What is Digital Adoption? A Comprehensive Guide

Running a successful sportswear brand, you decide to expand your product line with more sports gear varieties. Anticipating growth in the workforce and customer base, you create detailed manuals to guide customers in proper product use and invest in a new sales tool to enhance employee performance.

A year later, you review your brand’s performance and find, to your surprise, a decline since the expansion. Upon investigation, you discover employees underutilized the new tool, resulting in poor sales.

At the same time, customer support tickets on product usage have increased, leading to higher returns and negative reviews citing poor product design.

You reflect, “If only my customers knew how to use the products properly and my employees efficiently used the new sales tool, product adoption would have been stronger.”

(I’ve finally said the word from the title, we’re getting to the meat of it now)

What is Digital Adoption?

Digital adoption is the process by which users fully embrace and utilize digital tools or software to their fullest capability. This involves learning new technologies and integrating them into everyday tasks to achieve efficiency and productivity.

Digital Adoption can be implied in the following two categories:

Employee-facing digital adoption

Employee digital adoption focuses on how effectively they understand and use internal tools to maximize efficiency and productivity.

Customer-facing digital adoption

Customer digital adoption focuses on their ability to understand all features and capabilities of newly purchased software for maximum value. This increases product usage and reduces the likelihood of churn.

Why Digital Adoption Matters For Your Business?

Digital adoption is an ongoing process that businesses must continuously manage. Effective digital adoption strategies help onboard new customers and employees and keep them informed on the latest features.

A disruption in the digital adoption process can risk:

• Reduced employees efficiency
• Increase in customer support tickets
• Gaps or delays in employee communication
• Poor customer product adoption

This results in higher employee frustration, stress, diminished customer experience, and missed revenue opportunities.

Let’s take a look at a few sweet statistics to understand at scale why your business needs a digital adoption strategy.

1. A Harvey Nash study shows that 73% of people believe SaaS is essential to business success.
2. Foundry reports that 93% of organizations have adopted or plan to adopt a digital-first strategy to boost employee productivity and enhance customer experience.
3. Walkme reports that 38% of digital transformation efforts last year failed to meet objectives due to low end-user adoption, resulting in an average wasted spend of $12.4 million.

Looking at these stats, it tells us:

• Digital transformation is essential in business, and exploring ways to digitize organizational operations is crucial.
• Ensure adoption to achieve your digital transformation goals and prevent unnecessary losses.

The Role of Digital Adoption in Your Business’s Digital Transformation

Digital transformation involves adopting new digital systems and tools that reshape company operations, including cultural shifts and innovative approaches to business challenges.

Imagine digital transformation as a movie protagonist discovering a new power, like Luke Skywalker learning about the Force in Star Wars or Neo entering the Matrix in The Matrix. These powers enable the hero to overcome challenges—just as digital transformation empowers businesses to tackle modern obstacles.

Similarly, when your business undergoes a digital transformation, new processes, overhauls, and tools are brought in to help users tackle challenges better.

Digital adoption is like training these protagonists undertake to master the newfound power systems to use them to their full potential and defeat the big bad.

In the business world, the organization takes digital adoption initiatives to let its employees and customers become pros in the new systems and be more efficient with them.

Benefits of Digital Adoption

With global IT spending expected to hit $5 trillion in 2025, digital adoption is crucial to maximize ROI and justify this investment. Efficient technology use provides significant returns and offers the following benefits:

An Ongoing Process

Digital adoption ensures the success of digital transformation efforts through continuous monitoring and adjustment. This ongoing process tracks progress and implements necessary changes to maintain smooth operations.

Improved Decision Making

Using newly incorporated systems to their fullest potential makes sources of truth more reliable. This enables management to make calculated, fact-based decisions.

Better Analysis of Performance

Strictly following new processes enables accurate performance measurement, identification of successes and failures, detection of system gaps, and timely fixes to prevent major impacts.

Increased ROI

The primary goal of digital transformation is increased ROI. Well-designed digital adoption strategies help companies achieve this goal as planned—or even ahead of schedule.

For Employee-Facing Digital Adoption

Better Onboarding Process

Improved processes streamline new employee onboarding and enhance understanding of the internal environment. This, in turn, enables customer teams to deliver a better onboarding experience, supported by more effective tools and materials.

Increased Employee Productivity

Educating employees on new tools and systems increases company productivity and ensures goal achievement.

For Customer-Facing Digital Adoption

Reduced Customer Churn Rate

Effective digital adoption strategies boost product adoption rates and, combined with strong customer service, increase customer satisfaction. Together, these metrics lower churn rates and build a healthy customer base.

Increased Net Promoter Score

A net promoter score (NPS) measures customer loyalty and their likelihood to recommend your tool. It also reflects the effectiveness of your digital adoption strategies. High product adoption rates improve NPS, and a strong NPS further boosts product adoption.

