The 5 fundamentals of a great digital adoption solution

Long before the pandemic began, the workplace was undergoing a digital transformation. Now more than ever, companies rely on software to help them meet challenges across the entire organization. The number of Software as a Service (SaaS) apps companies use grew 30 percent between 2018 and 2020, and the dollar amount spent on apps increased 50 percent over the same period.

Companies may be spending more than ever on SaaS applications, but they aren’t necessarily making the same investment in ensuring their teams get the most value from these tools. Recent surveys have shown stubbornly high levels of employee discomfort with using their company’s internal app suite. How, then, can managers build greater employee confidence and fluency when using software? The right digital adoption solution is critical.

If you’re beginning to think about choosing a digital adoption solution to inform your change roadmap and build employee confidence and fluency within and across your apps, here are five essential elements you should expect the right one to offer. 

1. An analytics-led strategy

A successful digital adoption plan is one that accounts for existing employee behavior and meets teams where they are. It’s therefore very important for a digital adoption solution to provide change managers with comprehensive behavioral analytics in order to see how employees are spending their time inside apps. Robust analytics also lets managers determine which guidance to prioritize and how to best support teams at any given moment. Once their digital adoption plan is underway, teams can come back to analytics and quantify how well their strategy is working. 

2. Guidance where and when your team needs it

The best digital adoption solutions bring the right guidance to the right employee at the right time–not just within a tool, but across the entire change landscape. Whether it’s driving the adoption of a new feature, providing context for a custom field, or sending alerts to maintain security in a given area, a digital adoption solution should allow for customized support. What’s more, it ensures that this support stays top of mind for your team members, whether they are brand new or long-tenured. 

3. Comprehensive feedback management

Acting on employee feedback is essential to a successful continued rollout because it makes change a two-way, iterative process. If your strategy is imposed from the top down and only includes a one-way line of communication, it will almost certainly fail. Instead, it’s important to gauge how well guides, processes, and the software itself are addressing employee wants and needs. By proactively providing feedback, employees are able to give their companies important insights into what’s working and what’s not. And by acting on that feedback, managers can let their employees know their feedback isn’t going unheard. 

4. Maximum ROI on your IT portfolio

For IT professionals, a digital adoption solution shouldn’t be assessed by the success of any one guide within an app, but rather by how it helps them drive adoption of the full array of functionality provided by the software a company pays for. Imagine if a company used, say, Microsoft Excel to only do basic math within cells, rather than for complex financial formulas, chart and graph building, and the countless other features it offers. The company would be nowhere close to maximizing its ROI on that application. The right digital adoption solution helps managers ensure employees are utilizing the complete set of features their internal suite offers.

5. Optimized security and compliance

As employees grow increasingly comfortable with the software they use, it’s important to make sure they’re using it securely and following established guidelines and regulations. In this regard, the in-app guidance and analytics a great digital adoption solution provides is particularly helpful for chief information security officers (CISOs). The strong behavioral analytics an effective digital adoption solution offers allows compliance teams to keep track of how well employees are executing tasks in the manner required. And on the security front, CISOs can use a digital adoption solution to deploy alerts to employees about a phishing scam or other security event in real time, within the app where the danger exists. 

Want to learn more about the essential elements of a great digital adoption solution? Download our new e-book here.