digital adoption journey

Digital adoption

What is digital adoption? (+ benefits & challenges by department)

Sarah chohan.

Digital adoption encompasses the learning journey users embark on when embracing new software and technologies. This process typically occurs during the onboarding of new users, the integration of digital tools, or the implementation of change management initiatives. Digital adoption is ultimately the state where users fully comprehend and effectively utilize the capabilities of their digital tools. In essence, it signifies users’ ability to leverage the functionalities and advantages of both their tools and the associated change processes.

In practice, digital adoption is the outcome of continuous change management , onboarding, and training efforts, especially when incorporating new changes, software features, or updates. Ensuring that users’ learning and skills remain up-to-date directly influences the long-term success and sustainability of your software implementations.

Consider digital adoption the GPS in your digital transformation journey . You wouldn’t plan an expedition without an itinerary, so neither should your users. Together, change management and digital adoption play a crucial role in the implementation and sustainability of digital transformation.

Digital adoption allows organizations to:

• Close the digital skills gap
• Prevent skills obsolescence
• Align employee skills, corporate training, and business goals
• Implement sustainable digital transformation
• Measure digital transformation ROI

Why does digital transformation requires digital adoption?

The global response to Covid-19 accelerated an era of digital transformation. Overnight organizations shifted business priorities towards cloud-based, SaaS, and collaborative solutions to ensure the future of their operations. The vast majority of organizations were unprepared to implement not just one but multiple new tools at once, and all… while remote. This acceleration of digital transformation and deployment of digital solutions, mean digital adoption is now critical to organizational success.

Gartner’s Research VP, Sid Nag , notes, ‘The events of last year allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission-critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud…the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs’ interest in the cloud.’

Successful digital transformation drives both the performance and competitive advantage of organizations:

• Short term: digital technologies and employee digital tools improve productivity and customer experience .
• Medium-term: digital transformation creates new growth opportunities and business model innovation.
• Long-term: overcoming the initial process of digital transformation paves the way for continuous, sustainable success and further innovation .  

(Source: BCG )

Who is concerned with digital adoption?

Successful transformation poses different challenges to stakeholders across an organization, all of which can be addressed with digital adoption:

• A CIO concerned with the ROI of your tools (improving the day-to-day use of tools, improving user adoption, lowering support requests , etc.) 
• A Head of Change interested in promoting new and sustainable processes ( reducing resistance to change ) 
• An HR Director trying to standardize processes and reduce skills obsolescence (keep skills up to date)
• A Learning and development leader exploring new ways to optimize training (remote onboarding, reducing training costs) 
• A Purchasing Director trying to facilitate the use of procurement tools for occasional users
• Any other stakeholder looking to get the most out of their digital tools 

What are the benefits of digital adoption?

In today’s business landscape and the broader view of your organization, successful digital adoption is beneficial to your organization, employees, and customers for a variety of reasons.

a) to commit users long term 

b) to increase the time to value of your users

c) to instill the value of digital transformation into your organization

d) to create a digital corporate culture

e) to lower costs (training, support, operational costs, etc.) 

f) to improve user retention

g) to decrease, mitigate and eliminate software abandonment

h) to improve workflows and internal efficiency 

i) to create sustainable digital transformation

j) to be competitive in your industry

Organizations track digital adoption as a metric to maximize digital transformation ROI, improve software onboarding and training implementation and reduce organizational training costs. But new technology is only half the solution. Simply put, technology is only profitable once users can extract its value. 

94% of employees would stay with a firm for longer if it invested in their learning and development. ( Rallyware , 2021)

How does a DAP benefit departments in an organization?

Human resources department, learning & development department, purchasing department, change management department, how to drive digital adoption.

Any organizational change or transformation should be driven by planning, especially when implementing new technology. Achieving successful digital adoption amongst your users requires strategic thinking from the get-go.

A bad first impression can be detrimental. User onboarding is the introduction to a tool and the first stage of adoption. Users form their initial judgment based on implementation, user experience, ease of use, and practically to functionality. If your users experience difficulty at this stage, it increases the probability of software abandonment (user churn) later down the line.

Luckily, a digital adoption checklist can help drive successful adoption

• Introduce the change and its value to all stakeholders
• Communicate with users at each stage of a change process
• Facilitate a mindset and culture around change (behaviors, skills, attitudes) 
• Develop a change management strategy
• Implement a digital adoption platform (DAP)
• Assemble an all-in-one resource library – for centralized access to guidance and support
• Deliver personalized training 
• Use the ‘learning by doing’ methodology
• Measure user analytics and performance  
• Collect user feedback

What are digital adoption challenges?

Traditional user onboarding and training can be time-consuming, expensive, and more than often unsuccessful. 

New hires must complete an average of 54 onboarding activities. ( SaplingHR , 2021)

These challenges lead to lower rates of adoption, additional training, and in the worst-case scenario, software abandonment. The task is even more challenging as software stacks evolve and scale over time. 

How to identify your challenges

What are your current training methods? Are users engaged in the process? How do you measure the success of your training? 

Inadequate training methods : Classroom training sessions alongside inefficient demos create a margin for error, including information retention, disengagement, and repeat training. Coupled with long-winded training materials (PDFs, PPTs, certification tests, archaic LMSs), users lose the right to take in information at their own pace.

Is your strategy defined from start to finish? Are all your stakeholders involved in the project conception and continually updated throughout the project?

Lack of change management strategy : Lack of strategy means unprepared, uneducated, and reluctant employees working between old and new systems on top of their existing workload. 

Do you have an established user support system in place? Is support at the core of your digital user experience, and is there effective two-way communication?

Resistance to change : A lack of strategy results in employee resistance to change which is both the worst-case scenario and the most common outcome of introducing new software or change processes. Resistance is due to factors that include: poor communication, fear of failure, and training time constraints.

Do your software investments contain analytics to support ROI? Do you have digitized, real-time access to product and user insights?

Measuring user adoption : Conventional onboarding and training results are difficult to measure and inaccurate for ROI based on classroom learning, documents, and certifications. And unless individual tools or additional software contain analytics, it’s also measured once, giving organizations no overview of the relationship between user and software from that point forward.

What is a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP)?

A d igital adoption platform (DAP) is software specifically designed to navigate users through their digital tools day-to-day, with complete autonomy. Users benefit from on-demand training guides and 24/7 access to support to facilitate their engagement. 

Platform features include step-by-step in-application walkthroughs – providing organizations with an interactive environment to onboard, train, and communicate with their users. 

A DAP is an autonomous training tool with full remote capabilities, real-time analytics, and adaptable training guides that can target specific users and user needs.

What makes a digital adoption platform a must have, compared with other training solutions is its ability to embed over any web-based application. It allows users to train and work simultaneously, directly inside their software, and reduce distractions. The interactive system of guides facilitates “learning by doing” – a practical learning methodology used to educate users while they work.

A digital adoption platform is a key tool to closing the digital skills gap, reducing skills obsolescence, and implementing a culture of employee development from the day of onboarding.

Digital adoption platform features

In-application interactive walkthroughs

An interactive walkthrough is much like a virtual guided tour, with one exception. The user manually guides themselves through an action-activated sequence of guides, tooltips, and popups revealing new information step-by-step.   

Taking place in-application, interactive walkthroughs are a more effective way to engage and educate users during onboarding.

Microlearning

A microlearning approach transforms training into bite-size micro objectives. Training modules range from 30 seconds to 3 minutes in short, frequent bursts of information activated by the user. Simple and targeted information helps facilitate maximum engagement.

Resource library

All learning resources are centralized and accessible at the time of need. The resource library only displays what is relevant to a particular learning path at one time, improving efficiency and time.

Personalized and customizable content

In the learning process, it’s vital to reach the right users with the right content. Ensure users only receive relevant and tailored training specific to their profile.

Customizable training

Adapt and customize training workflows based on user analytics, code free.

24/7 Support

Implement user support on any software or application, including CRM, ERP, HR application, in-house tools, etc.

Multi-project management

Manage multiple projects at once with a dashboard overview of all your users, projects, and guides. 

User analytics

Measure user and content performance in real-time by tracking the interactions between users and their resources.

About Lemon Learning

L aunched in 2014, Lemon Learning is a leading SaaS solution, specialized in driving the adoption of enterprise software (CRM, ERP, Procurement, HRIS…). Our approach integrates interactive guides and contextual tutorials seamlessly into the application interface, empowering users to navigate and leverage software with ease.

With Lemon Learning you can analyze software performance, optimize usage, and reinforce its effectiveness. Key benefits for Lemon Learning customers include:

• 50% reduction in support costs on average 
• 75% reduction in face-to-face training time
• 70% reduction in time to create and update content

  Lemon Learning is compatible with all web based software.

A propos de Lemon Learning

Lancé en 2014, Lemon Learning est une solution web, leader en France, dans l’adoption des logiciels d’entreprise (CRM/ERP/Achat/SIRH…) grâce à des guides interactifs et des tutoriels contextuels directement intégrés dans l’interface de l’application.

La solution Lemon Learning permet également d’analyser les performances   de vos logiciels métiers pour optimiser et renforcer leur utilisation.

Les avantages pour les clients de Lemon learning sont nombreux :

• 50% de réduction sur les coûts de support en moyenne chez nos clients
• 75% de réduction du temps de formation en présentiel
• 70% de gain de temps dans la création et la mise à jour du contenu

Enfin, Lemon Learning est compatible avec tous les logiciels webs.

Quiénes somos

Lanzada en 2014, Lemon Learning es una solución web, líder en la adopción de software empresarial (CRM/ERP/Compras/HRIS…) gracias a guías interactivas y tutoriales contextuales directamente integrados en la interfaz de la aplicación.

La solución Lemon Learning también le permite analizar el rendimiento de su software empresarial para optimizar y fortalecer su uso.