Reduces The Burden on Customer Support

Effective digital adoption provides customers with resources, such as a knowledge base, to resolve issues independently, reducing the load on customer support and enabling focus on priority tasks.

Common Digital Adoption Challenges

Reluctance to change

A common challenge is employee reluctance to adapt to new digital transformation plans, as established processes may feel disrupted by new systems.

Workaround: Implementing a Change Management Strategy (CMS) requires clear communication about why systems are changing, the organizational benefits, which tools are being replaced, and the transition timeline.

Addressing employee questions and concerns ensures a smooth transition by aligning everyone on the change.

Not providing customers with good resources

Introducing major software features without guidance confuses customers, hampers product adoption, and risks breaking their trust.

Workaround: Educate customers on changes and teach them how to complete tasks effectively.

Conduct a pre-launch webinar to review changes and guide customers on navigating the software update.

Alongside the webinar, update the knowledge base with the latest information, screenshots, and videos, and inform customers they can use it to address issues.

Poor selection of new tools

New tools for digital transformation must integrate well with each other and existing tools, as poor integration slows workflow, reduces productivity, and delays target goals.

Workaround: Assess current workflows and select tools that emulate or improve them for easy employee adaptation.

Inform employees about new tools, and their purpose, and gather feedback through a survey, inviting alternative tool suggestions.

Poor training on new tools and systems

Inadequate training and insufficient resources for new tools lead to miscommunication, process misunderstandings, and an unproductive work environment.

Workaround: Develop a training strategy to teach employees task completion with new tools and workflows, and hold a live Q&A to address their issues.

Update your internal knowledge base alongside the external one, adding information and addressing common queries.

Lack of skills to adapt to the change

A workforce lacking the skills to use new tools delays implementation and incurs unexpected costs for training or hiring to fill the skill gap.

Workaround: Identify workforce segments with skill gaps before implementing new processes and create a training plan. Begin training them on how the new processes will work.

After implementing changes, build LMS courses with quizzes, use digital adoption tools, and provide in-app tutorials to ease the learning curve.

Lack of performance trackers

Tracking digital adoption performance is as crucial as implementing it. Without Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you cannot measure if your digital transformation is effective.

Tracking internal productivity improvements, product adoption, and customer satisfaction rates can be challenging.

Workaround: Set KPIs to track both internal and external digital adoption strategy performance. Here are some KPIs you can track:

• Adoption rate (both internal and external)
• Employee training completion rate
• Support ticket rates (both internal and external), etc. (KPIs are discussed further in detail in a couple of scrolls)

Strategies for Successful Digital Adoption

Implement change management measures

Change management addresses the human aspect of organizational change, helping individuals and teams transition smoothly with minimal disruptions. Common change management measures include:

Communication: Give employees an overview of current processes, related challenges, and their impact on the organization. Then, set the context to introduce changes and clarify how processes and workflows will evolve.

Addressing concerns: Address employee concerns about skill adjacency, the proposed training plan, and who they can approach for clarification.

These measures help reduce employee resistance to change and facilitate change effectively.

Keep your customers prepared

Create a plan to inform existing customers of major software changes, guiding them through the transformation to keep them prepared.

Publish articles and feature videos in your knowledge base or send feature release emails explaining the changes, their purpose, and rollout timeline. Highlight the training and support provided to assist customers through the transition.

Conduct employee skill assessments

After implementing new systems and tools, conduct skill assessments to identify employee skill gaps for adapting to the transformation. Follow up with post-test surveys to determine specific training needs.

Training strategy

After completing tests and surveys to clarify employee training needs, determine the training methods. Here are ways to train both employees and customers.

LMS Courses: LMS courses provide structured training, tailored for specific teams and customer segments to maximize effectiveness.

Webinars and Live Sessions: Live training sessions and webinars allow interaction with trainers for real-time query resolution. Like LMS courses, they can be tailored for specific teams and customer groups to offer niche-focused training.

Using Digital Adoption Platforms

Digital Adoption Platform is software that integrates with your tool to provide in-app guidance as users navigate. It can support both new internal tools and the latest version of your software.

Some tools also integrate with your existing knowledge base and let users search for answers directly from the tool.

Updating your knowledge base

Plan and update your knowledge base for both internal and external users. Incorporate assessment and survey feedback to build a valuable FAQ section alongside updated information.

Enabling users to self-serve during organizational change reduces the burden on customer success, customer support, and internal support teams.

Regular KPI tracking

Setting and tracking KPIs are the best way to numerically measure the performance of your digital adoption strategies. Here are some important KPIs to measure:

Adoption Rate: Use this for both internal and external users to track adoption rates for new internal tools and customer enablement software

Net Promoter Score: An increase in your net promoter score after transformation likely indicates greater customer adoption of your software.

