It’s clear to everyone that we’re living in a digital age. In a time when people expect to run their lives through their smartphones, competitive enterprises have no choice but to adopt digital tools.
Like most enterprises, you’re probably in the throes of a “digital transformation.” But also like other enterprises, you probably encountered unexpected obstacles in the digital race.
If your enterprise is struggling with digital transformation, or even finding it hard to maintain your market share and keep up with the competition, there might be an unexpected cause: it’s because you’re ignoring digital adoption.
Digital adoption is the often-overlooked, but utterly vital companion to success in the digital era. Gartner has already recognized digital adoption tools as an important and separate category for business tech.
In a nutshell, digital adoption means that everyone, from managers to employees to customers, is using your digital tools to their fullest extent. Without digital adoption, your enterprise is guaranteed to struggle to meet all the rest of its business goals.
Not convinced? Here’s a more detailed explanation of why your enterprise will limp along without digital adoption, while all the rest of your competition races past.
Without digital adoption, employee engagement withers and dies
Picture the scenario: your partner just replaced your old TV screen with the newest, top of the line digital monitor.
It can get every channel, offers movies on demand, and automatically adjusts brightness to the room’s lighting.
But they didn’t show you how to use it, and you can’t find the instructions, so you can’t find the channel showing the NFL game.
Instead of feeling grateful to your partner for the gift, you feel more and more resentful every time you miss the game.
It’s the same for your employees when you give them the newest business tools without ensuring proper digital adoption.
They feel a growing sense of frustration and resentment because they don’t know how to use the new tools, eventually making them act like this:
Their motivation drops and employee engagement dries up, affecting everything from customer service to product development to sales and marketing.
Without digital adoption, productivity plummets
When you introduce new business software, or even update existing programs, without ensuring digital adoption, you’ll make it difficult for your employees to do their jobs.
Your new digital tools automate and streamline business processes and workflows for greater efficiency, but your employees don’t know how to use them.
When they don’t know how to use business tools effectively, your employees are much more likely to bypass them altogether and carry out tasks manually instead, or use out of date software versions that are slow and clunky.
They end up wasting time and energy on processes that should have taken half the time to complete, and you lose out on productivity.
Without digital adoption, you lose money on expensive tech
When you buy expensive new technology, cutting edge digital tools, and upgrade your business software to the newest versions, it’s an investment of both time and money.
Your enterprise paid a significant amount to select the best tools for your needs, install and configure the new solution, and safely remove the old technology, but without digital adoption, you don’t see the RoI that you expected.
Paying all that money for a more efficient workforce and satisfied customers is one thing; paying all that money for tools that go unused is quite another.
It might seem like the most important investment is in setting up the right tools and apps for your enterprise, but the relatively small cost of an effective digital adoption solution enables ROI on the entire affair.
Without digital adoption, you lose customers
Digital adoption doesn’t just affect your employees; it affects your customers too.
You might have invested in a new members-only website or self-service user portal to make it faster for your customers to access information, carry out tasks like making payments or checking products, or to interact with your company on demand.
But if you ignore the customer onboarding process and overlook digital adoption, you’ll end up pushing customers away instead of serving them better.
Customers don’t have the patience to work out how to use new apps, and quickly grow frustrated when they can’t use the old, familiar ways, increasing churn rates.
What’s more, employees who are disenchanted with your new digital tools won’t have the capacity to guide customers through the new processes.
You’ll end up hemorrhaging customers for the want of a little digital adoption forethought.
Without digital adoption, you’ll miss business goals
Most enterprises introduce new digital tools or go through digital transformation in order to boost capacity or meet some other advanced business goals.
When you skip over digital adoption, you’ll end up missing those business goals.
Enterprise predictions that are based on the effective use of new digital tools, increased employee productivity, and improved customer engagement are doomed to failure without the digital adoption.
Missing business goals can end up derailing your enterprise so much that it can take years to get back to where you were before the introduction of new tools.
Digital adoption is your enterprise’s secret to continued growth
Digital adoption underpins efficient business practices and smooth workflows.
Without digital adoption, you’ll end up losing money through low RoI on expensive tools and updates, customer drop-off in the face of confusing digital processes, increased employee frustration, and plummeting productivity.
Ignoring digital adoption removes your ability to deliver on confident business predictions, leaving your enterprise struggling to maintain your market share, let alone to scale and thrive.