Las ventajas para los clientes son numerosas:

• Reducción del 50% en los costos de soporte en promedio con nuestros clientes
• Reducción del 75% del tiempo de formación presencial
• 70% de ahorro de tiempo en la creación y actualización de contenido

Lemon Learning es compatible con todo el software web.

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• August 20, 2021
• Digital Adoption
• Reading Time: 5 minutes

The Fastest Way to Drive Digital Adoption in Your Organization

Table of contents.

Technology has made our workflows more dynamic and fast-paced. Almost all firms and businesses, regardless of industry, sector, or business function, are now digital and are attempting to employ new technologies to streamline procedures.  

The last decade or two have seen exponential levels of technological advancements and change which is possibly the biggest revolution since the industrial one. The business world is undergoing an unprecedented rate of technology adoption because it is has proven to be a highly efficient way of selling goods, services, and even running organizations.

This can be easily witnessed by the migration of almost every product and service, whether it is groceries you want to buy or a retirement house.  

Modern businesses are all about the digital space. Today, businesses use a wide variety of smart technologies to help streamline their operations. This leads to an efficient and improved productivity index. Digital Adoption simply helps companies achieve their short-term and long-term goals in a much more efficient manner. 

What is Digital Adoption?

Digital Adoption is a process of empowering technology users to experience the full potential of the application that they use. It ensures that the users adhere to the designed process to unleash the maximum potential of any web-based application.

In other words, Digital Adoption allows your workforce to leverage enterprise applications to the fullest. 

How to drive digital adoption?  

Digital Adoption journey can be scary. Especially for organizations that have been following processes in a specific way for a long time. In such cases, the idea of change, especially when it comes to accepting a whole new application, can be off-putting.

But there are things you can do to help make Digital Adoption more seamless Here are some effective Digital Adoption strategies  that you can follow to drive Digital Adoption: 

• Develop a Transformation Vision 
• Make the technology accessible 
• Overcome change resistance 
• Communicate effectively 

A. Develop a Transformation Vision

The first and foremost task for anyone trying to drive Digital Adoption  and transformation is to lay out a coherent vision that answers this fundamental question: what are the business outcomes that underpin digitization? Random digital transformation will waste money, frustrate employees, and could end up being a massive and expensive blunder.  

Employees of an organization need to have proper education on Digital Adoption in order to ensure a seamless transition. Employees can be briefed on reasons for Digital Adoption, how it helps them with daily operations, and so on.  

B. Make the technology accessible 

Accessibility plays a critical role in helping employees learn new tools and adapt to change. Typically, employees wait for email responses, support tickets, or sift through resources to find answers to any queries they may have.

However, while the purpose of  digital innovation  or introducing new technology is to increase production and efficiency, inaccessible training has the opposite impact in most cases.  

To successfully drive Digital Adoption or adoption of any technology, the most important thing an organization needs to do is to make the technology accessible to the target audience. Build and create infrastructure to make it simple, convenient, easy, accessible, and seamless for the end-users to learn, understand, use and experience the new application. 

C. Overcome change resistance 

One of the main roadblocks in the process of Digital Adoption is employee resistance to change. Human beings are instinctively afraid of what they don’t understand, so as a transformation leader, the quickest way to drive Digital Adoption  in your organization is to dispel this fear. 

People who can’t adapt to changes can make the transition harder or prevent a company from taking advantage of a trend or emerging opportunity. 

Successful Digital Adoption is dependent upon new ways of thinking and working, which, at many organizations, requires a cultural shift. Employees have to be given not only the tools and training to keep up with these changes but must buy into them and view them as a necessity. CTOs and change officers are responsible for messaging and the framing of these changes.  

D. Communicate effectively 

Before even implementing the change, host an information campaign as to why the change is happening, and outline what the benefits await the users directly and the company as a whole. You’ll want to remove roadblocks and design a framework that supports the organization’s goal. Make sure there is clear communication with employees about the new platform, its function, and why it’s being added.  

Begin discussions about importing existing data formats, and integrations with existing systems, to overcome fears about data loss and complications during the transition. Break the target audience’s existing way of doing things by allowing new technologies to enter their daily lives progressively such that they don’t even realize the change. 

By now, you would have understood what drives Digital Adoption. Let us go further and understand how to achieve successful Digital Adoption with the help of Digital Adoption Solutions (DAS). 

Solution for Digital Adoption  

Software applications are constantly being updated and new features are added to keep up with the fast-paced world of technology. Almost every Enterprise software goes through a major update within a year, introducing many new features with each release.

This proves that training is not a one-time affair, especially when it comes to learning new software solutions. It is of utmost importance that employees understand the working of tools and new software; if they fail to do so, successful Digital Adoption is not going to happen. 

Most tech solutions require some know-how to operate and utilize fully, hence it is important for any organization to walk their employees through the new way of doing things more than once. For your workforce to keep up with the newly implemented software and its subsequent updates, they need ongoing alerts and proper in-app assistance.  

With the help of a Digital Adoption Solution, employee onboarding and training can take place within the application itself. It is wise to research thoroughly before you invest in the right Digital Adoption platform. Look at the  features of a DAP  and understand what you need the most and leverage the right one. 

Apty is an intelligent Digital Adoption platform  that proactively helps you understand the user’s roadblocks and needs, so you can create personalized walkthroughs to match the exact issue.

With a DAP tool like Apty, you can seamlessly onboard and train employees, ensure process compliance, boost employee productivity, execute seamless change management and effectively drive Digital Adoption.

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• Post Updated On: August 14, 2023

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Accelerating Digital Adoption: Immersion in Customer Journey and Advanced Customer Measurement

• May 2, 2022
• Leverage a holistic approach that permeates the entire organization creating new value, increasing growth, and driving operational excellence.

Hero Digital is pleased to feature this article by Barbara Lehman , a transformative leader who specializes in ushering organizations into the digital enterprise era. Read the full article below to learn how to accelerate digital adoption at your organization.

The relationship between brands and customers has shifted to digital. As a result, business leaders across all industries are investing heavily in new digital tools that improve efficiency and cut costs.

Shifting customers to digital requires a formal program that begins with understanding your goals and how digital transformation aligns with them. Evaluating your organization’s change readiness is also crucial to identifying the path and steps necessary for accelerating digital adoption. 

Paramount to success is a customer-first focus with all areas and business models aligned and driving to deliver a cohesive customer experience journey. Top customer-centric brands leverage a holistic approach that permeates the entire organization creating new value, increasing growth, and driving operational excellence.

With top customer-centric brands raising the bar, customers’ expectations have risen. Now, it’s not just in comparison to others in your space but across industries. 

Some considerations will include the following:

• What is the ideal customer journey? What vital digital capabilities and features must first be enabled? Enablement is critical, including exception handling and the next best action for the customer.
• What business policies potentially conflict with these goals? For instance, deciding whether to waive or eliminate fees for customers should also consider how revenue from these fees is handled from revenue goals in the field.
• What are the potential objections and scope of change required? A comprehensive change management plan and program governance will be necessary.
• What data is available and understanding of customer behavior? Is there a measurement framework developed? For instance, data that shows when customers are calling through a specific journey and why are critical to understanding customer challenges and proactively managing them to digital. Interviews and other customer VOC efforts to understand today’s experience and potential opportunities to improve that experience and perhaps re-image/innovate on today’s products and services.
• Executive sponsorship from the top-down fully embraces an immersive customer experience and is committed to the investment necessary to drive this shift for both the customer and internal organization.

Map Current and Ideal Customer Journeys 

To make substantial change and drive meaningful digital adoption, a deep understanding of the desired customer journey is needed. Items to consider in your strategy include the following: 

The strategies and tactics to encourage customers on the preferred path. For instance, when customers call in to make a payment, what tactics are employed so they are likely to self-serve the next time they need to make a payment. 

Are there services that need to be updated to meet customers’ higher expectations? Are the new opportunities to provide real value to customers that are not provided today?

How will all accountable teams/individuals be measured? 

What are the key customer performance metrics used to evaluate progress?

Customer-centric Measurement Framework

Building and measuring all components of a customer journey can take time and money.  

• Start with a few key metrics and the core of what you are trying to solve. Suppose you are trying to take calls out of your call center. In that case, call center data is essential to understand current challenges and provides a baseline to measure as new adoption strategies and capabilities are launched. Other key measurements to consider are customer performance measurements like NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction).
• Create a “Northstar” Digital Contact Share measurement to understand high-level progress to shift customer behavior. The metric evaluates the customer’s mix of channel interaction, at which digital contact is produced compared to other channels.
• Set goals to increase the digital adoption rate. It will be essential to have stakeholders also signed up and measured against the plan in most organizations.

Intense focus and advanced analytics on existing customer behavior

Why are customers calling? What does the data tell you? Is it identifying gaps in service or communication? Where can these be improved, and where are there opportunities to manage customers’ expectations, especially if you can’t solve for the ideal state right now.

With your customer journey output, analysis of existing customer behavior is essential to identify opportunities to improve, re-imagine or innovate. Thoughtful consideration is also necessary to ensure an experience works end-to-end and that customer messaging is clear and concise. Otherwise, it can potentially generate a call due to confusion.

An intelligence-driven platform is fundamental to digital transformation and a longer-term digital-based enterprise. Leveraging the data in your organization along with advanced tools and methods to systematically understand where a customer is in their journey, based on intelligence, and personalization, proactively communicate with the customer through preferred channels, streamline and prepare them for the next step in the journey.

For example, if the customer is complete, what is the next step to keep them engaged and is specific to their needs as a customer? The initial work to build out this functionality and practice is detailed and requires advanced analytical skills. If you don’t have this skill set in-house, I recommend looking for experts to do the foundational work.

Common Challenges in Driving Digital Adoption

First and foremost, the biggest challenge usually to driving adoption is driving change. Driving digital adoption can impact the operating model, how you do business, and ultimately how people work.

