Why does it feel like your digital transformation is at a standstill?
Despite rising momentum in digital investments, your organization is barely moving forward. Like running on a treadmill, you’re no closer to executing your digital strategy.
Everyone can see that employee productivity hasn’t improved. Internal operations are slow and riddled with problems. The customer experience isn’t meeting current expectations.
These problems have challenged organizations for a while now, but no one could put their finger on the reason why.
Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. We’ve defined the problem, and leading global research and advisory firm Gartner has established a new category of technology — digital adoption solutions — intended to solve it.
Lack of digital adoption is keeping you stagnant
The reason so many organizations see their digital transformation efforts fail is because of a lack of digital adoption. This is a critical deficiency in the digital era — one that will severely cap your potential to improve internal operations as well as the customer experience.
Unless people can actually use technology as it is intended and with the full range of capabilities, it will be impossible to fully integrate it into the workflow. Not only that, but digital tools will become a barrier to productivity and innovation instead of an enabler.
Without digital adoption, there is no digital transformation success (or progress, for that matter).
Instead, you’ll keep running in place.
Why has this issue gone undetermined for so long?
Digital adoption is an obvious lynchpin for digital transformation. After all, if your users literally can’t use your technology, there’s no way you can achieve any ROI or fulfill your digital strategy.
But, when you’re in the throes of planning, it’s easy to overlook the factors that ultimately contribute to (or prevent) digital adoption.
First, you identify a need to boost your digital arsenal. You create a digital strategy and incorporate it into the business model. You choose cutting-edge technology to make it happen, then dive into implementation.
But then…
Few employees actually use the technology, and the ones that do stick to a small range of elementary features.
Complex business processes lead many to drop off before they even complete a task.
Demand for IT support becomes unmanageable.
User frustration and stress cause a serious blow to employee morale.
The tools that were supposed to lift employee productivity to new heights are becoming barriers to completing everyday work.
Lack of digital adoption is to blame for all of these issues, it’s just hard to pinpoint amid broad digital change. But with a clear definition, we have a common language with which to understand the problem.
A Digital Adoption Solution is the missing link
The builders of WalkMe understood the impact of digital adoption years ago. As more and more organizations arrive at the same realization, the demand for a solution is rising.
What does a digital adoption solution do?
A digital adoption solution is a tool that addresses all of the factors that prevent users from adopting technology, such as inadequate training, complex user interfaces, frequent updates from the cloud, and many more.
This breed of software guides users through business processes on any type of enterprise platform, app, or website, enabling even first-time users to complete any task efficiently.
It’s on-screen, real-time guidance eliminates the need to invest in lengthy (and ineffective) traditional modes of training, and also ensures users always have access to support, even if they forget how to do something.
Digital adoption solutions are invaluable to any digital growth initiative. They save organizations time and money with greater productivity and faster user time-to-competency, provide analytics to enable continuous improvement of the user journey, and strengthen both the employee and customer experience.
WalkMe’s DAP: Leader of the pack
While digital adoption solutions are just recently recognized as an official category of technology, WalkMe has been building and refining it’s Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) for nearly a decade.
Here’s what the pioneer of digital adoption solutions does.
Provide training that actually works
The truth is, traditional methods of training are not equipped to prepare employees for the modern digital workplace. Classroom learning sessions, webinars, or training manuals are time-consuming, take employees away from their work, and lead to poor knowledge retention.
Instead, digital solutions that enable contextual learning allow employees to get up to speed instantly. The DAP ensures all users, regardless of prior experience on a given software, can easily navigate and use the full range of features.
By analyzing a broad range of contextual factors (such as a user’s position, the task at hand, prior user behavior, the goals of the department, etc.) the DAP provides proactive guidance and literally walks the user through any process, step-by-step.
This completely eliminates the need for traditional training. Instead, users “learn in the flow of work” and are able to be productive from the very first time they use a software or app.
Optimize any business process
Many organizations are completely unaware of the toll time-consuming and complex digital processes impose. When key business processes aren’t user-friendly, productivity, accuracy, and efficiency are all at risk.
According to one of our studies, if business processes require too many steps or take too long, employees are likely to “drop off” or quit in the middle. This means people are either not finishing their tasks or they are finding an unsanctioned workaround.
The study found that if a digital business process takes more than two minutes, 50% of users will drop off. And only processes that have five or fewer steps have a 70% success rate. Anything more than that will drive users to quit.
The DAP empowers you to optimize any digital process with automation. Among WalkMe customers who used business process automation, the process completion rate was 81%, compares to 49% for those that didn’t use automation.
Provide a superior customer experience
The DAP empowers you to provide an enhanced customer experience via two main avenues.
The first opportunity is by integrating the solution on consumer-facing platforms. For example, if a consumer visits a retail website with the intention of buying something, on-screen navigational guidance will ensure he or she can find exactly what they’re looking for in the least possible steps. It fulfills consumers’ desire for access to information, expediency, and a seamless experience.
The second way the DAP can improve CX is by empowering employees to better serve customers. If employees are burdened by complex software that is difficult to use and interferes with customer interactions, there’s no way they can provide an engaging experience.
By making employees’ lives easier, taking over mundane tasks via automation, and ensuring accuracy, the DAP increases employee efficiency and gives them the power to provide the best possible experience.
Find your missing link
It’s easy to get on the track to digital transformation success when you can identify exactly what has been holding you back.
Without digital adoption, there is no way to fulfill your digital strategy. The establishment of the new category reconfirms what we already know is an essential truth in the digital era: human users need real-time, personalized support in order to exploit the full potential of technology.
