for a celebratory glass of Moët when a catastrophic realization bubbles up amidst the celebration. Billy has no idea whether the project actually worked. It turns out, Billy is the latest victim of vanity metrics.

What are vanity metrics?

Vanity metrics exist in plain sight – buried in reports, dashboards and even OKRs. Look closely, and you’ll be able to identify the tell-tale signs, the gorgeous looking metric highlighted in bold, may not be that good looking after all.

Vanity metrics aren’t actionable 

The heart of data-driven teams is the understanding that if something can’t be measured, it can’t be affected. The days of running blind off of gut feelings should be as far behind us as faxing sales contracts and cashing checks. 

Whether you’re building WalkMe solutions, or sending an action-oriented email, we can all take a page of marketing optimization wisdom by thinking about a call to action (or CTA.) v   Pop quiz – what metric would you use to optimize and report on? Well, it’s surely not the click – it’s the action. Measure that. If you’re measuring something else. It’s probably a vanity metric.

Vanity metrics look impressive, but might not be repeatable.

Is that dashboard that came pre-loaded in your ERP providing data around how many people logged into your system every month? Good – that information is super critical for understanding whether or not it’s being found and accessed, but it may not tell you whether or not you’ve had any impact on fulfillment times. Perhaps it’s a number that looks great, but if it’s not tied to the work your team is doing and iterating, it might not be the best metric to look at.

If you’re leading a Digital Adoption effort, you’ll want to dig into more than just the reporting you’re getting out of the box with your software, or that stale BI dashboard your team might still be using from 2020, and instead think about what you need to know about your in-platform user behavior to measure success.

The problem with how we measure digital transformation projects.

So what does this have to do with your digital transformation project? Well, if you’re working on one, go take a look at your latest status update. I’ll wait. It’s just us friends here… go ahead and give this article 5 stars if you’re tracking go-live date, SDLC milestones, or maybe training and enablement dates. 

Bravo! Well, here’s the thing, all of those data points are absolutely critical in measuring the project, but ask yourself if they’re providing any visibility into your actual transformation. If you’re scratching your head, let’s talk about how value was determined back when your mammoth project was a wee slide in your executive team’s planning off-site.

What organizations really want to do

This one is easy… drive growth and maximize revenue. That’s clear, but how it’s done usually falls into a few common categories.

• Reduce operating costs (improve margins)
• Improve employee satisfaction and engagement (increase productivity)
• Accelerate rate of distribution  (maximize earnings)
• Accelerate deal cycles (boost revenue)

That’s why projects that get funded at organizations large and small are often tied to the types of efficiencies that impact the company’s bottom line. The ability to move faster, more efficiently, and with greater satisfaction is the cornerstone of every digital transformation effort. So why do so many transformation projects end up measuring go-live dates and delivery costs?

It’s how we forecast risk and costs

The realization of intended benefits can’t be had if there’s no platform to dole out said benefits. As a result, it’s all hands on deck to get new software in place. This pushes a ton of focus on the service delivery teams and project management teams to ensure new software tools and platforms are ready on time. Attention shifts from benefits to risk, and teams concentrate on what they know best.

• Expected return versus project costs
• Platform and integration costs
• Training costs
• CSAT

What should we measure instead?

If we think about our friend Billy Smith, part of the reason they’re up at night is because they’re caught up in a risk mindset instead of a transformation mindset. So let’s help Billy sleep better on their next project so they can focus on real impact metrics instead of vanity metrics.

Go Live Date → Value Realization Period

System go-live is easy to measure. Did we push to production? Congrats! But that doesn’t inform whether the investments paid off. Identify the motivations behind the system in the first place. 

Is your goal to expedite contract signing in order to accelerate deal cycles? Measure that, and start to calculate how long it takes to see the value of the system you mapped out when you first purchased it. Measuring Value Realization Period, or time-to-value, will help ensure the Moët is twice as nice once you open it.

CSAT → Process Abandonment Rate

CSAT is an incredible metric used by almost every organization to measure whether the people that use your system are happy. The funny thing about CSAT is that while it looks like a quantitative measurement because it’s a number, CSAT is actually entirely subjective and therefore easy to measure, but difficult to replicate. More so, it’s less correlated to positive outcomes than ever before.