Other considerations include:

• Culture – What are the core competencies in the organization? Does the organization have a continuous improvement “growth” mindset?
• Talent – It is critical to hire individuals who will bring the right skill sets and competencies to meet the future needs of the organization.
• Legacy systems, processes, and department owners will likely be stakeholders that will need to be included in this effort from the beginning. This can be a great opportunity to streamline from front-end experiences to back-end systems and leverage cloud technologies.
• Executive Sponsorship is crucial to maintaining support with business partners and the funding necessary to drive the changes and awareness necessary to see impactful results.
• Traditional operating model methods can slow down progress in an organization and may not be adaptive to an ever-changing business landscape. Leveraging an agile-like framework for specific processes and projects beyond development could provide stronger agility capabilities as an organization.

Leadership Points – Driving Digital Adoption

Acceleration of digital adoption strategies starts with a focus on the customer experience coupled with a robust and concentrated approach to advanced analytics and a comprehensive customer insights practice.

• Digital Adoption efforts should align to broader company purpose and goals. Do you want a digital first approach? Are there areas it is critical to lead with another channel?
• Embrace “digital enterprise” methodologies and competencies. Successful strategies in driving adoption begin with information readily available to inform the journey and provide the right experience at the right time. Solutions that can manage and move functions and services to cloud technologies can allow for quicker delivery to production and the ability to adapt in the longer term.
• A comprehensive change management plan is a critical element to success.

Once changes to the customer journeys are live continuous improvement by customer insights, performance measurement, and internal indicators are critical to understanding where you have improved or potentially disrupted previous experiences and where there are opportunities to optimize. Living journeys, the ongoing management of journeys requires continued assessment of performance, A/B testing of new experiences, customer feedback and intelligence to understand where the customer is in their journey and how can you intelligently engage them before they call, and what is the next action in the journey so that customer is being clearly guided through their experience.

A formalized plan and approach will provide the governance and ability to manage programs and results for most organizations effectively. In my experience, these efforts take dedicated resources, investment, and reasonable time to deliver.

It can take time to shift customers and usually does not happen overnight. It requires building awareness of the capabilities available, the customer’s time, the tactics, and support at any touchpoint to move these customers to digital interactions. Each material improvement or new service will drive value for the organization and customer, ultimately providing the opportunity for additional growth.

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• Modernizing Digital Landscape with Cloud Adoption Journey

Cloud adoption is the process of migrating applications from enterprise on-premises servers to cloud infrastructure. Scaling up or down with on-premises infrastructure requires sourcing, provisioning, and maintaining hardware and software “in house.” Cloud adoption streamlines the process by providing businesses with ready access to computing resources. 

Cloud adoption offers multiple benefits to businesses, including:

• Scalability 
• Cost reduction 
• Right-sized resources
• Increased security 
• Flexibility 

Assessing cloud readiness is a crucial aspect of the cloud adoption journey, as are the steps that come after the initial assessment. This article will explore the keys to a successful cloud adoption journey in detail, including preparedness, strategy, migration of applications, and post-migration enhancements. 

Summary of key cloud adoption journey concepts

The table below summarizes the pathway to cloud adoption that will be explored further in this article.

The cloud adoption journey end-to-end

Cloud adoption includes well-defined steps organizations undertake to transition their IT infrastructure and applications to cloud-based solutions. The success of cloud adoption depends on the effective planning of each phase, from identifying the need to migrate to post-migration optimization. 

The cloud adoption journey.

Cloud adoption journey step 1: Identify business needs

This phase involves identifying the business's need to migrate to the cloud and performing an initial feasibility study. Cloud migration should be a solution to an existing business problem. For example, a cloud migration might help an organization control costs, speed up time to market, or simplify infrastructure management. 

However, cloud migration may not be the right option for all applications. It is essential to do a feasibility study identifying the key advantages and disadvantages of moving applications to the cloud. Depending on the outcome of this phase, the organization should proceed with adoption or seek on-prem improvements to resolve the root cause of the problem.

Cloud adoption journey step 2: Evaluate your preparedness 

Evaluating readiness for cloud migration includes evaluating existing architecture and IT capabilities and identifying infrastructure and software dependencies and skills gaps. Carefully study all the features of the applications, assess the workloads, and categorize them as:

• No longer needed and can be retired (e.g, SaaS or low-code solutions can replace it or the functionality is no longer needed). 
• Dependencies/ limitations would hinder migration to the cloud; needs to be kept on-premises.
• Meets the requirements to be migrated to the cloud. 

It is recommended to shrink the infrastructure and application portfolio before, not after, cloud adoption. Setting goals and objectives and identifying potential risks assists organizations with developing a framework for migrations.  

Cloud adoption journey step 3: Develop a cloud migration strategy

After evaluating readiness, developing a cloud migration strategy is essential before embarking on the rest of the journey. Organizations should categorize applications based on criticality and dependencies to prioritize migration phases accordingly.

During this phase, teams should also identify regulatory and compliance requirements and the possible options while migrating to the cloud, as well as evaluating user management options. For example, some companies continue using on-prem directory services to manage permissions in the cloud and use services like Amazon Cognito and Amazon Identity Center for AWS cloud.

Also, selecting the right cloud model may impact the cloud migration's success. Organizations can use the following cloud models:  

• Public cloud offers flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and easier scalability options, but it may have compliance and security limitations.
• Private clouds , on the other hand, may offer compliance and security options but are more cost-intensive and require more effort to scale. 
• Hybrid cloud models include public and private cloud options to divide infrastructure across both clouds based on compliance, security, and other business requirements, enabling a balanced and flexible approach.

An overview of public vs private vs hybrid cloud. ( Source )

Once the cloud model is selected, selecting a cloud service provider for the public and hybrid models is essential, depending on the services offered, pricing, and ease of use. For example, estimating costs for cloud usage can be crucial in finding the best overall value among cloud options.

Hosting options in the cloud and on-premise. ( Source )

A cloud adoption roadmap should order milestones based on application criticality, migration complexity, and budget. It is often recommended to start with the easy-to-move applications first and then leave the more challenging applications for later. This allows you to revise your strategy and benefit from “easy wins.” Hard-to-move examples could be high business impact workloads, high I/O systems, or regulated information processing.

Cloud adoption journey step 4: Plan and architect the cloud environment

After finalizing the cloud migration strategy, we plan and architect the cloud environment for workloads. We need to design the infrastructure and the capabilities required for the applications to be migrated from on-premise servers to the cloud. In simple terms, we can say that we are building servers in the cloud for the applications to be hosted. The following sections discuss the network architecture and design of the cloud environments and the essential compliance measures related to network architecture.

Watch Now. No Forms

Designing network architecture in the cloud

Network architecture design is about designing the underlying resources (e.g., servers) in the cloud to host the applications on them in the later stage. Why do we need to design resources in the cloud? Because we have plenty of options in the cloud based on our requirements. For example, an application's database can be hosted on RDS databases, DocumentDB, or DynamoDB in the Amazon cloud. Depending on your cloud provider, you can choose from the available services to host the applications.

An example of multi-region and highly available network design in the cloud ( e.g., for hospital needs). ( Source )

The following checklist details important considerations for designing network architecture. 

• Determine the required cloud resources and capacity. Analyze the resource demands of each workload, such as CPU, memory, storage, and network requirements. Also, evaluate the varying requirements and peak usage periods.
• Plan for scalability to accommodate the increase in the workload and ensure a seamless user experience. Add auto-scaling groups and load balancers in the network architecture to deal with scaling requirements. 
• Evaluate the data storage requirements, including capacity and type of storage. Plan for data backup to ensure durability and business continuity. 
• Create a disaster recovery strategy. A disaster recovery strategy is essential for business continuity. Organizations should ensure that their strategy considers their architecture and storage options. 
• Use logical isolation to improve security posture. Implement network segmentation and security zones to logically separate resources.
• Reduce latency between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud. Establish network connectivity between on-premises infrastructure and the cloud environment, ensuring adequate bandwidth, low latency, and reliable network connectivity for optimal performance. 

Security and compliance measures for cloud resources

Every organization has unique security and compliance requirements. When hosting an application in the cloud, ensuring the underlying resources meet our security and compliance requirements is essential. 

The checklist below details key security and compliance considerations during a cloud adoption journey:

• Ensure incident readiness. Utilize virtual networks, subnets, and security groups to create isolated security zones. Implement security groups and access controls to allow access only from authorized users and applications. 
• Enforce the principle of least privilege. Implement least privileged identity and access management (IAM) in the cloud to keep data and workloads secure from unauthorized access. Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access controls (RBAC). 
• Leverage security tools. Use firewalls, host-based anti-viruses, and cloud-based threat detection solutions to detect and respond to incidents. 
• Encrypt data to keep it confidential. Ensure data confidentiality by using encryption at rest and in transit.
• Enable logging and traceability where possible. Integrate existing systems like Active Directory with the cloud environment for access control across the organization.
• Prioritize disaster recovery. Have a disaster recovery and business continuity plan in place.

Cloud adoption journey step 5: Migrate applications and data

After an organization defines its architecture, it can migrate workloads and data to the cloud. The sections below detail the essential aspects of the migration phase of a cloud adoption journey. 

Define a migration approach

The migration approach can vary based on the application characteristics, complexity, and business goals. Two common methods for migration are “lift and shift” and “re-architecting.” 

Lift and shift involves migration from the application to the cloud with minimal modifications. This approach offers a comparatively quicker migration but may not use the most effective cloud capabilities. It is suitable for applications with few dependencies and no major hindrances in adopting the target cloud platform. 

While re-architecting involves redesigning the applications to utilize cloud capabilities, it allows for scalability, resilience, and improved cost efficiency. Re-architecting is more complex than lift and shift. Typically re-architecting is required when lift and shift is impractical. 

