How to find the best digital adoption solution for your company in 2024
The workplace is a different environment today than it was just a year or even six months ago. Whether you’re working from home or back in the office, as we head into 2024 it’s likely that the day-to-day of getting things done requires what can feel like an ever-growing collection of workflows and software.
When companies invest in new digital tools, the learning curve for employees can be steep, with new business-critical processes and behaviors to learn. Ultimately, when employees don’t adopt the software they’re supposed to use, it can chip away at productivity, efficiency, and even employee happiness.
So how do you ensure your business-critical processes and software are adopted successfully?
What is a digital adoption solution?
To ensure success in the digital workplace, companies are turning to digital adoption platforms. At their core, digital adoption solutions are pieces of software that are layered on top of another software product, app, or website to help facilitate proficiency and adoption by guiding users through key tasks and providing contextual information as users navigate the product. They deliver training and support right where work happens, through walkthroughs and self-service resources that live inside the applications we use to get work done.
But when it comes to employees actually adopting important work processes and software tools, it’s crucial to ensure you’re not flying blind. You can’t just rely on in-app guides alone. When investing in a digital adoption solution, the ability to reliably deliver in-app training is foundational, but it’s just as important to understand the role your chosen solution plays in other key jobs to be done.
Who benefits from digital adoption solutions?
Business operations and transformation teams
Using the power of a digital adoption solution, business operations and transformation teams can make better decisions for the organization leading to better business outcomes. From streamlining and optimizing business processes and workflows, to making workflows and processes more efficient, to collecting and managing feedback in a central location, these teams can use digital adoption solutions to boost productivity, improve experiences for employees, and optimize the software in their internal-facing portfolio.
Employees
Employees themselves benefit greatly from a digital adoption solution because of the ways it can be used to improve how work takes place. The power of in-app support and notifications provides timely, contextual, and personalized guidance to those segments of employees who need it, while leaving those who don’t alone. It does this by meeting them where they are — in the app itself. Digital adoption solutions also help managers understand how employees work so as to improve the flow and efficiency of various business-critical processes. What’s more, it allows employees themselves to become part of this process, letting them provide feedback in-app about what’s working and what isn’t.
Five things to keep in mind when evaluating digital adoption solutions
1. Understand how work happens
The most successful digital adoption initiatives take a data-driven approach. The number of apps used in a given process—and the number of features in the average piece of enterprise software—can be enough to make your head spin, but chances are you don’t need a walkthrough for every process or a guide for every button.
Instead, effectively improving adoption is about optimizing select key workflows to ensure new employees onboard successfully and you see a reduction in support tickets. Making an impact in the right places is key because when employees are bombarded by too many in-app guides, they tend to stop paying attention and training loses its effectiveness.
How do you know where training is actually needed? It starts with being data informed. Pendo is equipped with rich behavioral analytics that yield insights into how your employees use software on a feature-specific level, within and across apps.
Having an underlying foundation in data ensures you avoid filling applications with unnecessary guides, since you’ll be able to identify precisely where training will make the biggest impact. As part of our data-driven approach to digital adoption, Pendo surfaces the most frequent paths employees take once they log into an application and identifies common points of friction and drop off.
Taking a data-driven approach to digital adoption goes one step further when you personalize the guidance each employee receives based on their experience with the software they are using. By segmenting employees based on what they have and have not done in an application and then delivering targeted messaging accordingly, you can be sure walkthroughs are effective by only delivering training that employees actually need.
2. Drive solution governance and compliance
Taking a data-driven approach to digital adoption can play an even bigger role when it comes to maintaining internal governance. While it’s important that in- and cross-app walkthroughs help employees adopt software, it’s equally crucial to be able to measure whether employees are using the tools provided to them correctly in the first place.
In some cases, when employees don’t use software appropriately, performance slips and KPIs go unmet. In extreme examples, breaches in software compliance can mean fines, or even jail time. No matter your industry, though, it’s crucial to be able to see how employees are using the software, not just that they’re logging in.
