Top 5 digital adoption strategies

Digital adoption has become a priority for every organization looking to capitalize on their digital transformation project. However, the majority of organizations are experiencing adoption challenges, impacting the value from their investment.

To support we’ve compiled the top 5 considerations you need for your digital adoption strategy.

But first, it’s essential to define what is meant by digital adoption.

“Digital adoption is the consideration of how well digitally powered processes are adopted.”

Andrew Barlow, VP Innovation and Advocacy, AppLearn

1. Don’t rely on software intuitiveness

Many organizations expect the software they’re purchasing to be so intuitive that it’s “just adopted”. We understand that vendors and SIs don’t help this misconception with some of the messaging they put across.

However, the fact remains, if you’re not prepared, you will face digital adoption issues.

IDC found in a recent study that 76% of digital adoption challenges were not related to the software.

What this tells us is that the broader focus during digital transformation needs to be placed on supporting the entire enterprise-wide change. Relying on software intuitiveness will only result in poor ROI as the majority of issues arise from other factors.

2. Determine who will be affected by the change

We find many practitioners are aware to some degree what their adoption issues will be. However, it seems this knowledge doesn’t find its way into a plan or activity to help specific stakeholders.

Different modules will have different impacts and it’s crucial that you understand how each employee will be affected.

Create a stakeholder list of all the different people your digital transformation will touch. These can be grouped into categories such as employees, managers, HR, administrators, recruiters, finance, etc. Once you have created a list of impacted stakeholders, you can understand the effect of your transition and prepare accordingly.

3. Create a sustainable plan

Once you have identified your adoption challenges and stakeholder assessment, you will need to manage these issues.

Organizations often rely on traditional communication and support approaches such as mass email, classroom training, and webinars, which ultimately fail. This is because they were most likely created to support static business change whereas modern SaaS technologies are now subject to frequent change.

As a result, your plan must accommodate not only for frequent system/feature changes but also future users. You must utilize a content distribution mechanism that is always easily accessible within the application.

Ask yourself the question, how will I onboard future users?

4. Budget for ongoing change management  

“Traditionally only 1% of a project budget is allocated to change management. To truly achieve digital transformation adoption this should be more like 7%.”

Nico Orie, Vice President HR Strategy and Operations, Coca-Cola

Another huge mistake organizations make is not budgeting correctly for digital adoption.

Change management is often viewed exclusively as a pre-go-live expense. However, as previously stated, ensuring sustainable adoption requires support for new hires and during software updates. As a result, if organizations want to continually capitalize on their investment, they must budget for ongoing change management.

You need to take a significant part of your change budget and allocate it to supporting continuous change; otherwise, the software will change, new people will join the organization, and during this time, support costs and tickets will skyrocket.

5. Utilize modern support tools

Many organizations try to rely on their SharePoint portal to share communication, training and support content. We’re yet to see anyone utilize this method successfully.

In many ways, this is a result of an instant gratification culture where people expect the right content to be delivered to us at the time we need it. Users don’t want to leave the application every time they need support.

You need to utilize modern support tools such as a Digital Adoption Platform to provide digital communications and support directly within the application. A Digital Adoption Platform ensures users have support at their point of need, increasing both digital adoption and ROI.