Steps for workload migration

Once the migration approach is selected and the dependencies have been carefully understood and sorted, workloads can be migrated in steps to ensure minimum disruption and maximum availability. 

Workload migration can be split into two categories: 

• Application migration 
• Data migration

Depending on the amount of data and the time to make it available in the cloud, data can be migrated in bulk, streamed, or sent via incremental sync. After the data has been fully migrated, teams can begin data validation to check data integrity. 

Dependencies and considerations for migration

Depending on your specific needs, consider data encryption, compression, and backup practices during the migration process. For some cloud services, you may be required to set up infrastructure and networking components in the target cloud environment for application migration. Migrate application components while considering dependencies and sequencing. Monitor the migration process closely, addressing any issues or errors promptly.

Post-migration testing

After the application is migrated, teams can run functional, load, security, and compliance testing to ensure the application's adherence to requirements.

Cloud adoption journey step 5: Post-migration assessment and optimization

Organizations must assess workloads after they have been migrated to the cloud to ensure they function as expected and meet business requirements. It’s likely assessments will uncover the need for optimizations and changes. The sections below explain important steps for the post-migration assessment and optimization stage. 

Implement metric monitoring

Implement post-migration monitoring to ensure rapid detection of and timely response to deviations. Here are three ways to implement effective metric monitoring:

• Use cloud-native applications for application metric monitoring.
• Set up alarms to identify suboptimal performance and respond. 
• Optimize applications to reduce metric deviations.

Implement governance

Ensure consistent FinOps , SecOps, and DevOps operations. The cloud governance checklist below can help organizations get cloud governance right:

• Implement automation and DevOps practices to reduce errors and effort. The right platforms and tooling can help automate effective governance. For example, CoreStack provides comprehensive FinOps, SecOps, and CloudOps capabilities that can help teams govern cloud operations.
• Design for resilience. Design and restructure workloads to ensure repeatability and disaster recovery in case of failures.
• Perform regular backups. Ensure periodic data backup for the application’s data and disaster recovery plans to recover from unforeseen events. 
• Have an incident response plan. Ensure a well-formed incident readiness state to ensure the execution of incident response plans in case of data breaches or malicious activities.

Recommendations to ensure your cloud adoption journey is successful 

The recommendations below can guide organizations in successfully migrating their applications to the cloud.

Plan effectively 

Detailed planning before the actual migration is a critical success element in cloud adoption. It is recommended that you plan and architect the network considering all the business requirements. You may also use cloud adoption frameworks to guide your adoption journey (e.g., for Amazon see here ).

Rack up easy wins to build momentum 

Cloud adoption is a broad topic, and there is a lot an organization could do in the cloud. However, for organizations early in the cloud adoption journey, it can be important to demonstrate value early. Look for easy wins that can help test your strategy and prove the value of the cloud. As a result, cloud initiatives are more likely to gain buy-in throughout the organization. 

Continuously optimize

After migration, continuously re-evaluate the cloud-native options available and adopt the most suitable cloud-native capabilities, ensuring cost-effectiveness, efficiency, scalability, and security. For example, based on the available cloud computing options, you may adopt different computing options based on your changing needs. Consider utilizing third-party tools such as CoreStack for post-migration DevOps and SecOps optimization. 

Migrating applications and data to the cloud is a significant endeavor that requires careful planning, execution, and validation. Organizations can achieve a seamless and successful migration by assessing dependencies, choosing suitable cloud options, designing an effective migration plan, and testing and validating applications and data.  

Following these guidelines throughout the cloud adoption journey can help organizations leverage the scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency of the cloud while meeting the security and compliance requirements of the organization. 

Once you have adopted the cloud, platforms like CoreStack can help manage cloud infrastructure and get the most out of your cloud investments. 

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The State of Digital Adoption Report 2022

As leaders in the Digital Adoption revolution, Userlane has compiled a report that takes a snapshot of the current adoption landscape and its impact on the Employee Experience (EX).

We surveyed both business leaders and employees and found they acknowledge that strong digital adoption is vital to their success as their use of technology grows.

But as tech stacks grow, employees are struggling to use new software. Businesses, therefore are not receiving the best possible return on investment and, in fact, they are actively losing both time and money. Digital transformation can only truly succeed with strong digital adoption. And strong digital adoption ultimately improves the employee experience.

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How to Drive Adoption With Digital User Journeys 

Well-defined customer touchpoints are the foundation of a strong digital experience with your product. As the SaaS industry evolves and gets more sophisticated, so do customer and user journeys along these touch points.

Today’s customers expect a seamless omnichannel experience as they move from onboarding to product adoption to renewal—and it’s critical to lead them to value quickly to ensure your product becomes sticky along the way. Here’s a look at how to drive adoption with digital user journeys. 

Customer Journeys vs. Users Journeys

Let’s start with the basics. What’s the difference between a customer journey and a user journey ? The terms “customer” and “user” are sometimes used interchangeably—but each has a distinct set of priorities and needs when it comes to their digital experience with your business and product. And, most importantly, product teams need to address both journeys with their in-app and digital product experiences to drive adoption and retention. 

Customer journeys encompass everything with an overall account. For example, are they new to your product and still need to implement product tags or integrations to complete setup? Has the previous customer admin for your product found a new role and a new admin needs training ? These milestones and lifecycle events are critical to address via your in-app programs and should be a key part of your customer journeys. 

Unlike the customer journey, user journeys address the specific needs of an individual user of your product. While customers, or accounts, have a few significant lifecycle moments, users vary greatly in terms of specific user types, product needs, and daily usage. User journeys can include granular mapping to key features, re-engagement if users go dark in your product, and outreach such as one-to-many webinars or feature release notifications. 

Creating a Cohesive, Measurable Digital Program

When you think about your customers’ and users’ digital journeys, many touchpoints probably come to mind. You might send automated emails, have a welcome video play in-app, or guide users through activating certain features in-product via step-by-step walkthroughs. 

Most organizations have elements of these journeys but lack a cohesive way to orchestrate—and measure the impact of—their digital efforts. Having a cohesive and measurable digital program as part of your customer’s product experience is critical. 

Suppose you don’t know when users will navigate to certain features or what in-app touch points are actually moving the needle on adoption. In that case, you’ll have no way of guiding your users successfully to value—a critical need for Product teams, customer-facing teams, and overall SaaS business success. 

The good news is cohesive and product-driven digital journeys are easier to curate than you might think, and there are a few key ways you can ensure these journeys align to increase adoption and retention, not only within your product but across the entire customer relationship.

Using Digital Journeys to Drive Adoption

Whether your business is high touch, low touch, or somewhere in between, it’s just not feasible to guide users to adopt key features at scale when these efforts are all manual. Expecting your Customer Success (CS) team to effectively support all customers and intervene when they are dropping off in adoption flows isn’t realistic. 

Digital adoption journeys, especially when based on product usage, let you curate one-to-many content in a way that provides all customers with a cohesive experience and scales your manual efforts. The best user journeys should:

• Be based on usage. Trigger in-app content that guides users to the content they need to reach value based on their sign-up date, feature activation, or user parameters. 
• Prioritize high-value feature activation. When helping users reach value quickly, it can be overwhelming to promote all feature/functionality. First, guide users to adopt tools in your product with the most value-add to reach fast time to value (TTV) .
• Showcase curated content via an accessible checklist. With a knowledge bot embedded in your product, you can organize and launch in-app guides to specific, stage-based milestones. For example, you may surface an onboarding checklist or an adoption one to users as they get deeper into your product. Using an embedded checklist also helps users relaunch guides if they want to review specific content. 
• Change over time. The best journeys are continually evolving as user feedback is collected and acted upon. Review the impact of your in-app content on feature adoption and use in-app surveys to ask for user feedback to collect information, such as Customer Effort Score, to fine-tune how you guide users to value.

Influencing Retention via Digital Journeys

Both user and overall customer account retention are essential in SaaS, and ensuring your digital user journey content promotes sticky experiences that lead to retention is key. A few ways to lean on the digital journey to drive retention are to:

• Promote features that correlate with retention. You may think you know what features add the most value for your users. Still, it’s essential to do regular Retention Analysis to understand what features are strongly correlated with retained users. These are the features that should be promoted via user journey flows to increase overall retention.
• Address user friction points. By reviewing where users get stuck or encounter challenges when using your product, you can proactively address user needs via in-app guides that help them navigate around key challenges as well as use data-driven analysis to make future roadmap priorities to address these challenges long-term. 
• Ask for in-app input on leading indicators like NPS. By incorporating rolling NPS programs into your in-app digital content, you can get a better measure of the likelihood of customers to renew. Asking for NPS in-app instead of via email or in person has a dramatic impact on response rate, with some Gainsight customers seeing increases of 3,900% and 2,700% in NPS responses, just by moving from email to in-app. You may also use a combination of in-app and email NPS to approach different levels of stakeholders or end-users with more targeted surveys.
• Automate renewals via digital touchpoints. When renewals are highly manual, customers take longer to renew and have more opportunities to discontinue their services. Consider making renewals a part of your in-app and email programs, in order to simplify the renewal conversation and automate renewal outreach. 
• Encourage users to dive deeper into your product. Whether it’s via a thriving community of peers sharing new use cases, or by promoting deeper feature usage for more proficient users, guiding users to more deeply engage with your product will build stickier experiences making renewal a no-brainer. 

Digital user journeys are key to effective user experiences, and aligning your journey with adoption and retention is critical to overall business success. When journeys are mapped to user needs and guide users to key value, product experiences, and overall digital touch points can drive adoption rates, reduce churn, and drive overall NRR. 

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What’s next for digital consumers

Introduction.