So instead, measure what your users are actually doing. Are they starting a fulfillment order and stopping midway? Are your sales people generating a proposal but getting confused along the way? This metric gives you a near real-time insight into how successful that shiny new platform is when it comes to driving outcomes so that you can provide help along the way when you need it – not when support tickets start piling up. 

Training Participation Rate → Process Initiation Rate

Oftentimes, companies may rely on time-consuming training, webinars, or the more advanced, in-app guidance. Teams will often measure how many people joined, engaged or RSVPd. This is a great way to measure the reach of your training, but it misses the mark when it comes to measuring whether people know what they need to do.

Instead, measure how your employees or customers are actually starting the process they’ve been trained on. Perhaps it’s step one of benefits enrollment, or using a macro in the contact center. Being able to quantify and measure process initiation rate is your signal into what’s working and what’s not.

Are you ready to look past that shiny vanity metric?

As you look ahead to your next transformation project, make sure to examine the data you’re using to validate your investments. Are you measuring outcomes that you have an effect on? Are you connecting those to repeatable and measurable business impact? If you are, you might just have what it takes to harvest the real promise of digital transformation in your organization. Good luck!

We surveyed 1,475 senior business leaders from global enterprises in 11 different industries on their digital adoption progress to understand their plans, strategies, and goals. 

What is The State of Digital Adoption 2022-2023 Report?

The second annual report of its kind, The State of Digital Adoption 2022-2023, gives us a peek into how enterprises are managing digital transformation initiatives, including where challenges and concerns are most prevalent. 

Check out the infographic for the statistics that reveal the digital adoption resources and processes enterprises currently have in place. Plus, explore their future digital adoption strategy and investment plans.

Why does digital adoption matter?

Digital adoption is the key to successful digital transformation, and digital transformation is vital to ensuring productive and effective organizations. In the aggregate, companies spend billions on digital assets to improve business outcomes. 

Global IT budgets now measure in the trillions of dollars aimed at driving businesses forward. Enterprises can’t afford to passively adopt new technologies, especially if hundreds or thousands of employees need to adopt the same system.

The cost of failure

Failed digital adoption can be incredibly costly to enterprises. In fact, we found that enterprises are wasting between 32-26% of their digital investments due to unmet KPIs and are losing up to $97M in failed digital adoption costs.

What do the findings mean for digital transformation efforts?

Our findings show that the core element preventing successful digital transformation is the human factor. Employees are overwhelmed with expanding and siloed tech stacks and enterprises are paying for it with broken and inefficient processes.  

The next step

Taking a user-centric approach to digital transformation helps ensure employee digital dexterity, allowing you to maximize ROI on your tech stack. Explore how your digital transformation efforts compare to those of leading global enterprises and how digital adoption can help you meet your organizational KPIs. 

Learn more. Download the full The State of Digital Adoption 2022-2023 report.

Today, I’m extremely excited to announce that the “Big 3” analyst firms, Gartner,  Forrester, and IDC are all now officially covering digital adoption platforms (DAP) as its own category. In the latest publication, 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms,* 14 out of the 40+ vendors in the DAP space today are recognized as Representative Vendors.

The report also estimates, ”By 2025, 70% of organizations will use digital adoption platforms across the entire tech stack to overcome insufficient application user experiences.”

We are truly at the tipping point for DAP.

This analyst coverage is just the latest evidence of what we and the brave early adopters that trusted us to solve their biggest technology adoption problems have known for years. 

User experiences matter for employees just as much as they matter for customers. Legacy approaches to driving technology adoption don’t work in the fragmented application landscapes that our employees live with every day. They expect more. They deserve more. And you’ll never realize the full potential of your technology investments without a new approach; without a digital adoption platform at your side. 

Coverage commitment by the largest analyst firms is monumental for the DAP space. It validates the courage of these early adopters, and gives the next wave of customers the confidence that DAP should be the standard for enterprise-wide technology deployments. And as the DAP market continues to expand, we will see more evaluative reports, such as the recent PEAK Matrix by Everest Group in which WalkMe was named the leading digital adoption platform for the third consecutive year.

Eleven years ago, we identified a challenge, took a concept we believed in, created a product, and told stories. Thousands of stories, to anyone who would listen. This was the critical education required as a category creator. And it has proven to be a critical part of becoming the market leader. 

