What is a digital adoption platform (DAP)?
A digital adoption platform is a software that is layered on top of another software product, app, or website to help facilitate proficiency by guiding users through key tasks and providing contextual information as users navigate the product. These tools help get new users familiarized and proficient in an application quickly, as well as provide ongoing education to drive adoption of new features and functionality.
Why is a digital adoption platform important?
As fluent and efficient software use becomes increasingly important to drive employee productivity and growth, a digital adoption platform is crucial to ensuring companies get the most out of the apps their teams use. That starts with efficient in-app onboarding that enables new hires to hit the ground running quickly, and continues as companies monitor areas that might be generating hurdles and leading to a bottleneck of IT support tickets. The robust analytics that the right digital adoption platform provides will also help companies ensure internal governance measures and best practices are being followed. What’s more, the increase in employee productivity and level of comfort with apps will invariably trickle down to improved customer experiences.
How do I choose a digital adoption platform?
When considering which digital adoption platform to use, teams should be mindful that different employees will have different needs and levels of software experience. It follows that companies should choose a platform that allows for nimble segmentation and targeting across categories, so that each employee gets tailored guidance and help. This segmentation capability not only ensures employees are getting the information they need, but also that they’re not being bombarded with information they don’t. At the same time, an effective digital adoption platform will help teams actively incorporate employee feedback into their planning process, making sure it doesn’t get lost in a feedback black hole.
How do I measure the return on investment (ROI) of a digital adoption platform?
Purchasing software for your team is a big financial commitment, and the right digital adoption platform will ensure that it does not go to waste. Teams should be able to customize employee training and onboarding and measure how effective these efforts are using comprehensive analytics. The right digital adoption platform will let companies quantify the impact of their digital adoption strategy by, for example, looking at how support ticket requests in a given area have decreased following new DAP-enabled training. Teams should also be able to track how time spent on given tasks has decreased following deployment of new in-app guides and how that has fueled growth in key KPIs. For IT teams, a great digital adoption platform’s ROI should be measured, not by the success of any one guide, but rather by how effectively it drives adoption of the full set of features your internal software suite has to offer.
What are the best digital adoption platforms?
The last thing a company should do is to pick a digital adoption platform that ends up contributing to the very problem it promised to alleviate. With that in mind, be wary of choosing a platform that itself requires tedious and expensive onboarding, uses disorganized, chaotic interfaces, and ends up becoming an added hurdle and general burden to employees.
The best digital adoption platforms offer employees simple, streamlined experiences and interfaces that are intuitive and user-friendly regardless of one’s technical background or level of expertise. They also give administrators the ability to manage all of their needs from one place, rather than forcing them to constantly navigate among various tools and dashboards. Just as important, the best digital adoption platforms are more than just their software, and come with a support team committed to working with you as a partner to set you up to succeed.
Where can I learn more about digital adoption platforms?
For those looking to become more familiar with digital adoption platforms, Pendo has published information on how to accelerate software adoption and increase employee productivity.