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven rapid adoption of digital channels across countries and industries, but digital’s growth has plateaued in the past six months and may begin to slip back once the pandemic eases—even as total digital adoption stays well above prepandemic levels. That’s one of the findings from a new McKinsey survey of global consumer sentiment conducted in April 2021. Companies can look to hold on to newly digital consumers by improving digital experiences, investing in “ phygital ,” 1 “Phygital” refers to the blending of digital experiences with physical ones through unique and often interactive experiences for the user, sometimes requiring real-time interactions with a person—through chat, call centers, or remote advice. and putting consumer trust at the heart of all they do.

The survey suggests that industries across regions experienced an average of 20 percent growth in “fully digital” 2 In this survey we contrasted three types of interactions: “fully digital,” such as those taking place on websites and mobile apps, as well as through virtual assistants; “digital with human assistance,” such as those occurring through call centers, live chat, and email; and “physical interactions,” such as those taking place in stores, bank branches, or at shopping stands, carts, and outlets. users in the six months ending in April 2021, building on previous gains earlier in the pandemic . During that same time period, it was primarily younger people joining the ranks of digital users.

But, with consumers having reached high levels of digital penetration in most regions and industries, the acceleration into digital channels now seems to have leveled off in both Europe and the United States, with consumers in some industries saying that they will be using digital channels less frequently once the pandemic ends. As a result, even as total digital adoption remains above prepandemic levels, many industries and regions may see a modest negative net change in postpandemic digital use relative to 2020.

Would you like to learn more about McKinsey Digital ?

The industries most vulnerable to the loss of digital consumers may be those that saw the biggest gains in digital adoption during the pandemic. New adopters had little choice during lockdowns but to embrace digital channels, and the channels they entered were more likely to have been newly built and with a less satisfying user experience than established ones.

While differences arise between countries, regions, and industries, consumers tend to have similar expectations everywhere, according to our survey. Furthermore, consumers who had previously been limited (or at least accustomed) to more local, physical-world offerings before the pandemic (for instance, in education and healthcare) have learned to access those services digitally and, given digital’s borderless nature, to access them globally, too—even as their local providers made more of those services available digitally themselves. Once exposed to best-in-class experiences and offerings across industries and around the globe, ever more digitally savvy consumers may be reluctant to settle for less.

Europe’s digital migration during COVID-19: Getting past the broad trends and averages

Companies can respond by addressing the areas that matter most to digital consumers. According to our survey, these include improved user experiences, better offerings, heightened security and privacy, and phygital expertise, among other approaches. Innovations in digital services may hold the key to further penetrating digital channels, and to staying competitive in the ones that companies have already entered. Moreover, companies moving boldly in digital tend to see excess returns , in part through a virtuous circle that emerges: as more customers use digital channels, organizations learn from behavioral data to further improve digital offerings, which in turn draw more users. This opportunity might be particularly promising in industries most at risk of losing newly acquired digital users.

The following charts examine the survey findings 3 For more about our survey methodology, see our “About the research” section following the final chart in this presentation. and shed light on digital users as they emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic into a postpandemic “next normal.”

Slipping back. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven unprecedented numbers of consumers into digital channels, but some consumers have begun using those channels less in the six months leading up to April 2021. That may be unsurprising given that consumers during lockdowns had little choice but to shop online, and to turn to at-home-entertainment options. Now that consumers have more freedom to choose, they may express a preference for more physical-channel interactions in certain industries.

Improve digital services and experiences. Companies can improve their digital services by innovating around the three dimensions that consumers say matter most:

• Improve trust in digital services by increasing privacy and security. About 44 percent of consumers surveyed don’t fully trust digital services.
• Improve the user experience in digital channels by refining user interfaces (UX/UI) and by creating phygital interactions, at least some of which (for example, high-ticket or complicated-to-purchase items) may involve a human agent. About 56 percent of dissatisfied users conveyed discomfort with digital UX/UI or lack of sufficient information about, for instance, products and services.
• Improve the end-to-end consumer experience by making all products and services digitally available, by improving after-sales services, and by offering better prices and deals in digital channels. Some 39 percent of dissatisfied users say that they can’t accomplish everything they intend in digital channels, and roughly 20 percent of dissatisfied users want to mix online chat with a human into their digital interactions.

About the research

McKinsey used the following methodology for the online survey, which was conducted in April 2021 and which provides the data for this article. 4 The survey was conducted online and was limited to users with internet access.

Sample: About 29,000 respondents in 24 countries were surveyed in April 2021. Respondents were balanced by age and gender, with less than 2 percent variation relative to any given country’s demographics. Survey respondents were recruited 5 The recruitment process for the survey was controlled by an independent panel per country as per ESOMAR directions. by open enrollment, by invitation, and through certified providers. All respondents were verified prior to taking the survey. The scope of the survey included:

Digital sentiment: We surveyed respondents’ level of consumption of digital services by industry in the six months leading up to April 2021, as well as their forecast for how much they will consume in the six months after April 2021. We also surveyed respondents’ modes of digital consumption , including channels (such as fully digital versus digital with human assistance versus fully physical) and other customer-related dimensions, such as perceived innovation, satisfaction, trust, and so on.

Industries surveyed: Industries surveyed included banking, education, general retail, government/public sector, healthcare, insurance, media and entertainment, retail grocery, telecommunications, travel, and utilities.

Countries surveyed: Countries surveyed included Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Neira Hajro is a partner in McKinsey’s London office, Klemens Hjartar is a senior partner in the Copenhagen office, Paul Jenkins is a senior partner in the Oslo office, and Benjamim Vieira is a partner in the Madrid office.

The authors wish to thank Iñigo Fernández del Amo, Santiago Fernandez, Nicolas de la Flor, Martin von Knobloch, David Libreros, and Isabel Muniesa for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Lang Davison, an executive editor in the Seattle office.

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Journey to the center of a customer adoption strategy

The right customer adoption strategy can improve the customer experience, reduce churn, boost retention, and do wonders for bottom-line profits.

A sophisticated adoption strategy begins with understanding the journey that customers go through when discovering and adopting new products.

Map the customer adoption journey to find the treasure

A customer journey map outlines the path that customers take before, during, and after purchasing your product or service. 

An adoption journey map, emphasizes the journey customers take when implementing and making use of that product or service.

But the adoption journey really takes place over several stages, including:

Marketing and sales  

Marketing models often focus on the pathway to purchase. 

During these phases of the journey, as they navigate towards a purchase decision, customers will discover the roots of their problem, potential solutions, and solution providers. 

Though marketing may seem far removed from product adoption, these stages represent the first engagements a customer will have with a brand or service, and the quality of those interactions will sculpt the future of their brand and product experience .

Customer onboarding refers to the period when customers first begin using a product or service.

During this stage, they are introduced to the product through demos, product tours, walkthroughs , and other techniques designed to quickly acclimate customers to their new environment.

Customer service staff, such as account representatives, may also provide hands-on support and training, depending on the nature and complexity of the product.

Certain products, such as sophisticated B2B SaaS platforms, can be quite difficult to use and may require continuous training. In many cases, the quality of that training will directly affect how much value customers pull from your product. 

Although some companies may provide a bit of hands-on training, human instruction is simply not scalable, nor is it affordable.

To overcome these challenges, many organizations are using more modern training solutions, such as digital adoption platforms (DAPs) , which provide contextual, in-app guidance. When added to a training mix, these platforms can enhance metrics across the board, from customer engagement to retention to lifetime value.

Ongoing support

Ongoing support, including both technical support and customer support, is crucial to maintaining healthy, profitable customer relationships. 

Support also directly impacts the user experience (UX), which, in turn, influences customer longevity and value. A single bad experience, for example, can drive a customer away from a brand permanently, as we’ll see below.

The influence of UX on customer adoption

The journey map outlined above is only one of several possible models that can be used to describe the customer’s adventure through product research, selection, purchase, and adoption. 

While some may focus more heavily on other aspects of adoption, such as the standard of the training, UX quality plays an equally critical role.

Customers are 2.4 times more likely to stay with a company that can solve their problems faster—and they are 2.7 times more likely to spend more when companies communicate clearly.

These discoveries complement those from a survey conducted a few years ago by PwC , which found that bad customer experiences can be very detrimental to customer retention.

Among their findings:

• 59% of customers in the United States will leave a brand they love after a few bad experiences
• 32% of global customers would leave a brand they loved after a single bad experience
• 73% of customers pointed to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions
• 43% would pay more for greater convenience

In short, customer experience has an enormous impact on customer relationships. That experience doesn’t start once a customer makes their initial purchase. It begins early on with the very first interactions.

Customer adoption strategies should therefore cover the entire journey map.

How to create an effective customer adoption strategy

Every business is different, but customer adoption strategies should share a few common characteristics.

Here are tips for creating a customer adoption strategy:

• Set clear goals. Strategies should be built around objectives. In the case of a customer adoption strategy, targets should naturally revolve around maximizing adoption—but it is important to actually define what “adoption” means for your organization, ideally using quantifiable metrics. Only then will it be possible to create KPIs and a data-driven method for maximizing adoption.
• Define a means of achieving those goals. The exact mechanisms used to achieve adoption will vary depending on the circumstances. A software company, for instance, could use tools such as DAPs to enhance customer adoption. A company selling physical products, however, would use another mix of training tactics.
• Understand and follow best practices. The concepts contained in this article will help to set you up for successful customer adoption. For more ideas and best practices, review these posts on how to drive business value through UX and creating a customer experience strategy .
• Keep up with industry trends. The global economy and customer sentiments change rapidly. Customer expectations evolve, digital technology advances, and best practices change.

No customer adoption strategy will be perfect right out of the gate. It will be necessary to continue optimizing and refining that strategy over time. For that reason, it is crucial to take an agile approach to customer adoption, which would aim to stay responsive, customer-centered, and data-driven—traits that are essential in an era where the tides of customer sentiment shift with the winds of the world.

