The Benefits Of Digital Adoption Platforms
Software businesses today are driven to deliver outstanding Customer Experience. To accomplish this, it is crucial to ensure that customers have a comprehensive understanding of and can effectively utilize the products or services they invest in. This is where a digital adoption platform (DAP) becomes instrumental. But what exactly is a digital adoption platform, and how can it support customer education? In simple terms, a digital adoption platform is a powerful tool that helps customers navigate and learn how to use a software application or digital product effectively through in-app tutorials and messaging.
Imagine your company has just purchased a new software service. While it holds great promise, you might find yourself overwhelmed by its features and functionalities. That's where a digital adoption platform steps in, acting as your friendly guide to help you maximize the value of the software. Rather than sifting through lengthy user manuals or getting lost in a sea of online tutorials, a digital adoption platform simplifies the learning process. It provides interactive and personalized guidance right within the software interface, making it easier for your customers to understand its features, functions, and workflows.
While digital adoption platforms don't always sit directly under the customer education tech stack, they are a vital resource for customer education teams. In this article, we will delve deeper into the ways a digital adoption platform can support customer education.
How Digital Adoption Platforms Maximize Customer Education Outcomes
1. In-App Onboarding
The first, most obvious, benefit you can get out of a digital adoption platform is in-app onboarding. Digital adoption platforms can trigger in-app guides based on user analytics, meaning they know if it's a user's first time logging in, or whether a user has tried out a new product feature. You can utilize this to launch specific guides at specific moments in a user's onboarding or as a result of meeting certain conditions.
For example, you might launch a guide for all new users on their first login that acquaints them with your platform and shows them where to find your support center. Then, you can set guides to launch after other conditions are met that go deeper into your product's functionality. These can be set to simple trigger conditions, like the first time a user visits a certain page, or 30 days after a user first logs in.
In-app onboarding also allows you to deliver targeted and personalized guidance to new clients based on their user persona. Rather than giving every user the same guidance, you can segment your users and add user segments to the conditional logic in your onboarding guides. Be careful not to annoy your users with too much in-app guidance. There are three cardinal sins to in-app onboarding guides:
- Guides that are too long; 10 steps or more means asking for trouble.
- Guides that don't allow users to dismiss them.
- Too many guides, or guides that trigger immediately, one after the other.
2. Leveraging Product Analytics
Next on the list is leveraging product analytics to better evaluate your customer education program. If you're using the Kirkpatrick Model [1] to evaluate your program, you already know the utility of product analytics. The analytics features of a DAP allow you to track and monitor user behavior within your application or website. You can gather data on how customers interact with different features and compare it with course completion or webinar attendance.
By analyzing this data, you can identify patterns, trends, and usage metrics to gain a deeper understanding of customer engagement. For example, you can track the completion rates of tutorials, the time spent on different sections, or the most accessed knowledge base articles. These insights help you pinpoint areas where customers may be facing difficulties or where they show a high level of interest, enabling you to tailor your educational content accordingly.
Watch out for low adoption in product areas users have already been trained on. If they've made the effort to complete the eLearning, read an article, or attend a webinar, yet they still aren't adopting the product, that is a strong indicator that either the training material is missing the mark, or the product isn't solving their problem. Make a habit of checking your Level 3 Behavior metrics [1] to identify any product or training shortfalls.
It's worth noting that before you dive too deeply into your DAP's analytics dashboards, you should make sure that the data is accurate. Set up some time with your analytics manager to get a better understanding of what numbers you should pay attention to.
3. Assessment
The last one on the list might be a bit surprising. Most people think of an assessment as an exam or an essay, but an assessment is essentially a scientific inquiry that tries to figure out how much the learner has learned. According to Evans (2013), the five characteristics [2] of a quality assessment are:
- Content validity
- Reliability
- Fairness
- Student motivation and engagement
- Consequential relevance
Content validity just means the assessment measures what it says it's going to measure. Consequential relevance means the assessment measures worthwhile knowledge or skills. A DAP assessment can meet all of these criteria. After all, what could be a more reliable and valid test of a user's ability to perform a task in your platform than actually performing the task in your platform?
To create an assessment with your digital adoption platform, design a prompt the same way you would design a guide, except rather than telling users what to do, ask them what they should do. In order to distribute these assessments, you may have to get a bit technical. You likely don't want a test to trigger as a result of a user accidentally meeting the right conditions, so rather than automatically activating these assessments, you can create a manual trigger. Some digital adoption platforms allow you to reference permalinks that will launch certain guides. You can reference these permalinks at the end of your course, or send them in a follow-up email after training webinars.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a digital adoption platform (DAP) offers several key benefits to support customer education efforts. Through in-app onboarding, you can provide new clients with a seamless familiarization process tailored to meet their specific needs. The analytics capabilities of a DAP allow you to monitor user behavior, identify pain points, and gather valuable insights on how customers engage with your product.
By analyzing this data, you can optimize and improve your customer education efforts, making them more effective and impactful. Additionally, leveraging assessments within the DAP enables you to create reliable and valid tests of users' abilities to perform tasks in your product. By continuously refining and enhancing your customer education initiatives using a DAP, you can drive customer success, boost adoption rates, and enhance the overall Customer Experience. If you want to learn more about DAPs, begin searching for major vendors. If you're evaluating different DAPs, be aware that they vary considerably, and not all vendors offer analytics or in-app guidance.
References
[1] Using The Kirkpatrick Model To Supercharge Your Customer Academy
[2] Five characteristics of quality educational assessments: Part one
