The ultimate guide

to digital adoption

Digital adoption is a foundational part of having an effective workforce and successful software investments. After all, if nobody is using the applications you’re paying for, never mind using them well, you won’t get the benefit of the software—no matter how hard you try.

Despite this, awareness and understanding of digital adoption isn’t where it should be, even if it is growing. 

According to Forrester’s New Tech Digital Adoption Platforms report, venture capital (VC) investments in DAPs grew nearly sixfold, from $76 million to $470 million despite the pandemic. The DAP market also grew by around 50% during this time as documented by Everest in their Digital Adoption Platform State of the Market report. Moreover, the study predicts further growth of up between 40-50% over the next few years. By 2025, Gartner predict in their Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, that 70% of organizations will use digital adoption platforms across the entire technology stack to overcome still insufficient application user experiences. 

However you look at it, organizations are beginning to understand the importance of digital adoption as a solution to providing agility, consistency and resilience across their key applications.

This guide is designed to define the space and show you how digital adoption can boost any application, process or goal—ultimately leading to a thriving and successful digital workplace. We know this because we’ve helped many global businesses reduce user frustration, ‘tier 1’ support tickets, rework and inefficiencies across their technology stacks in record time.

There’s a lot to cover, but we’ve kept this as jargon-free and straightforward as possible. Each of the chapters contains subsections and links to further reading, but by the end of this guide you’ll be ready to drive software success in your business. 

Chapters

1. Digital adoption basics
2. How to find digital adoption challenges
3. How to improve digital adoption
4. How to measure digital adoption
5. How to prioritize digital adoption
6. Conclusion

Digital adoption basics

What is digital adoption?

In its simplest form, digital adoption is about helping people to use and embrace technology. It’s about making sure the software you’ve invested in is working hard and delivering the value you thought it would. 

Typically used in relation to business applications, this definition can be expanded to include internal teams, external customers or entire companies. But whether used on a personal or organizational level, digital adoption efforts will always be focused on improving the engagement, experience and effectiveness of digital tools and workflows. 

It is a common misconception for digital adoption to be linked to measurements like the number of users accessing a system or for it to be seen as a one-off achievement. However, digital adoption is not concerned only with the availability or apparent usage of technology. Instead, digital adoption is about making sure every employee interaction with corporate technology is as efficient and as high quality as possible. In other words, ensuring the technology delivers the maximum possible value to the employee and to the business. 

A focus on the employee and building your digital adoption strategy around them is incredibly important – non-negotiable in fact. Employees are people. People learn, develop, and interact with software in diverse ways. And so, it is imperative that software experiences reflect this to create unique workflows that accommodate these diverse needs and preferences. It is not a one-size fits all solution, the way employees interact with software needs to be tailored to them to maximize engagement and output. 

By placing your employees at the center of your digital adoption strategy, you ensure business applications are used well and in an efficient way, and that they are achieving the expected outcomes. 

Strong digital adoption across an organization not only enables and maintains the original business case for an app, but provides measurable benefits, from improved productivity and satisfaction to reduced support costs and time to value. 

However, for enterprise software to deliver its intended business value, it must be fully adopted by the people using it. To us, this comes down to achieving a combination of participation, speed and data quality. 

In terms of participation, this means ensuring all users are engaging with the software and completing the required transactions. Speed means not only that users are completing transactions quickly, but not having to waste time seeking support when it’s needed. Finally, data quality is about accurate user inputs as well as the resulting business intelligence that enables good decision making. 

While the use of a digital adoption platform (more on this later) like AppLearn’s is necessary to make sure of and measure success, digital adoption is ultimately a people problem and, like people, it should be supported inside and outside of technology. 

We have touched on this briefly already, but for a digital adoption strategy to be effective, you must put your people in the center. 

Return on employee (ROE) is fast becoming a c-level priority. It is very relevant here. The concept of ROE goes beyond improving culture or adding new benefits. Organizations with digital adoption strategies that actively improve the way employees are interacting with software, will win the war for talent. 

Before we dig deeper into why digital adoption is important, we should clear up how it overlaps with related but distinct disciplines. If you already appreciate why this matters, you can skip ahead for an introduction to digital adoption platforms or to learn an effective digital adoption strategy you can apply to your organization. 

Is digital adoption different to product onboarding?