Those countless conversations with prospects, partners, investors, customers, and industry analysts fed our innovation engine, allowing us to fine tune the value that WalkMe delivers to tens of millions of end-users every day via the industry’s first digital adoption platform, built to meet the scalability and sophistication demands of the enterprise. Today with users in more than 160 countries, WalkMe is trusted by 2,000 customers, including 80% of the Fortune 10. 

From time-to-proficiency (reduction in training and onboarding time), increased productivity hours and reduction in support calls, to improved NPS/user satisfaction scores, WalkMe is a strategic investment for today’s most forward-thinking organizations (see 50+ examples).

And it’s not just me – or WalkMe as a company – who thinks this; many of our customers have received accolades and industry recognition for their digital adoption programs’ impact on their organization (see Nestle, CHRISTUS Health, Colgate-Palmolive, ADP, Red Hat, AMN Health Services, WMG, GQR, and Sun Life).

With the publication of the latest Gartner Market Guide, we believe the DAP market is in the next phase of category creation: evolution. DAP’s potential is being realized within more and more organizations each day as we continue to work with leading enterprises to maximize the value in their technology investments.

With WalkMe as the engine leading the DAP revolution, the momentum is real. And there’s still a lot of room to get on this fast-moving train. 

Join us. 

*Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, Melissa Hilbert, Maria Marino, Stephen Emmott, 14 September 2022.

Disclaimer

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or is affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

The cross-industry need for digital transformation (DX)

According to our 2022-2023 State of Digital Adoption report, 67% of enterprises are under “incredible pressure” to accelerate digital transformation (DX).

What is DX? 

Simply put, digital transformation is the implementation of tech systems to maximize efficiency and productivity while delivering business value and driving innovation.  Further benefits include that it:

• Improves organizational efficiency
• Boosts employee productivity
• Limits costly human error
• Raises customer and employee satisfaction
• Increases cross-enterprise agility
• Provides access to valuable enterprise data
• Enables scalable training & onboarding

For detailed insight into DX, including its role in various industries, visit our glossary page here.

Enterprises that achieved digital transformation

When trying to make a change, it’s always helpful to review some examples of success stories. Here are three noteworthy digital transformations by major enterprises to gain inspiration from. Keep reading to learn how these companies did it. 

Comcast

Comcast innovated new products including voice-activated controls and a cloud-based video platform for watching TV. However, this didn’t result in the boost in customer satisfaction they expected. So, citing the “accelerated adoption of digital technologies brought on by the pandemic”, the $84-billion U.S media and communications company reorganized, putting product innovation and customer experience together. 

With this transformation, the company was able to create a highly personalized experience that uses machine learning to recommend content. Additionally, Comcast tracked the impact of their offerings through IT investments, customer care, technology usage, and accounting to ensure a smooth and cost-effective customer experience. 

This example shows how basing digital transformation on the customer experience lets companies understand and address all their touch-points and how they interact with their audiences—from the marketing campaigns they see, to the sales personnel and processes they encounter, and to where they first connect with a company.

Netflix

Where Blockbuster went wrong, Netflix went right. Netflix based their digital transformation strategy on the customer.

Netflix, who originally began with a business model based on direct mail, unlocked their superpower potential when they moved to a cloud-based, on-demand model. Even before that, with a focus on the customer experience, they deployed an online recommendation engine to help customers find shows they like based on their interests and tastes and let customers know which videos were out of stock—meaning they could avoid going to video rental stores altogether. 

In 2002, Netflix had 857K subscribers and $152.8M in revenue. In 2019, they had 151.5M subscribers and $15.794B in revenue. Their biggest competitor in 2002, Blockbuster, tried to protect its bottom line with tactics like late fees, but this ultimately garnered hostility, was disliked by customers, and the rest is history.

Nike

When Nike felt they were getting a bit dated and sluggish, they underwent a digital transformation. Nike transformed the company’s mindset, supply chain, and brand to better connect with its customers during the pandemic. 

The brand focused more on data analytics, updated their e-commerce strategy, developed stronger digital marketing campaigns, and amped their direct-to-customer sales. The brand took production capabilities in-house to allow for market agility and invested in robotics as well as 3D printing.

With this, Nike was able to open concept stores, create more membership opportunities, and improve the overall customer experience by using digital consumer data more effectively alongside an omni-channel approach. 