LMS Course Completion Rate: Course Completion Rate shows how many users have completed courses, providing insight into the effectiveness of your training measures.

Knowledge Base Article Visits: Identify the most visited and longest-viewed articles to pinpoint where users may be struggling, allowing you to offer additional support in those areas.

Support Ticket Rates: Support tickets from internal and external users indicate the effectiveness of your training measures. If support tickets increase over time, re-evaluate your training programs.

Productivity Difference: Compare employee productivity before and after adoption to assess the success of your transformation efforts.

Collect feedback from your stakeholders

While numerical and factual metrics help statistics, that’s only one-half of understanding your users. The other half involves direct feedback from them. Frame a set of feedback questions for your users to get insights and relate them to your KPIs.

Following these measures will help you understand how your digital adoption strategies have been working.

Digital Adoption Best Practices

Use multiple training modes

In your training strategy, incorporate multiple modes:

• An in-app guidance for live navigation help
• A comprehensive knowledge base (articles, videos, guides, etc)
• A structured learning course with LMS
• Live webinars to address users on a live platform

Various training modes support users at different stages of their learning journey, enabling efficient training at scale.

Maintain transparency with your users

Transparency eases the change process for users and should be maintained throughout. Inform users of potential adoption issues and how employees will be supported. Transparency builds trust and provides security, reducing employee confusion, stress, and turnover.

Personalize your training with use cases

Personalize training methods for different users to ensure effective knowledge sharing. Tailor training for various teams and customer segments according to their specific use cases to enhance tool adoption.

Maintain milestones during adoption

Milestones benefit both users and management. They help management track adoption progress, while users are encouraged to reach milestones through small rewards, with a significant reward upon full adoption.

It can boost employee morale and motivate them to be active in the digital adoption process. Here’s one from me: I’ll buy you lunch if you tell me what you’ve learned so far (I promise to send you tasty PNG food images on successful task completion).

Plan out the tools for digital adoption

Plan digital adoption strategies with tools that support each other, such as an in-app guidance tool integrated with your LMS or knowledge base that supports your content formats. This streamlines user help services and strengthens your overall training plan.

Examples of Digital Adoption

How WebEngage leveraged an LMS for retention

WebEngage enables businesses to create personalized customer experiences and automate retention campaigns at scale. To support growth, they partnered with Trainn to build an LMS Academy.

A key goal was to help customers find WebEngage-certified talent, supporting product adoption and retention.

With Trainn’s support, they built their academy from ideation to launch in just one month. Users spend an average of 111 minutes (1 hour and 51 minutes) on the Academy gaining knowledge.

Read more about our journey with WebEngage and their academy launch

Trends in Digital Adoption to Watch Out For

AI and machine learning for digital transformation

Foundry reports that 84% of IT organizations are exploring or using AI and machine learning to achieve digital-first status. Cloud-native platforms and AI engineering are top choices for digital transformation.

This identifies the upskilling training needed for your current workforce and initiates your digital adoption strategies.

Increase in the number of SaaS apps used

Despite an average decline in SaaS app usage from 2022 to 2023, BetterCloud research reports a 29% year-over-year growth in SaaS apps among medium-sized companies.

If your SaaS tool serves this group, assess and implement digital adoption measures to differentiate from the competition.

Dependency on multiple software applications

A Whatfix study found that 93% of employees rely on at least three software applications daily, and 85% perform tasks that span multiple applications each day.

Customer-facing digital adoption: Focus your strategies on educating customers by integrating with their existing tech stack.

Employee-facing digital adoption: Your new tools must integrate with your existing workflow, prioritizing key systems to avoid major operational disruptions.

Increase in digital adoption investments

Walkme’s research shows a 63% increase in digital adoption investments from 2022 to 2023, primarily supporting content development, process automation, AI, and in-depth training.

If you’ve started your digital adoption process, know that you might have competition in this race. Invest in digital adoption tools that help you automate parts of the process such as content creation for your LMS and knowledge base.

Accelerate Your Digital Adoption Journey with Trainn

Trainn is a no-code training platform for customers and employees, offering product videos, interactive guides, a knowledge base, and an academy in one solution. Trainn automates content creation, the most time-consuming part of building a customer education hub. Just record your screen, and it transforms into an interactive guide or product video with AI voiceovers, highlights, and zooms.

With easy content creation, you can launch your knowledge base and academy within a month, free of design or developer dependencies. The knowledge base serves as a self-service center, allowing customers to resolve queries independently. The academy enables structured courses to certify users.

If all of this sounds too good to be true, try it out with our 14-day free trial - who knows, our date with your digital adoption journey might lead to a second one ;)