It is not uncommon for onboarding to be considered the start and end of digital adoption, but this is a big mistake. 

In its simplest form, product onboarding is about helping a new user to get familiar with a new product. While this is clearly linked to digital adoption, it is only a single piece of a bigger picture. 

Onboarding is typically broken down into one-time processes, a chain of information and instructions designed to introduce first-time users to a new product or feature and how they can use it. 

However effective an onboarding process is, it is often an early-days, one-time event. While new onboarding can be delivered every time software updates or when users appear to be forgetting what they were taught, it is typically used as a plaster rather than a root issue fix. 

In contrast to this, digital adoption should always be a continual, strategic consideration. While users who are onboarded well are more likely to understand a product, adopt it and use it effectively in the short-term, there is much more to digital adoption than onboarding. 

The shift towards hybrid and remote working—accelerated by Covid-19—brings with it new technologies, processes and ways of communicating. And as more and more people need to collaborate and manage business functions remotely, businesses are having to adapt to support this new way of working and think beyond software onboarding. 

Face-to-face, instructor-led training simply does not work anymore for businesses that have transitioned to hybrid or fully remote working. Asynchronous learning has become the new ‘norm’ when helping employees navigate and get to grips with software. This is something businesses need to consider, and not just at the onboarding stage. 

While product onboarding focuses on initial information share, digital adoption drills into improving the ongoing digital employee experience (DEX). It is a constant, ongoing concern, not just for new users or products. 

Is digital adoption the same as change management?

Despite some overlap, change management and digital adoption are not the same thing. 

At a high level, change management can be broken down into two different types. The first is concerned with managing change across a business and the second is related to computer systems. It’s the first of these that is sometimes confused with digital adoption, and it is easy to see why. 

This type of change management tends to focus on ensuring change initiatives involving new processes or products connect with the workforce and get the expected results. While digital adoption should support the aims and sentiment of change management, it is more focused on helping users and organizations to get the most out of products and applications. And with the growing shift towards a digital workplace, digital adoption is now more wide-spread across organizations than ever. 

That’s not to say people aren’t a priority for digital adoption. It’s quite the opposite. The whole point of it is to help users embrace technology and use it effectively, it just approaches things differently. Placing employees at the center of your digital adoption strategy and considering their needs helps businesses transform a simple—and usually not very well thought out user experience—into a human experience; which has a hugely positive impact on the way people interact with technology. 

Another key difference from change management is that digital adoption is not just concerned with new products, but the continuous improvement of existing applications and long-term digital workplace success. It is a continual consideration, not just linked to change. 

By identifying friction, inefficiencies and wasted time within applications then intervening to remove these at the source via in-app interventions using a digital adoption platform, digital adoption looks to improve user experiences and efficiency, rather than managing the transition itself. 

If change management is concerned with how change is handled within organizations, digital adoption is concerned with how employees interact with software to get maximum output. Considering employee needs and ensuring you humanize the experience with software makes all the difference in delivering long-term application success. 

Why is digital adoption important?

In short, having a digital adoption strategy is the only way to make sure you’re getting the maximum value out of business applications. You need to know this to avoid paying for software that nobody is using, or at least using well. 

There’s also an economic point to make here. If you can guarantee anything, it is that things will always change; and when it comes to the economy, this is especially prevalent. In tougher economic climates, businesses are often asked to identify cost saving opportunities. Through driving digital adoption, businesses can ensure that their employees are using applications effectively, which in turn creates time savings and boosts productivity. 

Many business leaders and application owners make this mistake because they’re bought into a solution or the benefits it promises, but don’t consider digital adoption—sometimes even assuming that new tech will just be adopted. 

We know this because companies spend billions every year on software. $793bn to be precise.

That’s a lot of money, and the expectation is that software will deliver value worth more to the business than its cost. However, many of these projects fail to deliver the value the company set out to realize. Various academic research puts the failure rate of transformation projects at roughly 70%. In other words, most businesses have made software investments that haven’t delivered the value they thought it would. That’s a shockingly big number.  

Independent digital adoption research into the in-application behavior of 1 million users revealed that on average 58% of employees are now using more applications than they were pre-Covid, and 76% are spending up to 6 hours per day using multiple business applications. This increase is having a big impact, with 1 in 5 employees expressing that they are more frustrated with business applications. And it’s not surprising—the rise in applications and digital processes means that on average, employees are switching between 35 business critical—disparately connected—applications over 1000 times each day.