Nestlé

The largest public food company in the world, Nestlé underwent a major digital transformation in order to enable advancement and scaling within the enterprise. The strategy they followed was named ‘Vision2Life’, and its purpose was to:

1. Bring value to receivers of IT services
2. Main global synchronization while operating locally
3. Merging product management and business stakeholders
4. Made the IT department an innovator, not just a service provider

In Nestlé’s annual investor report, they stated that the changes were about creating business value driven by data and technology. Their goal? To create an exceptional customer experience through engagement and more efficient operations. The conglomerate strives to achieve this using future-forward technologies, including AI.  

In their words, Nestlé will achieve this by “creating channel-less ecosystems, advancing always-on analytics, expanding connected operations, and supporting sustainability”. 

Discover how Nestlé partnered with WalkMe to boost employee digital adoption and drive organizational transformation. 

Spotify

In order to provide superior customer value and scale internally, Swedish streaming platform 

Spotify shifted their focus to customer engagement metrics and their internal structure. Having seen success from expanding their offerings – from just music to adding podcasts, live audio, and audio books – the enterprise knew that further transformation couldn’t hurt. 

In the first phase of the plan, Spotify took their team structure back to the drawing board. 

Having reworked it entirely, they ended up with an organizational layout that created a culture that rewards creativity and experimentation. 

Each product within the Spotify ecosystem is owned by a team made up of individuals with varying expertises. This structure allows diverse skill sets to come together, resulting in exceptionally well-designed products that enhance user experience – the cornerstone of successful digital transformation. 

Sephora

In 2015, beauty store extraordinaire Sephora made a serious commitment to innovating when they turned one of their warehouses – previously a test site for retail stores – into a digital transformation hub. The hub was dedicated to developing digital solutions that would create seamless customer experiences across physical and online spaces. 

On top of their innovation lab, Sephora released a myriad of new offerings including:

1. The Pocket Contour app, which provides contouring tutorials based on users’ individual face shapes
2. Beacon-driven (IoT location-based broadcasting devices) notifications to provide on-time and personalized notifications to in-store customers
3. Sephora Flash for ultra-fast, free shipping
4. Virtual Artist app (2016), which uses augmented reality (AR) to let users try on makeup virtually before buying

In the digital space, Sephora added features such as AI-driven chatbots that enable users to book appointments and the ability to effortlessly find and buy makeup tested using Virtual Artist on the Sephora app and website.

The result of all of these introductions was a frictionless, personalized customer experience thanks to a true omni-channel experience.  

UPS

In a bid to improve customer experience, courier company UPS has designed a comprehensive digital transformation strategy. In fact, digital transformation is not new to the company. Having invested for decades in technology and IT infrastructure, UPS was able to maintain an incredible on-time delivery rate throughout the COVID-19 pandemic – even when industry rates dropped.

In 2018, it was announced that UPS would invest $20B into e-commerce. A large part of that sum has gone to data and analytics command centers featuring IoT sensors, cameras, and Network Planning Tools (NPTs). These technologies allow the company to track the whopping two million packages processed per day in their facilities. Additionally, UPS rolled out ‘ORION’ – “on-road integrated optimization and navigation”, a fleet telematics system using advanced algorithms to constantly optimize delivery routes based:

• Distance
• Fuel
• Time
• Environmental impact 

The result of all these initiatives? 90% of Americans are now experiencing a reduced delivery rate of 3 days or less and experience significantly less mixups. 

Key takeaways

What we have learned from how Comcast, Netflix, Nike, Nestle, Spotify, Sephora, and UPS achieved digital transformation is that a customer-centric approach is the key to success. Each of these enterprises strayed from the traditional business model that follows a typical ‘spray and pray’ approach – mass production and mass distribution. However, the other element shared by these companies’ digital transformation journeys is data. 

All seven enterprises highlighted provided their employees with copious amounts of customer data and implemented systems that improved their workflows. This goes to show that digital transformation begins when employees are empowered with systems and technologies that enable new levels of efficiency. Additionally, following the changes they made to their business models, each of these enterprises experienced significant data-fueled growth based on exceptional user experience. 

To learn how WalkMe helped our customers achieve successful digital transformation, explore our customer stories.