“Digital adoption solutions are used to improve the adoption of multiple tools across the organization. The software walks a user through business processes across multiple products. It provides a consistent user experience, eliminating in some cases manual entry.” – Gartner 

Evolution Of DAS

“The journey of Digital Adoption Solutions has been incredible until now and the path it is heading towards is more exciting than before,” said Khadim Batti.

The timeline of DAS has seen two paths in the technology and market life cycle perspective and both these paths have been highly influential on each other. The journey of the earliest DAS tool began with a focus primarily on digital guidance and product navigation. These were quick solutions to solve user challenges at an interface level. And the customers it attracted were early SMBs and niche solution adopters who were looking out for a solution for their websites or software product. The mid-2010, however, saw an emerging challenge in enterprise product adoption. As IT budgets increased, the number of applications swelled and the need to quantify ROI became more important. This is when DAS came into the eyes of larger enterprises, and the market narrative began to shift from navigation and task completion to online employee experience. 2019, however, was a landmark when Gartner formally recognized Digital Adoption Solution as a category with many large enterprises embracing Digital Adoptions Solution to solve their user adoption challenges.

The evolution of DAS in such a short period of time is nothing short of extraordinary and its growing presence can be perceived through these numbers: 

• 200+ Fortune 500 customers and 450+ enterprise coverage in 3 years.
• $580 million investments in DAS providers.
• 40+ DAS providers listed in G2 listings.

System integrators and software vendors have also started playing a key role in the growth of the DAS landscape, either by partnering with DAS vendors. At Whatfix we are proud to partner with more than 30 SIs and software vendors who take us to the market as their preferred OEM partner or as a service provider at the global stage. 

Growth Aligned to Macro Trends – The Rise of Cloud 

To understand the staggering growth of DAS, we need to look no further than the macro trends that are prospering the way businesses and people operate on a daily basis. The growth of the cloud and SaaS model is one notable example. 

“Investment in cloud infrastructure among enterprises is through the roof and it is only a matter of time before all applications are solely cloud-based,” Batti said.

Gartner predicts the cloud services market to hit $331 billion and around $150 billion of worldwide cloud services revenue will be attributed to the SaaS in the year 2022. These numbers had a definite impact on how organizations view the adoption of cloud-based software:

• 50% increase in the overall spend per company on Saas products.
• 30% increase YoY in the unique number of apps in usage per company.
• 288 software applications in use, on average across enterprises.

Growth Aligned to Macro Trends – Remote Work

As talent becomes more global and distributed, organizations can no longer shackle themselves to the old ways of working. The recent unfortunate events of COVID-19 are now hastening a change that was already rearing steadily – “remote work”, which is now becoming the new normal. 

The pandemic has changed how we look at working from home — or for that matter, anywhere but the office. It is redefining and redesigning the ‘workplace,’ with technology bridging the gap between employers, employees, and consumers all over the world.

Growth Aligned to Macro Trends – Future of Work

Automation: According to Gartner, 69% of the routine work that is currently done by managers will be completely automated by 2024. And automation will become a key ingredient of all tasks as a part of digital adoption.

Reskilling & Upskilling: Changing technology requires constant learning and training since users need to be kept abreast of the new ways of utilizing technology to improve their productivity and efficiency. 

On-Demand Experience: As remote work becomes the norm and digital tools become indispensable. Users will expect the remote experience to be very close to the traditional office experience for practices like onboarding, training, meetings, discussion, support, etc. Hence organizations need to create an on-demand experience that is self-served. 

Although these trends existed before the pandemic hit us, the post-pandemic changes have really accelerated them. In order to meet the changing ways of working and align with the new norm – remote working, enterprises have been left with no choice but to prioritize their digital transformation efforts. Competitive pressure, the need to stay relevant, and survival are the new key drivers for every organization’s digital transformation efforts. 

A recent survey of directors, CEOs, and senior executives found that digital transformation is one of their top concerns, yet 70% of all digital transformation initiatives do not meet their goals. The major reason for this failure is the underutilization of most software due to a lack of user adoption.

How can Organizations Make their Transformation Initiatives Successful?

According to Khadim, “Digital Adoption Solutions are perfectly poised to play a key tool in driving change, especially in this unfortunate time.” By design, DAS is inherently user-centric and it prioritizes digital experience. And as a driver of adoption, productivity, and efficiency DAS is closely aligned and shares the same result areas with digital transformation. 

Whatfix Impact on Enterprise Application Adoption

The impacts are almost immediate with the benefits being felt across multiple teams and the key result areas. Significant improvements have been seen in data quality and a drastic reduction in support cost. 

DAS in Action – Experian Case Study

Experian is a leading global information services company that made a significant investment in Salesforce, empowering its salespeople to manage their business and client relationships effectively. Despite a strong training set-up, users struggled to leverage Salesforce in their sales process with initial training emphasis heavily focused on how to use the tool. Heavy customization to Salesforce resulted in a diverse, high number of processes implemented.

Experian’s training team decided that interactive, on-demand training that helps users in the flow of work was the best way forward. 

Adopting ‘Whatfix powered’ on-screen guidance technology has been game-changing for Experian in delivering training for both onboarding and reinforcement. ‘How to’ training became on-demand as users got assistance while ‘doing’. This had a huge impact on the approach to Salesforce and connected systems training, with dramatic cost savings benefits.

The Impact of Whatfix

Here are a few metrics Whatfix helped Experian achieve: 

• 50% reduction in training time.
• User adoption time: From 7 to 2.5 months.
• Data quality increased by 20%.
• Onboarding modules were reduced from 19 to 6.
• 60% reduction in the content creation time.
• Time to launch SF in new BU: From 2.5 to 1 month.

Challenges for DAS Vendors

Although DAS is hotly emerging into the mainstream technical technology landscape, it does not mean that it comes without any hurdles or challenges. Here are a few challenges faced by the DAS vendors: 

• Being an emerging category, there is limited awareness and exposure amongst buyers.
• Identifying the correct decision-makers in a cross-functional, shared enterprise, and convincing buy-in from stakeholders. 
• Justifying DAS investment and expected ROI in addition to software costs.
• Keeping pace with emerging technologies.

The Future with DAS

“The future of DAS seems to be stronger than ever with the incorporation of the latest technologies like artificial intelligence, automation, and contextualization capabilities.”, Khadim added.  

Since Gartner announced the importance of Digital Adoption Solutions as the future of enterprise development, digital optimization has entered a new realm. Companies can adopt DAS to seamlessly transition into digital havens. It can drastically transform organizations by providing personalized, contextual tools, and walkthroughs to streamline training and onboarding efforts without taking the employee out of their workflow. With a DAS, instead of breaking away from important tasks, employees receive guidance in real-time so they get the training they need, when they need it (not more, and not less) – meaning workers can spend more time on productive work.

Here are a few of the benefits DAS has to offer: 

Personalization and Automation 

• Improved experience contextualization accuracy with AI.
• Bots enabled conversational tasks.
• Predictive automation with Machine Learning.

Enterprise-wide Adoption

• Adoption of DAS beyond core teams.
• New leadership roles in employee experience.
• Dedicated centers of excellence to influence application adoption.

Employee Experience

• Augmented training.
• Onboard and get trained remotely.
• Centralized help and support content.
• DA as a virtual and cross-layer application.

So this is how digital adoption has evolved in the last few years and how it is helping enterprises with digital adoption, training and learning, information searching, and using the software to its full potential. The journey has been amazing until now and we believe that the future is going to be very exciting as well. 

If you have any questions or want to learn about how Whatfix Digital Adoption Solutions can help you with your Technology Adoption goals, you can schedule a demo with us!