Are you in the midst of a digital transformation and running into problems? You are not alone. Digital adoption challenges slow down or kill many business transformation projects. In fact, of the nearly $1.3 trillion spent on digital transformation last year, $900 billion was wasted, according to research published in Harvard Business Review.
Fortunately, there are solutions even to the worst digital adoption challenges.
In this article, we’re highlighting one of the most effective solutions – software walkthroughs and we’re going to cover:
- Common Digital Adoption Challenges
- What are software walkthroughs?
- How do software walkthroughs help with digital adoption challenges?
- Implementing Software Walkthroughs to Solve Digital Adoption Challenges
Common Digital Adoption Challenges
Digital adoption is about transforming your business to take advantage of technology. You change and update your processes to be more efficient and nimble with the help of new software and other technologies. But doing so is not always easy. Some of the most common digital adoption challenges are:
1. Training
Training users on new technologies and software is time-consuming and expensive. You must spend countless hours developing training materials. Then you have the expense of conducting the training which could include travel costs for trainees and presenters or renting additional space.
Even if you can do all of the training on location with an in-house team, you still have the cost of the lost productivity. Every minute someone is in a training session is a minute they’re not doing their regular job. Furthermore, keeping training materials up-to-date is especially challenging in a digital environment.
Technologies constantly change. Software gets updated to the latest version. Processes and company policies get revised. Any small change can force learning and development professional to update their training materials and retrain their users.
2. Onboarding
Onboarding is another challenge with digital adoption. Many companies make the mistake of only focusing on the initial rollout of new software or technology, but their need to train doesn’t end there. You must develop a solid plan for onboarding new users to your technology.
3. Knowledge Retention
Even if you have the most robust training and onboarding programs, it doesn’t matter if your users can’t retain the information. People forget 70 percent of what they learn in a training session within 24 hours. Retention a couple of days or even a week later is even worse. (Learn more about the “forgetting curve phenomenon in our blog post on how it impacts your Salesforce training.)
4. Tracking and Analysis
How do you know how your users are doing with new technology? How do you track your overall digital adoption? Measurement, tracking, and analysis is a challenge for most companies undergoing digital adoption.
What are software walkthroughs?
Software walkthroughs are interactive guides that show people how to use new applications. The walkthroughs feature pop-up balloons that direct users where to click and give instructions on how to complete the process. You can deploy a walkthrough as a product tour to provide a general overview of how to navigate a program or as a process flow to help users complete specific tasks.
You can improve user onboarding and adoption by streamlining your technology with interactive walkthroughs. Using a walkthrough is like having an experienced guide sit next to you and giving you a tutorial on how to use the application.
Software walkthroughs simplify tasks and technology with a self-guided wizard approach. You’ve probably used something similar if you’ve ever used software to prepare your taxes.
Most people who use TurboTax or other do-it-yourself tax preparation services are not accountants or tax experts, so the program is designed to walk people through completing their taxes with a series of questions and on-screen guidance. This is an example of how a walkthrough makes difficult tasks more straightforward and faster.
How do software walkthroughs help with digital adoption challenges?
You can utilize software walkthroughs to solve all the leading digital adoption challenges we discussed above. For example, if you’re making the switch from Salesforce Classic to Lightning Experience, here are the problems you could face and how an interactive walkthrough could help.
| Digital Adoption Challenge | Solution with Software Walkthrough |
| Training Updating all your training materials from Classic to Lightning is time-consuming. You also need to train your users on how to navigate the new experience and any changes in processes. | Walkthroughs show users how to navigate the platform and highlight any changes in a process without the need for traditional classroom training. Once you’ve built a walkthrough, you can export it in several formats eliminating the need to update your training materials. To learn more about decreasing the time you spend on training materials, see our blog post on how to use the COPE method for developing LMS content. |
| Onboarding You’ll need to quickly training and onboard new users on how to use Salesforce Lightning – especially if they’re used to Salesforce Classic or haven’t used Salesforce at all. | Great news! You can use the same interactive walkthroughs you created to train your existing users to onboard new users. You can make a new novice user productive in Salesforce Lightning without classroom training by using the on-screen guidance of a software walkthrough. |
| Knowledge Retention Perhaps you’ve already done some training on Salesforce Lightning a couple of weeks before you made the switch, but now that you’ve made the change, you users don’t seem to remember anything they learned in training. | The real power of walkthroughs is that they are available 24/7 whenever a user needs help. Even if a user has poor knowledge retention, they can still complete their work with the help of on-screen guidance. |
| Tracking and Analysis So, you’ve rolled out Lightning. How do you know how it is going? What are users struggling with, and how can you meet that need? | Software walkthroughs also include analytics and insights. You can examine how people interact with your walkthroughs to understand where people are getting stuck and could use some additional help. For example, suppose you have a walkthrough that covers a 4-step process for entering a new opportunity into Salesforce. In that case, you could see users are abandoning the process on step 3 and deploy addition on-screen guidance to that step. |
Implementing Software Walkthroughs to Solve Digital Adoption Challenges
If you are trying to overcome digital adoption challenges, it’s obvious software walkthroughs can help. Walkthroughs are a common feature of a new category of SaaS solutions called Digital Adoption Platforms.
Apty is the world’s fastest-growing digital adoption platform and the one with the highest ratings for satisfaction on G2.
