FACT CHECKED
Measuring the success of your digital adoption initiatives is not just about numbers. Digital adoption impact can be felt in many ways and by all members of the workforce.
Organizations should look to measure the impact of the whole process. It’s not simply about onboarding employees to digital platforms and expecting them to use them.
Since digital transformation is an ongoing process, companies must determine metrics to quantify and qualify the effectiveness of digital adoption.
A survey by McKinsey found that the percentage of employees who believe their leaders regularly assess the ongoing impact of change efforts declined from 47% in 2014 to 39% in 2017.
“Treating software implementation as a one-and-done deal is a big mistake. Usability, productivity, and even the number of active users are important metrics to monitor on an ongoing basis.”
If the company’s employees lose confidence in upper management to continually monitor digital adoption impact and other change progress, they will be less enthusiastic about future initiatives.
4 tips for measuring digital adoption impact
1. Identify the baseline
By identifying your baseline, you start by measuring the basics. This part of the process is about understanding where you are now and what sort of digital adoption impact has been had on the business so far.
Using whatever data you have at your disposal to get a broad analytical picture of how your technology is currently being used (or not, as the case may be).
For example, let’s say your company is getting drowned in support tickets. So you implement a tool to help the support team manage the numbers the sheer volume of requests.
If you log how long it takes each member of the support team to solve a support ticket and factor in the number of team members and how many hours they each work per week, that’s your baseline data.
You can analyze these numbers and start to map out your digital adoption plan. Once you’ve begun executing the plan, you can monitor how these figures improve over time. This is one way to measure digital adoption impact.
A great tip is to use an ROI calculator, which will help you to find some baseline data.
2. Communication is key in realizing digital adoption impact
Your users must understand how their digital tools will help them to perform in their roles. They need to know why the benefits are important as well as the goal the company is trying to achieve by using these digital tools.
McKinsey reports that employees are 3.5 times more inclined to consider a new digital tool as a success when the company clearly communicates the purpose of using it.
So, good communication is necessary when planning accurate measurement of digital adoption impact. From a practical perspective, employees will be more willing to give up the old way of performing tasks if they understand how the new digital tool will benefit them. This helps to overcome resistance and make employees more eager to embrace change.
3. Use quantitative and qualitative assessments
This is a very important step in measuring digital adoption impact because through quantitative data, you can get a handle on how many users are adopting certain features and performing critical tasks with technology, while qualitative data gives you a clear picture of how users are feeling about the process.
Starting from your baseline data, it’s now possible to measure the distance between where you are and where you want to be, i.e. the desired goal.
For example, the company can see how far away they are from handling the number of support tickets per week that they should be able to using the technology. By knowing this distance, they can take steps to improve digital adoption and measure its impact over time.
4. Use a DAP
Enterprises using a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) can have highly relevant digital adoption metrics at their fingertips. The Insights section of the DAP is a user-friendly place to easily measure digital adoption impact.
Championed by WalkMe, the DAP is a software layer that can be applied to any digital tool, system, platform, or application.
Not only does it improve the user experience and training process for employees learning digital tools, it also provides enterprises with valuable digital adoption insights.
The DAP can help you to measure digital adoption impact through:
- Tracking individual user behavior
- Monitoring adoption of key processes and features over time
- Discovering behaviors that lead to user error and wasted time
- Finding out why users drop off during important processes
- Watching real user session videos
Conclusion: Measuring digital adoption impact is an important part of the digital transformation process. By using a DAP, companies can easily see whether their technology is being used as it should or not.
