Adoption Landscape Gap
When it comes to employee adoption there are plenty of tools available for both the technology provider and their customers to help support adoption. On the provider side we have Customer Service Platforms that help companies track their customers and how successful they are in using their product. On the customer side we have Digital Adoption Platforms that provide everything you need to know to use a tool and track your progress along the way. Both of these areas have expanded and grown greatly over past few years and created two mountains in the adoption space, but with that growth they have left a valley between them of unanswered needs.
Customer Service Platforms work as a cross between a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool and a standard support tool. They help customers to answer questions, track buying cycles and present data that can be used to help support clients. Customer service software is a set of tools used to collect, organize, respond to, and report on customer support requests and that’s the problem. It’s a great source of data for what your customers may be doing, but it only kicks in once customers are having trouble, it does not work to address issues before they arise. Additionally, once you find an issue all it does is identify it, there is no content present to solve it for that client and future clients on your platform.
As with any large system, Customer Service Platforms can have extensive setup processes to get the data right, and without that provide you with inaccurate data or unhelpful analytics. With the focus on out of the box features there is limited capability that forces a large learning curve as you dedicate colleagues to learning someone else’s technology in order to help your customers use yours. Overall, the process may be too costly and time consuming for most small companies, and they instead focus on more practical area, customer sales via a simple CRM and technical support via the standard channels.
Adoption often happens outside of a system with customers communicating to their teams, training new colleagues, and speaking to each other on the value of your platform, when to use it, what features are important and how the company can grow with it. All these narratives are missed by Customer Service Platforms and can create adoption that slowly fades away before it is every able to be tracked in a system. If a reduction in licenses is your first indication of poor adoption, you have already lost the war.
On the other side of the landscape are Digital Adoption Platforms, which fall into the same types of issue, just on the other side of the sale process. Digital Adoption Platforms require your customer to map out how to use a tool and build step by step instructions for their colleagues to follow. In addition to being time consuming and expensive, these platforms run into issues as content is updated with new features and cannot keep up with the amount of applications most companies add each year, instead focusing on the largest or most complex.
Digital Adoption Platforms do offer a few pre-built options, but only for the major players, which fall apart during customization and leave small and medium companies with new software or technology out of the picture. If you have not provided your customer with all they need to run your platform, communicate about it and training colleagues, how do you expect them to adopt it? Why should we expect a client to spend their time and resources in order to make sense of your platform. If the customer is making an investment in your platform in order to foster adoption it does not bode well for the usability and future engagement with your tool across the organization.
What companies needs in an intermediary. A company that works between the mountains of Customer Success and Digital Adoption platforms with a focus on results. No fancy platforms, no complex build outs, just tried and true content, based on what has worked across industries for decades. New technology companies need a partner who can help them to create a set of adoption materials that they can hand off to their customers to drive adoption. The industry is in need of training, communications, and engagement materials that companies can use to get colleagues excited about using the platform, engaged as new features are developed and start making an impact on day one.
This type of offering saves both the company and its customers money, resources, and headaches over the long run. It builds adoption to a platform so people can get back to doing what they do best, the jobs we hired them for. Using the new technology purchased as expected to make their lives easier and their jobs more efficient. It’s a win for everyone. This is Adoption Enterprises.