With cross-app analytics, Pendo makes it easy to ensure employees are staying on top of required tasks. Pendo was purpose-built to govern internal software usage–across one or multiple applications–with a single tool. In Pendo, highly configurable custom dashboards enable you to monitor and govern your digital adoption strategy at a glance, not just based on how often employees log in, but whether they’re completing the crucial tasks that show work is getting done.
3. Capture the voice of the employee
Most digital adoption strategies are full of one-way communication. You provide training to your employees on how to best leverage the software you provide, but how do you ensure you’re providing that training effectively? Digital adoption strategies are rarely successful when they don’t capture the voice of the employee.
The most common place to start is by collecting qualitative insights using in-app polls and surveys. Polls and surveys are a great way to ask for employees’ feedback and iterate on your digital adoption strategy, but if left unchecked they often result in a black hole of feedback.
Put another way: Sure, you asked employees for their thoughts, but what are you going to do about it? And how can you communicate back to employees that their feedback was heard?
Pendo goes beyond multiple choice polls and open text surveys by providing a dedicated feedback management system to help capture and understand the voice of the employee.
A dedicated feedback management system enables users to proactively share their thoughts on digital adoption improvements or ways to make the underlying application better. Pendo can also tailor in-app training to certain users based on the ideas they’ve shared. And if you plan to make changes based on what you’ve heard from your employees, Pendo keeps them informed and communicates updates back to employees to let them know their voice has been heard.
4. Quantify training impact
Providing in- and cross-app walkthroughs and training resources is one thing. But the most effective digital adoption solutions enable you to actually quantify the impact your digital adoption strategy is having on behavior change.
Whether it’s measuring support ticket reduction tied to a problematic workflow, or simply calculating how much less time employees spend on a crucial process now that you’ve built an in-app walkthrough, Pendo provides robust analytics to help quantify the impact and cost savings of in-app training.
In addition to measuring the downstream effects of the guides you create, Pendo also enables you to conduct guide experiments that directly measure the impact of a user seeing a guide on completing certain tasks and workflows. When selecting a digital adoption partner, it’s crucial to look for a solution that helps validate the impact you make with it.
5. Get up and running fast
If you’ve read this far, there’s a good chance you’re acutely aware of the pain of successfully adopting enterprise software and processes. Digital adoption solutions are seeing incredible growth because they help solve very real problems, but how can you be sure a digital adoption solution itself will be any different? After all, it’s just another piece of enterprise software that your company needs to successfully adopt.
Some of the most popular digital adoption solutions on the market are themselves difficult to adopt because of steep learning curves, bloated interfaces, and weeks of required consultations with professional services teams. When digital adoption solutions aren’t adopted properly, all too often they turn into shelfware, exacerbating the very problem they were designed to solve.
Though not a job to be done by your digital adoption solution, when evaluating your options it’s hugely important to partner with a vendor that will lead you to success and offers a solution that is intuitive and easy to use. That’s why Pendo was designed to be easy for anyone to use–no matter their role or level of technical expertise.
Pendo offers a streamlined experience, giving administrators everything they need right in one place, unlike other digital adoption solutions that require constant toggle switching between separate tools. And more importantly than the tool itself, Pendo is deeply invested in acting as a consultative partner and setting our customers up for success. We take a train-the-trainer approach to customer implementation, ensuring that clients truly understand how to maximize the value that Pendo provides, and are up and running in a matter of weeks, not months.
If you’re focused on ensuring employees adopt processes and use software effectively, there’s a good chance you’re already considering a digital adoption solution to help with these efforts. The most effective digital adoption solutions enable you to take an informed approach and are optimized for usability, because a digital adoption solution should never become what it was designed to prevent: just another expensive piece of shelfware.
Interested in learning more about the value Pendo provides to businesses? Get a custom demo here.