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How Microsoft does IT

Copilot for Microsoft 365 for executives: Sharing our internal deployment and adoption journey at Microsoft

Apr 23, 2024   |   Keith Boyd

She would know—her team just finished deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 to more than 300,000 employees and vendors across the world.

“The contents of this guide are based on the lessons we’ve learned deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 at global enterprise scale. The tips and ideas you’ll read here will help you accelerate your own time to value so you can realize the same benefits as our employees.”

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to empower, enable, and transform the company’s digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. We also provide a blueprint for our customers to follow, and so have created this guide for deploying and adopting Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Are you an IT pro?

View the full version of this deployment and adoption guide here.

Download your own copy of our full guide here.

Download a copy of this executive version of this guide here.

This executive summary of the complete Adoption and Deployment Guide is broken into four chapters designed to accelerate your time to value with Microsoft 365 Copilot:

Chapter 1: Getting governance right: Responsible AI depends on it

Chapter 2: implementation with intention, chapter 3: driving adoption to accelerate value, chapter 4: building a foundation for support.

Before you even begin your Copilot for Microsoft 365 implementation, you’ll want to consider how this tool impacts your data. Copilot uses Large Language Models (LLMs) that interact with data and content across your organization and uses  information your employees can access to transform user prompts into personalized, relevant, and actionable responses.

Giving your employees this level of access means proper data hygiene is a priority. At Microsoft Digital, we use sensitivity labeling to empower our employees with access while also protecting our data. Copilot for Microsoft 365 was designed to respect labels, permissions, and rights management service (RMS) protections that block content extraction on relevant file labels. That ensures private or confidential information stays that way.

Note: This chapter outlines the highly robust, best-case scenario we created for Microsoft, but we know not every organization has a fully deployed data governance strategy. If you’re in that position, don’t worry! You can use Restricted SharePoint Search to provide instant value and protection without exposing Copilot to all of your internal SharePoint sites.

Laying the groundwork with proper labeling

We’ve developed four data labeling practices that make up our foundation for appropriate policies and settings.

Self-service with guardrails

The data hygiene practices above form a foundation for compliance and security but backstopping those efforts through Microsoft 365 features adds an extra layer of protection. Here’s how:

International compliance: No size fits all

Europe has extra requirements in the form of EU Data Boundary regulations and works councils, organizations that provide employee co-determination on workers’ rights or regulatory issues. Our Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployment meant we needed to partner closely with our Microsoft works councils to address complex data and privacy implications.

Your experience will vary depending on your industry and where you operate, but we’ve learned that it’s best to work closely with local subsidiaries to ensure you have a complete picture of a region’s regulatory situation. Local insiders are poised to liaise with works councils (here’s how we do so internally at Microsoft) or other bodies through direct relationships. Start the process early so you can manage feedback cycles effectively and resolve any concerns through configurations that work for your employees.

Learning from Microsoft’s governance, security, and compliance practices

At the time of our deployment, we were the first company to do so at scale, and our implementation team had to choose from different licensing strategies. We’ve learned from experience that it makes sense to start with pilot groups who can validate the experience and enable the rest of your organization. At Microsoft, that looked like:

• Product engineers
• Works councils
• Advancing in phases, we deployed it to more than 300,000 Microsoft employees and external staff.

Scaling out your licenses

After you decide on the general shape of your rollout, you can begin building your licensing strategy. In Microsoft Digital, we started with individual licenses at the single-user level. As our implementation scaled, we tied licensing automation to Microsoft 365 groups to implement targeted licensing changes at scale. Those groups could include subsets of employees or entire organizations within Microsoft, and we keyed our automation logic to their expanding and contracting eligibility.

We highly recommend defining a phased rollout strategy and structuring your groups accordingly. That creates accountability and gives your IT admins a crucial point of contact for understanding the licensing needs of different groups within your organization.

There are three primary benefits to using groups:

Pre-adoption communications

Given the excitement around AI, one of the biggest challenges during our phased implementation was support requests from employees not within our initial pilot groups. Most of our support requests at this stage were essentially asking, “When do I get access?”

You can easily avoid the issue through clear and honest communication. For example, when you alert your initial implementation groups about their Copilot access, you could simultaneously deploy “Coming soon” emails to the rest of your organization. That will help you avoid any confusion while simultaneously generating excitement.

Your IT implementation team can’t work in isolation. Communication, especially with organizational leadership, is a key part of your licensing and implementation strategy.

Learning from Microsoft’s implementation

The fact that your employees are excited about trying out Copilot isn’t enough. We found that you need strategic, coordinated change management to drive usage and adoption.

To do this effectively, you will need to empower change agents in your organization. These are not part time roles; they are dedicated resources across your company who are responsible for the change management function, including creation of a deployment and adoption plan, facilitating principled change management practices, communicating and engaging with employees, preparing employee readiness and learning opportunities, then measuring the success of your deployment across the enterprise. At a high level, your strategy should consist of the following five steps.

Focusing on change management is key when you deploy Copilot for Microsoft 365.

How Microsoft Digital drove adoption

At Microsoft, we broke our company-wide adoption efforts into cohorts, for example, subsidiaries or business groups. Depending on the size of your enterprise, you may benefit from this approach as well. We divided our adoption along two vectors: internal organizations like legal or sales and marketing, and regions like North America or Europe. Different cohorts have different focuses, but the strategy is similar. At Microsoft, we did this in four phases:

Effective change management requires careful planning. Begin by identifying and then working with company-wide change management leads. Next, identify members of your target cohorts who will support the adoption, including change managers, leadership sponsors, and employee champions.

Champions will be crucial to your adoption by filling several powerful roles:

• Pinpointing key usage scenarios for Copilot based on their cohort’s culture or processes.
• Providing insights that help adoption leaders build out their rollout plans.
• Most importantly, demonstrating the value of Copilot and showing their peers how powerful this tool can be in their day-to-day work.

When champions socialize their tips and tricks, our experience at Microsoft Digital has revealed that it’s best to share specific prompts and the value they provided as a concrete entry point for users. For example, a champion could say, “I saved three hours drafting this sales script in Microsoft Word using this prompt,” then share their Copilot prompt as a place for peers to start.

Works councils also play a key role at this stage. They offer the benefit of local cultural expertise and can help you identify the challenges employees face in their jurisdiction. Even something as simple as understanding proper modes of address helps smooth the road to adoption through effective communication.

Each of these sets of stakeholders has a role to play in leading your own rollout. We recommend using Microsoft Copilot adoption resources to build out your own adoption plan.

Onboard and engage

At Microsoft, we implemented this phase across each adoption cohort. Because every group will have its own champions and leadership sponsors, it’s important to treat each of them as its own organization, with its own unique adoption needs.

In advance of our general rollout, we created “jump-start” communications with links to learning opportunities:

• Localized training took the form of Power Hours in different languages and time zones. These training sessions demonstrated key Copilot scenarios across Microsoft 365 apps.
• Self-learn assets included user quick-start guides, demo videos, and Microsoft Viva Learning modules to accommodate different learning styles and preferences.

Pre-rollout communications fulfill two needs. First, this messaging is a great opportunity to launch your champion communities. Second, these communications build your employee population’s desire and excitement for their incoming Copilot licenses, then prepare them to hit the ground running when they get access.

After your Copilot licenses are live, your launch-day welcome comms are straightforward. Invite employees to access Copilot and to start experimenting with how it can fit into their work. There are many possible vectors for deploying these communications, but a multi-pronged effort that includes Microsoft Viva Amplify will deliver the maximum impact.

For support in building out your own communication plan, our adoption team has created a user onboarding kit for Copilot . These ready-to-send emails and community posts can help you onboard and engage your users.

Deliver impact

After everyone has access, it’s time to promote Copilot usage and ensure all employees are having the best possible experience and gaining the most value. For Microsoft’s cohorts, employee champions and leadership sponsors were essential levers.

It’s important to remember that Copilot isn’t just another tool. It introduces a whole new way of working within employees’ trusted apps. In Microsoft, we took great care to encourage employees to adapt a mindset to see it as part of their daily work—not just something they play with when there’s time.

Microsoft Viva Engage , or a similar employee communication platform, is a helpful forum for peer community support. In our case, it provided an organic space for champions to share their expertise and change managers to provide further recommendations and adoption content. For employees who explore best on their own, Copilot Lab provides in-the-flow learning opportunities to build their prompt skills.

Meanwhile, leadership sponsors diversified our communications strategy by deploying and amplifying messaging through executive channels like org-wide emails or Viva Engage Leadership Corner posts.

Extend and optimize

Understanding overall usage patterns and impact is crucial to optimizing usage. Our Microsoft Digital team used a combination of controlled feature rollout (CFR) technology while tracking usage through Microsoft 365 Admin Center and the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights. Together, these tools gave us the visibility and tracking we needed to establish and communicate adoption patterns. Meanwhile, IT admins and user experience success managers can access simple in-app feedback through Microsoft 365 Admin Center . But to really maximize value, our Microsoft Digital employee experience teams conducted listening sessions and satisfaction surveys.

All these insights are helping us establish a virtuous cycle to drive further value and better adoption for future rollouts, extend usage to new and high-value scenarios, incorporate Copilot into business process transformation, and understand custom line-of-business opportunities.

Driving user enablement with Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Digital used Microsoft Viva to help enable our 300,000+ global users. Microsoft Viva is an Employee Experience Platform that brings together communication and feedback, analytics, goals, and learning in one unified solution. Microsoft Digital used Viva across a range of change management scenarios, including building awareness, communicating with our employees, providing access to readiness and learning resources, and measuring the impact of our deployment.

A few specific ways we used Viva to accelerate employee adoption are shown below.

We’re using Microsoft Viva to power employee adoption of Copilot for Microsoft 365 here at Microsoft.

