FACT CHECKED
A digital adoption solution (DAS) is a cutting-edge digital training solution that can help businesses rethink and revitalize their employee training efforts.
Though new, digital adoption solutions – also known as digital adoption platforms (DAPs) – are skyrocketing in popularity.
As we will discover, there are good reasons for this:
- Digital adoption solutions completely change the employee training landscape, delivering better results in less time
- With the right digital adoption strategy, organizations can cut technical support budgets, shrink training timelines, and boost employee productivity metrics
- Organizations can avoid becoming mired in a mire of “endless training” that delivers mediocre results
To start off, though, let’s look at what a DAS is and does.
According to Gartner, The Digital Adoption Solution (DAS) Is an Innovative, Effective Employee Training Solution
A digital adoption solution (DAS), according to the well-known research firm Gartner, is an employee training platform that leverages cutting edge technology to:
- Improve employee productivity
- Save time and money
In their research, they focused specifically on sales teams and sales tools, such as CRM platforms.
However, CRM platforms are just the beginning.
A digital adoption solutions, as we will soon see, can be used to train employees on a wide variety of other tools, above and beyond sales software.
Later, we will examine several use cases in detail.
But first, let’s explore exactly how these training solutions work.
Top Features of the DAS
Digital adoption solutions revolutionize the way organizations train their employees through a few key features.
These include:
- In-app training. A DAS layers itself atop the target software, giving trainers the ability to teach employees directly inside the application. This allows users to immediately apply what they are learning, which improves their knowledge retention and accelerates productivity.
- Interactive walkthroughs. The digital adoption platform can walk users through a series of tasks, one step at a time. This allows even brand-new users to learn complex tasks and become productive from their very first day on the job.
- Task automation. Certain digital adoption solutions, such as WalkMe’s digital adoption platform, can perform repetitive tasks automatically, with zero human intervention. This can free up employees’ time, while also greatly increasing productivity.
- Software analytics. Software analytics monitor how users engage with a tool. This can help trainers better understand sticking points, training needs, and it can also help them prevent errors.
These features combine to create a training platform that dramatically outperforms other training methods.
Advantages of the DAS Over Existing Training Approaches
Most training solutions suffer from some deficit that prevents them from delivering real results in an enterprise environment.
For instance, in-person training is personalized and interactive, but it cannot be scaled cost-effectively.
Other training approaches, such as online teaching via learning management systems, can scale – yet they are not interactive and cannot offer immediate feedback to users.
In each case, business results suffer.
In-person training is simply too expensive.
And online teaching solutions do not offer enough flexibility, immediacy, or personalization for the modern organization.
Digital adoption solutions, however, can.
These platforms offer many advantages when it comes to employee learning, such as:
- Interactivity. In-product training is interactive, and interactivity improves the employee experience, keeping them engaged, interested, and productive.
- Context-based learning. A major problem with most training is the forgetting curve. That is, the more time between learning something and applying it, the more likely people are to forget what they have studied. Digital adoption solutions beat this problem by teaching directly at the moment of need.
- Personalization. One-to-many teaching is necessarily generalized. After all, the more people that are learning a topic, the broader the curriculum must be in order to meet those learners’ needs. Unfortunately, this approach sacrifices relevance. Digital adoption solutions, however, deliver exactly the right information at exactly the right time, reducing waste and keeping information relevant and personalized.
- Scalability. Many training approaches cannot be scaled cost-effectively. On-demand learning content, for instance, requires continual updating and production costs can be prohibitive. Digital adoption solutions, however, require the same infrastructure, regardless of the organization’s size.
There are certainly other benefits – a DAS can reduce technical support costs, accelerate employee productivity, decrease frustration, and so forth.
For more information on why these solutions outperform other training approaches, consider reading other blog articles that cover digital adoption solutions.
Use Cases
Here are just a few of the many ways that an organization can use a DAS to improve its workforce’s performance:
- Employee training. Employee training is one of the most fundamental ways that a DAS can add value to the organization’s bottom line. It can complement, supplement, or even replace many in-house training methods, greatly increasing the outcomes of existing training efforts.
- Employee productivity. In many cases, training efforts deliver sub-par results, which can cause employee proficiency levels to stagnate. Organizations can turn to digital adoption solutions in order to improve productivity levels.
- Increasing software utilization. If employees only use a software application sporadically – or if they only use some of its features – then the organization will only realize part of the value of its software investment.
These are some of the ways that an enterprise can use a DAS to increase its workforce’s performance.
For more information on digital adoption, digital adoption solutions, as well as digital transformation and the digital workplace, visit our digital adoption blog.
