Top 3 Issues Delaying Digital Adoption
The rapid growth of the technology industry has created a highly competitive landscape where customer adoption is crucial to success for small to medium-sized technology companies. 80% of technology companies now consider customer adoption as a critical success factor.1. With adoption being so important to both companies and the success of their clients, why is it so hard to achieve and what are the barriers facing most technology companies?
1. Resources: Many companies lack the resources and expertise to effectively develop and implement customer adoption strategies and struggle to effectively communicate their value proposition to potential customers. Most companies have focused their staffing on sales and development. They need colleagues in the field selling the product and developers back in the office making improvements and expanding the offering.
This does not leave to much room for colleagues who are focused on change management and user adoption. The hope is that the product is good enough to keep clients engaged, but there is not a focused team to make sure they have the tools they need. In fact, a lack of adoption resources, guides, and communications is one of the top complaints of most account managers when working to implement a product.
2. Cost: Current solutions in the market include hiring in-house teams or buying massive platforms. These options can be costly and do not provide the specialized knowledge and experience required for effective customer adoption. Companies who do not have the staff can hire resources, but consulting firms are costly, billing outrageous hourly rates and not always delivering.
Companies need to find the right ratio of resources creating value add against the cost to create them. Items cannot be one-offs; they need to be reusable across the full client base in order to provide real value.
3. Time: Technology companies face the challenge of allocating resources for developing customer adoption materials with limited budgets and the need to prioritize their spending on core product development. New companies are growing and developing in a fast-paced environment, they need to the ability to quickly turn around materials and get those out to clients. Competing in the industry means they cannot dedicate the resource time to these projects.
Companies need a partner who can come in and quickly create a series of materials, without having to start from scratch. Industry experts who know how people learn and can focus their time executing against deliverables that can be used right away and easily updated over time as the company evolves.
This all means we need to figure out a way to support technology companies as they focus on adoption. 62% of enterprises are “concerned” that a lack of understanding of new applications is increasing risk.2 We cannot support new applications unless we are supporting adoption across the board.
1Walk Me 2022-2023 The State of Digital Adoption
2Gartner