While some of this is considered ‘SaaS bloat’, an ever-increasing issue with software applications is that each application has a different, and often complex, interface. Employees are frequently required to get to grips with multiple applications, all of which look and work in different ways. 

The driving force behind many of these trends boils down to poor digital adoption. Software may have been bought for all the right reasons, but it’s not delivering value because people aren’t interacting with it in the way the buyer or business thought they would. And that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Business leaders can’t expect employees to just get on with it without additional support. 

According to our own research almost half (48%) of executives say they entirely agree that successful adoption of cloud-based technology is a priority. But despite this, 90% cannot easily measure against business outcomes and we know digital adoption platforms aren’t used as widely as they should be—even if this looks set to change. 

With the increase in hybrid and remote working, digital adoption is even more important. Employees are using more software than ever before, and they have no one to turn to if they don’t know what to do with it. 

The digital employee experience (DEX), along with ROE, is a rapidly growing trend. It’s something business leaders are paying a lot of attention to. Many are appointing dedicated DEX leaders to review and harmonize the digital landscape within a business, all for the benefit of the employee. By unifying—or at the very least—creating a ‘digital thread’ that ties the digital environment together it reduces employee frustration with software and guides them to successful outcomes. 

Without measuring and improving the digital employee experience in a scalable, convenient way, it’s more than likely the rate of software success will drop even further. 

Long story short, digital adoption is important because it’s a way you can make your software investments work harder in the long-term, and add more value to your business and your users. 

How to find digital adoption challenges

Signs of a digital adoption problem

Now you know what digital adoption is and why it’s important, let’s get into identifying challenges in your organization. 

While the user and process insights unlocked by a digital adoption platform are necessary to make sure of issues and drive priorities through data, there are other signs to look out for that will highlight a growing adoption problem. That said, they aren’t always easy to spot and often hide in plain sight. 

Before getting into the signs, it’s worth briefly discussing the insights offered by digital adoption platforms when it comes to finding adoption challenges. The insights delivered can be incredibly effective in pinpointing adoption pains. Pre-emptive analytics—which we touch on in more detail later—allow you monitor how employees interact with your software and spot adoption problems based on ‘confused’ behavior i.e., employees clicking back and forth and dwelling when completing processes. This insight gives you an immediate hitlist of adoption challenges which you can begin to work through. 

Now, back to the signs. But before we dig into the detail, it’s important to recap what digital adoption is all about. Firstly, that’s making sure every employee interaction with corporate technology is as efficient and as high quality as possible. Secondly, it’s ensuring technology delivers the maximum possible value to the employee and to the business. 

With this, it would be easy to start looking for business-wide signs that an application isn’t being used well, in a timely fashion to achieve expected outcomes. However, if you don’t have the data to prove this, then the signs of a digital adoption problem start with the individual employee experience, then tend to permeate through the organization. 

Employee challenges can be anything from low uptake, poor data quality, support ticket volume or even poor feedback. And in isolation, these may seem like an outlier rather than an outright digital adoption problem. The problem is, these individual issues snowball into organizational impacts including increased support costs, bad data and, most crucially, low return on investment from applications. 

At AppLearn, we use metrics such as these to help customers track their digital adoption successes. We have helped businesses such as Cushman & Wakefield and Interfor reduce support tickets which has in turn created significant costs savings. 

Let’s dive a bit deeper into these signs and associated impacts. 

Employee/user challenges

Without the analytical certainty of a digital adoption platform, the best sign of a digital adoption platform is poor user feedback. Whether you measure this through targeted means such as C-SAT and NPS or overhearing complaints, you should pay attention any time you have a user giving negative feedback about an app. Comments like ‘it takes too long’, ‘it’s annoying when…’ or ‘it’s so frustrating having to…’ are indicative of an adoption problem. 

While not feedback officially, support tickets are another source to consider when looking for digital adoption issues. It can be easy to see tickets in isolation, but this is a common trap to fall in to. If you can see that support ticket volumes coming in from an application are high, that means there’s likely a deeper adoption problem—especially if those tickets are related to ‘how do I…’ type queries. 