Learning from Microsoft’s adoption efforts

Empowering employees means making sure they have access to the right support channels. The fact that Copilot operates across a wide spectrum of Microsoft 365 apps adds complexity to support scenarios. As a result, it’s important to get your support teams early access along with your earliest pilot implementations. For Microsoft Digital, four principles define high-quality support:

Strategizing for support

Building experience and knowledge is one thing, but coming up with your approach to support requires planning and a strong idea of your users’ ideal experience. At Microsoft Digital, we take a “shift-left” approach. That means we save our human support staff time by attempting to create excellent self-service options for our users.

Shift-left principles can apply to many different support contexts, but with Copilot, we’ve found that the most important upfront action is ensuring your employees have accessible self-service support channels and communicating their availability. Work with your adoption teams to ensure they include self-service support options in their rollout communications.

Seven things we learned while preparing to support Copilot for Microsoft 365

Common questions, issues, and resolutions

We’re getting questions about why particular employees don’t have licenses.

• Use employee change management communication waves to solve for this issue by alerting employees when they’ll have access to licenses.

Users are coming to us with questions that would be better served by adoption and employee material, and that isn’t our role as support.

• Work with your adoption team to preempt these issues with proactive communications. Update your self-help content and provide your support agents with ready access to different employee education resources.

Teams are looking for integration support. Where do I send them?

• Share this list of pre-built connectors to help your users integrate various data sources to Microsoft Graph. This list shares the types of content supported .

Can employees put confidential information into Copilot?

• If employees are signed into Copilot with their Entra ID, they can enter confidential information.

My organization has concerns about who owns the IP that Copilot generates. Does the Microsoft Customer Copyright Commitment apply to Copilot?

• Microsoft does not own the IP generated by Copilot. Our universal terms state “Microsoft does not own customers’ output content.”

What’s the best way to verify the accuracy of the information Copilot provides?

• Copilot is transparent about where it sources responses. It provides linked citations to these answers so the user can verify further.

Applying Microsoft’s lessons to your own Copilot deployment

Embarking on your Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployment journey might seem daunting, but by capitalizing on the lessons that Microsoft Digital has learned from Microsoft’s internal deployment, you can both speed up the process and avoid any pitfalls. By anchoring your work in careful planning and making use of the steps and resources provided in this guide, you can unleash a new era of productivity through Copilot.

You’re not in this alone. If you’re looking for support or knowledge on any aspect of your deployment, reach out to our customer success team.

• Deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 at Microsoft
• Getting the Most Out of Generative AI at Microsoft with Good Governance
• Access the Copilot scenario library to understand different user needs and opportunities.
• Gain insights from the Microsoft Copilot dashboard from Viva Insights
• Take part in user Enablement Strategy training or watch the session on demand.
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 technical readiness guide
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 training content map
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 user experience strategy document

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

Tags: Employee Experience , M365 , Microsoft Copilot , Microsoft Viva

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The asset management maturity journey

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In the holistic asset management view, a scalable platform offers functionalities to build capabilities along the way. Each step in the journey demands adopting new processes and ways of working, which dedicated best practice tools and optimization models support.

The enterprise asset management (EAM) system fundamentally becomes a preventive maintenance program in the early stages of the maturity journey, from “Innocence” through to “Understanding”. This transition drives down the cost of unplanned repairs.

To proceed to the next level of “Competence”, APM capabilities take the lead. The focus of the asset management organization shifts toward uptime and business value by preventing failures. This also prevents expensive machine downtime, production deferment and potential safety or environmental risks. Machine connectivity through Internet of Things (IoT) data exchange enables condition-based maintenance and health monitoring. Risk-based asset strategies align maintenance efforts to balance costs and risks.

Predictive maintenance applies machine learning models to predict imminent failures early in the potential failure curve, with sufficient warning time to allow for planned intervention. The final step at this stage is the optimization of the maintenance and replacement program based on asset criticality and available resources.

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New ITU case study maps the Moscow ‘smart city’ journey

Moscow reports experience with Key Performance Indicators for Smart Sustainable Cities

A new ITU case study offers an evaluation of Moscow’s progress in meeting the objectives of its ‘smart city’ strategies and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The case study ,  Implementing ITU-T International Standards to Shape Smart Sustainable Cities: The Case of Moscow , was undertaken using the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Smart Sustainable Cities developed by the  United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC) initiativ e .

The ITU case study traces Moscow’s smart city journey from its origins in Moscow’s  Information City  strategy launched in 2011 to its successor the  Smart Moscow 2030  strategy. It highlights the role of Moscow’s Government in coordinating the implementation of a wide array of smart city projects in the city and how these projects have substantially improved the quality of life for city residents. The report assesses Moscow’s smart city performance using U4SSC indicators that measure impact on three dimensions: the economy, environment and society & culture.

Information and communication technology (ICT) is a recognized key contributor to the Moscow economy. Building on its strengths and maintaining ICTs as a strategic lever, Moscow has adopted vibrant policies for ICT development and proliferation. These aspects are clearly reflected in the good performance by Moscow, as presented in the report, within the sub-dimensions of “ICT” and “Productivity”.

The case study also serves as a valuable reference point to other cities in Russia and Commonwealth of Independent State countries – as well as to cities around the world pursuing greater efficiency and sustainability. ITU standardization experts responsible for the refinement of the Key Performance Indicators will also find the case study to be valuable.

RELATED: Dubai reports results from implementing ITU’s Key Performance Indicators for Smart Sustainable Cities

“Home to more than 12 million people, Moscow is the largest urban area on the European continent,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao. “Considering the size of Moscow and its population, this case study offers a unique set of lessons learned for other cities around the world developing a ‘smart city’ strategy. I commend Moscow’s leaders for their efforts to share these experiences and this knowledge with the international community, towards creating a ‘smart’ world for everyone, everywhere.”

“Moscow has made a rapid smart city journey from 2011 and we are keen on keeping up with the pace. No matter whether it is Moscow, Singapore or Barcelona – every city has the same task to make their residents’ lives enjoyable, safe and comfortable,” said Strategy and Innovations Advisor to the Chief Information Officer of Moscow, Andrey Belozerov. “We are happy to contribute to this research as it is important to develop universal metrics to access city performances all around the world.”

The findings of the case study will feed into the work of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T)  Study Group 20 , the expert group leading the development of ITU standards for the Internet of Things and smart cities. These standards assist in optimizing the application of ICTs within smart cities, in addition to supporting efficient data processing and management.

RELATED: New ITU case study shares insight into Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ strategy

The findings will also be taken up by the U4SSC initiative, which advocates for public policy to ensure that ICTs, and ICT standards in particular, play a definitive role in the transition to Smart Sustainable Cities. U4SSC also promotes the adoption of international standards in reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the reporting of associated experiences.

The Moscow case study follows prior smart city case studies of Dubai and Singapore. These have made valuable smart cities experiences and knowledge available to other cities around the world. This reporting also solicits feedback that helps cities to refine their smart city strategies.

U4SSC has developed a  ‘Collection methodology for the Key Performance Indicators for Smart Sustainable Cities’  to guide cities in their collection of core data and information necessary to assess  their progress in becoming a Smart Sustainable City. It is supported by 16 United Nations bodies, including ITU, and is open to the participation of all stakeholders interested in driving smart city innovation.

The collaboration encouraged by U4SSC has led more than 50 cities to measure their smart city strategies using the U4SSC’s KPIs for Smart Sustainable Cities, which are based on the ITU international standard,  ITU Y.4903/L.1603 “Key Performance Indicators for Smart Sustainable Cities to assess the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals” .

This ITU News story was originally distributed as an ITU press release. For more ITU press releases, see the  ITU Media Centre . 

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Moscow releases catalogue of smart city projects.

A joint project by ICT.Moscow and government, the resource features information on 68 smart city projects and public data sets on Moscow city infrastructure facilities.

Moscow has launched an English-language catalogue of its smart city solutions.

It follows the launch of the English-language version of its blockchain knowledge base earlier this month.

Smart city projects

A joint project by ICT.Moscow and Moscow’s government, the catalogue features up-to-date information on 68 smart city projects, including datasets and analytics. In addition to the description and key results, the relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are also indicated in each project card.

“The new catalogue allows the city to share its experience and innovative practices with international partners and analysts in a convenient format,” said Eduard Lysenko, minister of the Moscow Government and head of the government’s IT department.

“The Russian capital systematically introduces various IT solutions into the everyday life of Muscovites and the work of city services. At the same time, the key goal of innovation is to improve the safety and quality of life of citizens. That is why relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals, which are aimed at improving human wellbeing and protecting the environment, are indicated for all projects presented in the catalogue.”

Projects include the Uniform Medical Information and Analytical System (UMIAS), Moscow Electronic School, the official website of the Mayor of Moscow (mos.ru), The Moscow Innovation Cluster (i.moscow), the 5G demo centre, and Moscow’s experimental legal regime in the field of AI.

“The Russian capital systematically introduces various IT solutions into the everyday life of Muscovites and the work of city services”

All projects are classified across a number of areas, including human and social capital, urban environment, digital government, urban economy, end-to-end technologies, digital technologies and communications.

In addition to innovative practices, the project contains a selection of more than 600 public data sets on Moscow city infrastructure facilities and more than 30 data sets collected by the Department of Prospective Projects of the IT Department of Moscow Government according to ISO37120 and U4SSC international standards. It also includes news, various research reports and other smart city analytics.

Specialists from IT Department of Moscow Government have reportedly verified all the information provided.

The catalogue will be regularly updated and can be accessed at ict.moscow/en/projects/smartcitymoscow/

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Home » Digital Transformation » How To Develop A Successful User Adoption Strategy

How To Develop A Successful User Adoption Strategy

• Updated May 12, 2023

With digital transformation (DX) underway for many global sectors, user adoption is becoming critical for achieving success – especially for product-led growth companies. 

