User Adoption - Digital Transformation Program
Organisations make investments in technology to achieve specific business goals. These goals can range from increasing the market share, improving productivity, improving profit margins, or streamlining the business processes. Before making an investment decision, business leaders would like to know that what will be the Return-On-Investments (ROI) and how it will be measured? As soon as we hear the word ROI, what comes in our mind is the monetary benefits the organisation wants to achieve from the investment in the technology.
In today’s digital world, the organisation makes investments in digital technologies to provide a better experience to their customers, to gain better customer insights, to stay ahead of the competitors in the market, and so on. Measuring ROI on digital investments is tricky. For example, the organisation develops a portal for their customers, allowing them to view their products detail and place an order anytime, anywhere from any device. The organisation may define the X number of customers registering on the portal within Y months as one of the success criteria. Do we really think is this the right KPI to measure the success? According to me, the answer is NO. For the organisation, true return-on-investments will be the percentage of orders placed through the new digital solution.
In other words, the greater the digital solution is adopted effectively and used efficiently by customers, the higher would be the return on investment of the digital solution.
There is no doubt, the main focus while finalising the investment on the digital technology, must be on developing robust, user-friendly, and intuitive digital tools. However, the dimension of USER ADOPTION is more often ignored in such projects. An effective User Adoption strategy plays an important role in the success of the digital transformation projects. Questions on how the business will take the solution to the market, when, and who will be the solution ambassadors - must be answered to ensure the success of digital transformation projects.
For the success of the digital solution projects, the USER ADOPTION strategy must be planned effectively and executed with a comprehensive user adoption strategy that analyses key parameters
The User Adoption strategy document must include the affected audience groups including impacted user groups, solution ambassadors, support staff; analysis of the market condition, the communication channels to create awareness about the solution and communicate benefits, identifying instructional design approach to train the staff, designing rewards and recognition strategy to motivate the solution ambassadors and support staff. The user adoption strategy must also include the mechanism to collect and analyse the feedback at the periodic intervals and the feedback implementation strategy. Defining an effective user adoption strategy is a group effort and hence the identification of the right stakeholders and their involvement from time to time is a must. The stakeholder groups, which must be involved in the process of developing the user adoption strategy are Human Resource(HR), Marketing team, Senior Management, PMO, Business partners, Legal department, Worker Councils, and so on...
To conclude, a better user adoption strategy helps the organisations to get quality customers quickly who become ambassadors of the digital solution and help the organisation achieve better ROI in a short span of time.