Low uptake and poor data quality are other signs that go hand in hand. If you can see users aren’t logging in or not completing the processes required of them, then this is likely an adoption problem rather than an act of defiance. The same applies if you can see that the data users are entering into an application is inaccurate or insufficient. 

Finally, rework levels and navigation burn are two more significant signs of an adoption problem. While vendors don’t typically make this kind of information available within in-built analytics, speaking to and observing your employees can reveal how much time is lost to in-app inefficiencies in crucial tasks or seeking support. If you’d like more on this, be sure to read the how to measure digital adoption section of this guide. 

Where the above symptoms come from doesn’t really matter right now, that’s for later in the guide. What matters is acting on these signs and improving digital adoption before your business feels the brunt. 

The organizational impacts of poor digital adoption

As mentioned previously, seeing signs like the above as individual issues can create bigger business problems. Hopefully, you don’t see any of your own organization in the below, but the impacts of poor digital adoption are worth covering. After all, they are the reason why so many software investments don’t deliver their intended value. 

Increased support costs are sometimes written off as a side effect of using software, whether new or otherwise. However, with better digital adoption this can be avoided. And it should, as the associated costs and wastage of high-ticket volumes often negates any value from using an application in the first place. We’ll come onto the pre-emptive in-app alternative offered by digital adoption platforms later, but the avoidable cost of support tickets shouldn’t be accepted or overlooked. 

One of the key reasons for buying software, often right up there with convenience and cost savings, is to boost employee efficiency and satisfaction. Unfortunately, it’s not hard to see how some of the employee challenges can quickly damage this. If your employees aren’t working quicker than before the software rolled out or are losing more time to certain tasks, then the value of the application is affected. And this is the exact same for their overall happiness with the tool, as without buy-in it’s a matter of time before effective usage drops or people leave due to frustration. 

Everything in the last few paragraphs ultimately creates low return on investment from applications, and this isn’t something we need to dwell on. However, a final hidden cost of poor digital adoption is the impact poor data quality can have on business decision making. Bad data doesn’t only create rework for employees, it can cause missteps and poor investments before you even know it’s a problem—causing months of work and planning to be based on inaccuracies. 

That’s enough of the issues and impacts linked to poor digital adoption. You should now have more of a grasp on how to spot the early signs and why it’s crucial to act on them. Let’s get into how to improve digital adoption and our proven model which you can apply before or after you invest in a digital adoption platform. 

How to improve digital adoption

A proven digital adoption strategy

Years of seeing organizations succeed and fail when implementing applications has given us unique insight into both the technology and psychology. It has allowed us to see common trends in adoption problems throughout each implementation and build a digital adoption model designed to prevent them. 

While our digital adoption platform is the technical solution to these digital adoption challenges, our ‘three pillars to digital workplace success’ is the theory behind it.

In simple terms, whatever the tech, whatever the project phase and whatever the complexity, adoption challenges fall into three clear pillars. When considering the impact that an investment in digital technology will have on your business and your users, you can use the three pillars to guide your decision making, communication, training and support strategy to ensure it is a success. 

The three pillars to digital workplace success

As mentioned previously in this guide, digital adoption is largely a people problem. However, we have seen that it’s often software itself that’s regarded as being the main culprit for poor uptake and subsequent poor ROI. We’ve seen many businesses replace internal technologies with other competitive products only to experience the exact same challenges. You may have even gone through similar yourself. This demonstrates that software is not the only item in play and digital adoption extends beyond it.

Digital adoption strategies need to connect people to technology. And the best way to do this is to place employees—and their digital needs—in the center. 

Let’s take a look at each of the three pillars and how they should be approached to boost digital adoption. 

1. Diagnose

Do you have the tools in place to capture the data needed to identify where digital friction for employees is occurring? How accurate is this data, are you able to pinpoint friction with a degree of accuracy? The last thing you want to do is implement ‘solutions’ to digital friction in the wrong place. You’ll risk creating further problems and waste time. If you’re not able to diagnose the sticking points, then this is a great place to start.

2. Analyze

Is the data referenced above in a format that allows you to make informed decisions? Multiple spreadsheets with thousands of filters will be an inhibitor, rather than an enabler. The data you mine should be delivered in a presentable format. Ideally a dashboard or set of reports that are directly aligned to your business objectives. With data presented in this way, it is simple to analyze and spot your adoption problems and the wider business impact.

