How to measure your company's digital adoption trajectory
We live in a digital era, where digital adoption is critical for every business. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, your customers expect to be able to do everything online, and preferably from their phones. Digital adoption cuts right across the B2B and B2C divide.
It’s not just your customers, either; your employees demand it too. Your employees are increasingly born in the digital age. They look for smooth, smart, intuitive digital tools to assist and support them in every corner of their working life. Despite the importance of digital adoption, not every enterprise succeeds in introducing it. There are a number of obstacles to successful digital adoption, including employees and users who are resistant to change, interfaces that are complex to master, and a sense of overwhelm at the number of digital tools before us.
What is digital adoption?
It’s important to realize that digital adoption doesn’t only mean using digital tools. It includes using them to their fullest extent. If your employees are only using digital invoicing software to print out invoices that they calculated manually, for example, then they haven’t completed their digital adoption journey.
Similarly, banking customers who use their mobile banking app to check the bank’s opening hours, then arrive at the branch to ask about their bank balance aren’t using your digital tools fully either.
Why it’s important to measure your digital adoption trajectory
Your digital adoption journey includes the number of employees/customers using your digital tools, the time it takes for users to master them, the impact such tools have on productivity, and more. Because each digital tool can have many applications, your journey to digital adoption can be long. Sometimes it’s convoluted, too, as users slowly master one feature before they feel comfortable enough to move on to another one.
It’s possible that you might have to take a gradual approach to digital adoption, waiting until your users are familiar with the more basic uses of your tools before you move on to the more advanced options. In these cases, it’s particularly important to measure your digital adoption.
Without tracking your digital adoption trajectory, you won’t be able to see what progress you’ve made. When you measure digital adoption, you can see which areas are proving the most difficult for users to understand, and where users are meeting your adoption goals. Measuring digital adoption helps you to follow and prove ROI from digital tools, and spot areas where users need more help and support.
Here are our top tips for measuring your company’s digital adoption trajectory.
How to track your digital adoption trajectory
- Define clear goals
You’ll only be able to measure digital adoption successfully if you know what you hope to achieve with your new digital tools. For example: Is your goal to speed up the time it takes to issue invoices? Or is to reduce the number of errors in your invoices? These are both worthy goals, but if you want to reduce errors and end up only speeding up invoice production, you won’t have achieved real digital adoption.
When you set your digital adoption goals, try to think creatively. Are you only concerned with the number of employees using your new tools? Or is it more important to know how many are using 5 or more features? Remember that true digital adoption only occurs once your tools are used to their fullest extent. That requires recording how and how effectively employees and customers are using your tools.
- Set benchmarks
In order to know how much progress you’ve made in digital adoption, you need to know where you began. Start by setting a benchmark that you can use to track your journey. You could end up with some highly impressive numbers, but you won’t know if they represent a real improvement of your original situation.
To use our invoicing example, if you don’t know how many errors appeared in your invoices before you introduced a digital invoicing app, you also won’t know if you’ve succeeded in reducing them.
- Draw on digital adoption tools to gather data
Part of your digital adoption journey should include using digital adoption tools. This type of sophisticated software can deliver information about return rate, completion rate, usage numbers, and reveal deep information about friction points, abandonment cliffs, and under-utilized features.
- Measure outcomes
It’s important to remember that your goal is to track your total digital adoption journey. That means that you need to use your original digital adoption goals to assess the outcome. Did you succeed in reducing the number of errors in your invoices? If not, then even if you achieved a 100 percent adoption rate for the software, your digital adoption journey hasn’t reached its goal.
Measuring your digital adoption trajectory is the key to success
Digital adoption can be a long journey, involving plenty of training, onboarding, and sometimes starting all over again. When you set clear goals and benchmarks, use the right digital adoption platform to gather data, and assess that data against your original aims, you’ll be able to keep on top of your digital adoption trek and stay on course for full digital adoption.
Peter Davidson works as a senior business associate helping brands and start ups to make efficient business decisions and plan proper business strategies. He is a big gadget freak who loves to share his views on latest technologies and applications.