FACT CHECKED
Astute leaders understand that keeping enterprises meaningful and competitive is their number one priority today.
Only by doing so will your business deliver top-notch products and services.
Therefore, every piece of technology your company uses or deploys must run smoothly and be highly productive.
We all know that well-implemented technology boosts worker productivity. According to a report published by VMWare, 87% of CIOs believe that digital tools will boost companies’ revenue by at least 5% in 3 years.
But technological integration leads disrupts company workflow and culture. So understanding how to manage change is vital to successful implementation.
Here are the most common digital adoption barriers that enterprises encounter and how to overcome them to achieve digital enlightenment.
3 common digital adoption barriers
1. Resistance to change
Your company has developed its own habits and culture. The everyday routines, tools, processes, and relationships are central elements of this culture, whether it’s the way employees make their morning coffee or how they use the CRM.
Therefore, when you decide to introduce a new digital tool, you need to keep in mind that it will introduce discomfort and unfamiliarity into the lives of your workers. In fact, in today’s rapidly evolving digital workplace, it could even trigger digital change fatigue.
It’s natural to react to change with resistance. Research done on employee resistance to organizational change by Andrei Serban and Cristina Iorga (2016) notes that 87% of business process engineering projects face failure due to resistance and lack of understanding around the changes.
That is why it should be your priority to make the benefits of upcoming changes clear to your people.
One tactic for coping with resistance to change is participation. Involve end users in the process of the technology’s selection, installation, introduction, and assimilation so they can take ownership and provide valuable feedback.
2. Educating employees
The next of our digital adoption barriers is to do with the learning process.
No matter how much time you spend researching and comparing different offers on the market, choosing your ERP or other system, and installing it throughout the business, the desired productivity benefits will not materialize until you teach your people how to use it properly.
This is where many companies fail. Training brings with it a whole host of barriers to successful digital adoption.
● Limited training budget: Many enterprises begin on the back foot by not allocating enough budget to the education process required to get users to adopt technology successfully. Don’t rely only on the materials that come with the tool. Good training will ensure your ROI. And the faster workers fully adopt the new tool, the faster they will be able to contribute 100%.
● Ineffective, unmemorable training: Dozens of pages of manuals and boring webinars may serve only to reinforce the natural resistance in employees. You should always try and search for an interactive and time-efficient training solution, so that learners are more engaged and more likely to remember the information.
● Limited training time: Different people have different existing knowledge bases and rates of learning. Digital laggards are going to take a long time to fully adopt new digital tools and become as productive with them as they should be. But enterprises rarely take this time into consideration, providing less time and less training than is required because training, and time spent in training, costs money.
3. The user experience (UX)
The second of our digital adoption barriers leads seamlessly into the third: the user experience.
Despite the fact that more than half of the world’s population has access to the Internet, not everyone is tech savvy.
Even fewer people have the time or inclination to devote to learning all the features, navigation, and capability of your digital product or platform. Nevertheless, they will have to go on a UX journey in order to engage with you. And your company’s job is to make this ride smooth.
That is why you always need to keep in mind the level of technical skill in your target audience. Walkthrough guides, support services, and help centers are as crucial to your business success as your product being on the market or your website being live.
Complete digital adoption comes as a result of a fantastic digital UX. This will make your customer happy, and by extension, loyal.
A Digital Adoption Platform allows you to jump these barriers
On the plus side, these recurring digital adoption barriers caused one extraordinary solution to emerge on the market.
The Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) exists in order to make your company’s technological implementation successful. DAP is a software layer that merges with your new digital accelerator to make its integration smarter and quicker.
It provides personalized training and walkthrough guides for users of any new digital tool. Using machine learning technology, the DAP educates your users about the tool they’re using as they’re using it.
The outcomes are more productive employees, happier more loyal customers, and better return on your technology investment.