3. Optimize 

Now you have the data, and you’re able to analyze it effectively, it’s time to deploy solutions that will improve the way your employees work with software. Through optimizing the experience, you’ll see an immediate boost in digital adoption; leading to a happy, more productive workforce. Once you’ve optimized for success, your job isn’t done. It is important to revisit point one, keeping a close eye on digital friction and using the data to continually improve adoption.

We believe that if businesses use these three pillars to shape their strategic thinking, they are much more likely to create a strategy that leads to high digital adoption and software value. These three pillars are woven into our product, our implementation processes, and our customer success processes to ensure customers are gaining the full benefit of the years of research we’ve done. 

And while this framework is an effective way to approach technology value and change in your organization, it can only take you so far by itself. The next step is to learn more about digital adoption platforms, the only technology that supports these pillars. 

Our software onboarding checklist covers:

• The actions you need to undertake before rolling out a new application or onboarding a new member of the team
• How to master your team’s first reaction of the new application
• How to maintain success over time



What is a digital adoption platform?

We’ve referenced digital adoption platforms a few times throughout this guide, but without a proper introduction. A digital adoption platform (DAP), sometimes referred to as a digital adoption solution, is software designed to ensure business applications support the people and organizations that use them. It does this by making business applications easier to use, analyze and improve, typically by adding in-app support and user analytics. 

A DAP gives people the convenience, experience and intelligence they need to be as productive as possible—even when multiple applications or processes are involved. For end-users, this means useful guidance and access to help right when and where they need it. For application owners and stakeholders, this means making it easy to analyze and optimize workflows. For business leaders, this means straightforward insight into software value. 

How does a digital adoption platform work?

The most visible function of a digital adoption platform is the embedded in-app support offered to end-users. This is simply layered on top of the UI of existing applications, and usually consists of step-by-step guidance for key or complex tasks, as well as useful knowledge content. 

Making this support available in-app, at the click of a button is designed to make software easier to use and task completions more accurate. Features such as field validation and confusion detection point users to value faster, ensuring they complete processes correctly and in record time.  

The second crucial component of a digital adoption platform is enabling the measurement of digital adoption itself. By going beyond the data and analytics functionality typically provided by software vendors, the unique tracking of in-app interactions makes it simple to track metrics such as engagement with support content, time spent on tasks and the value of software itself. 

For application stakeholders, service delivery teams and C-level leaders, this makes it easy to demonstrate software performance and highlight problems to target with interventions. 

As a digital adoption platform can enable this across entire technology estates, it’s able to bring consistency to support and measurement of all applications. As software suites grow and become more complex, this will only become more important, and in turn make DAPs more prevalent. 

If you’d like to learn more about this technology, you can find out more about our digital adoption platform here. 

Is a digital adoption platform easy to implement and manage?

As well as the functionality of a digital adoption platform, it’s important to consider how it is implemented and managed on a day-to-day basis. 

Typically, a digital adoption platform is implemented into your setup as a browser extension or integrated directly into your software. Depending on the vendor, this will either be a managed process or rely on your IT team to deliver the roll out. 

The main consideration around implementing a DAP is time. As you’ll want to get the in-app support and analytics in place to both drive and prove value, you’ll want to get up and running quickly while ensuring the right elements are in place. 

For the ongoing management, it’s important to find a DAP that is light-touch and doesn’t require lots of administration or code knowledge. Again, depending on the vendor, a level of professional service may be offered to ensure you’re able to get the value from a DAP without needing a big-time investment, but this isn’t essential. Most DAPs are fully self-serve with 'no-code' functionality, ensuring efficient setup and on-going management.

At AppLearn, we look to get our implementations up-and-running within days. Customers then have the option to self service via our simple, no-code interface, or take advantage of our consultancy and hypercare services. In addition, we have a fully-fledged center of excellence that gives customers access to quick start templates, insights to help you pinpoint effective in-app support placement, and platform training accreditations. If you’d like to know more, you can learn about our approach.  

Everything including in this chapter, from the three-pillar framework to the ongoing management of a digital adoption platform is aimed at driving improvements and software value. But how do you know you’re improving something if you don’t measure it? It’s about time we got into the intricacies of measuring digital adoption.