To navigate these transformations, organizations are prioritizing digital adoption and exerting efforts to encourage user adoption. Without effective user adoption strategies, new technologies and processes may be adopted as intended, which could result in implementation failures and lost opportunities for growth.

The importance of user adoption cannot be overstated, as without it, even the most cutting-edge technology will likely fail to achieve its intended benefits. Businesses that offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) should develop a comprehensive user adoption strategy from the outset, making it a fundamental aspect of sustaining customer longevity. 

The key to user adoption is to ensure that the product or service meets the needs of its intended users at its core. This entails understanding the user’s pain points, preferences, and why they might resist change before making innovations.

According to Gartner , global spending on public cloud services by end-users is predicted to rise significantly in the coming years. It’s estimated to reach $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022, marking a 20.7% growth. The report claims that software-as-a-service (SaaS) is expected to grow 16.8% in 2023.

This article will delve into the critical topic of user adoption strategies. Many businesses may need to pay more attention to the importance of user adoption when launching their products or services. However, creating a well-thought-out user adoption strategy is crucial for outmaneuvering the competition and succeeding in today’s dynamic market.

In this piece, we’ll cover four essential areas:

A User Adoption Strategy: Why It Matters

Identifying causes for low user adoption, developing a user adoption strategy: 6 steps for success, putting strategic goals into action.

Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur seeking ways to increase user adoption or a business executive looking to enhance engagement with an existing product or service, this article will provide valuable insights and guidance.

The provision of a user adoption strategy comes as the natural next step for businesses aiming to improve product adoption rates. 

A user adoption strategy is essential because it helps create an effective and efficient customer acquisition and retention plan. Businesses can develop strategies specific to their target audience by understanding the user’s needs. This approach leads to an increase in adoption rates amongst existing customers and attracts new ones.

A well-crafted user adoption strategy can help a business identify its users’ needs, goals, and decision-making processes. Companies can use this information to create targeted marketing campaigns that are informative and effective. As a result, it can help reduce customer churn rates and increase product satisfaction.

A user adoption strategy matters because it provides a clear plan for businesses to target users who have yet to embrace the product fully or are unaware of its full features.

A user adoption strategy also allows companies to stay ahead of the competition by keeping on top of emerging trends in the market. It helps companies identify market gaps that they can exploit while avoiding the pitfalls of existing competitors.

Low user adoption is a frustrating challenge faced by many businesses. It is a complex problem that can have numerous causes. Here are some of the most common reasons for low user adoption:

A Decline in User Engagement : One of the main causes of low user adoption is a decline in user engagement. This may be due to a need for updates, new features, or regular bug fixes. When users feel that the app or website needs to be improved in some regard, motivation to continue using it is expected to falter.

Neglected Features : Another cause of low user adoption is neglected or overlooked features. It’s important to listen to user feedback and make required changes to the product. Certain features may not be user-friendly, and the users may find it hard to engage with them. This can lead to low user retention rates.

Onboarding Ineffectiveness : Many users who try a product out may not return. This could be due to poor onboarding. Users can quickly lose interest in the product if the user interface is not straightforward enough, instructions are unclear, or important features are left out of the training. Thus, nurturing a user’s first-time experience is crucial to cementing loyalty.

Insufficient Data for Management Insights : Low user adoption can also be due to inadequate data for management insights. It can be nearly impossible to fix the problem if you do not have the right data to analyze why users are leaving, causing the problem to become almost impossible to correct. Gather data from all touchpoints and analyze the users’ behaviors when interacting with the app or website.

Poor Customer Support : Poor customer support can be a major cause of low user adoption. Users want quick response times, personalization, and someone with authority to respond to their queries. If customer support is not meeting expectations, it can be a source of dissatisfaction and negative word-of-mouth, impacting user adoption.

Getting users to adopt new products or technologies can take time and effort, regardless of how great the product or technology might be. The adoption rate for new products or technologies can range between 50 and 70% , according to some estimates. These challenges can significantly impact a product’s success and be a major hurdle for businesses looking to introduce new products. 

Understanding the impact of your user adoption strategy requires a clear understanding of the target audience, their needs, and how they interact with the product. Companies must craft a strategy that resonates with their users, ensures higher adoption rates, and leads to sustainable product growth. 

Below, we’ll explore six steps you can follow to create a user adoption strategy that will help businesses effectively deliver their product or service to their target market and encourage them to become active and loyal users.

By aligning your strategy with these steps, you can create a comprehensive and detailed plan to achieve successful user adoption. 

1. Set up strategic goals

When developing a user adoption strategy, aligning your objectives with your business and user adoption end goals is essential. Starting with the overall business goals, such as increasing revenue or expanding your customer base, break them down into smaller, more specific, and achievable measurable objectives. 

For instance, increasing conversions by 25% within the next quarter could be a specific objective if increasing revenue is the primary goal.

You can ensure a proactive, streamlined approach to sustained user adoption by aligning strategic goals with your business objectives. Leveraging SMART goals can provide businesses with a structured framework to ensure KPIs are well-defined, achievable, and aligned with broader objectives.

Let’s deconstruct the SMART goals below.

• S pecific – the goals should be well-defined and concise.
• M easurable – the goals should be quantifiable and able to be tracked to measure progress.
• A chievable – the goals should be challenging yet realistic and attainable.
• R elevant – the goals should be aligned with your business objectives and user adoption strategy.
• T ime-bound – the goals should have a time frame and a deadline for completion and be time-bound.

SMART goals can ensure the user adoption strategy is focused on achieving your business objectives, strengthening efforts in alignment with the overall business strategy. This approach helps to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of user adoption tactics, ultimately helping to achieve business goals faster and with greater success.

2. Decide how to measure goals

When crafting a user adoption strategy, it’s essential first to determine how you’ll measure your goals. This is where metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come into play.

Understanding these two terms’ differences is crucial, as they work together to give you a full picture of how well your strategy is working. Metrics give you a broader understanding of your progress, whereas KPIs give you more specific insights into how well you’re meeting your goals. 

Metrics & KPIs

Metrics are an important component of any user adoption strategy as they provide quantitative data on the performance of your product. These data points help to measure progress and can be useful in identifying areas to improve your strategy. 

Key evaluation metrics include product adoption, customer satisfaction, attrition, conversion, and revenue.

For example, companies could use Google Analytics to track user behavior on their website or mobile app or send out a customer satisfaction survey to gauge their product’s usability and identify areas for improvement.

Once you understand your metrics, the next step is identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) to track.

When using metrics and KPIs together, ensuring that your KPIs align with your overall objectives is crucial. For example, if your goal is to increase user engagement, you might look at metrics like the number of daily active users or the average session duration. These metrics then help determine the KPIs, such as increasing daily active users by 10% in the next month or increasing the average session duration by 20 seconds.

By combining metrics and KPIs, you can gain deeper and more meaningful insights into the performance of your user adoption strategy. You can track progress towards specific goals, measure the effectiveness of different tactics, and adjust your approach based on data-driven insights.

User Adoption Metrics and KPIs to Consider

It’s important to remember that the distinction between KPIs and metrics can depend on the context in which they are used. For instance, the same metric may serve as a KPI for one objective and simply be a metric for another. 

Reflecting on this fact, here are a few key metrics and KPIs to consider when developing a successful user adoption strategy:

• Product Adoption Rate measures how many users have adopted your product or software and how quickly they did so.
• Time-to-Value : This metric measures how long a newly acquired customer takes to realize value from your product or service.
• User Attrition measures how many users you lose over a certain period, typically expressed as a percentage. It’s also often referred to as “churn rate.”
• Feature Adoption Rate measures how many users have adopted a specific feature of your product or software and how quickly they did so.
• Daily/Monthly Active Users : This metric counts how many users actively use your product or service daily or monthly.
• Time To First Action : This KPI measures the time it takes a new user to complete a key action, such as creating an account, making a purchase, or booking a service. This metric can help identify bottlenecks in the onboarding process and help improve usability.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) : This metric measures customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others.
• Customer Retention : This KPI measures the number of customers who continue using your product or service over time. It indicates customer loyalty and the success of your user adoption strategy.

AARRR pirate metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral) 

Aligning with Dave McClure’s AARRR pirate metrics can also be instrumental in reducing adoption friction and improving user adoption strategy.

By leveraging these metrics, you can identify areas of opportunity to optimize your user acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral strategies. For example, by focusing on improving your activation metrics, you can ensure that users receive immediate value from your product and are more likely to continue using it. Similarly, by enhancing your retention metrics, you can increase the lifetime value of your users and improve your overall revenue metrics.

3.  Craft a Comprehensive Customer Onboarding Plan

A comprehensive customer onboarding plan is essential for product-led growth businesses looking to build a successful user adoption strategy. This plan ensures that new users can quickly and easily understand the value of your product, its features, and its functions, making it easy for them to incorporate it into their daily routine.

A robust customer onboarding plan should be designed to work hand-in-hand with a user’s journey, providing targeted and contextualized support at each process stage. By guiding users through the product and its features, you increase the likelihood of them becoming regular customers or even advocates for your brand.

According to insights via Precursive , 74% of enterprise firms have a dedicated customer onboarding team, while 82% rate their onboarding approach as a key value driver. This highlights the importance of prioritizing investment in a dedicated team to successfully guide customers through onboarding, which can contribute to a positive customer experience while driving business growth.

The first step in developing an effective onboarding plan is identifying the core user personas most likely to benefit from your product. This allows you to tailor your onboarding experience to their needs, making them more likely to engage with your product and ultimately become loyal customers.

Businesses should also create interactive and engaging onboarding experiences that take users through key product features and functions. Incorporating videos, interactive tutorials, and user guides can be effective ways to ensure users are engaging with and understanding the product.

The final step is gathering user feedback throughout the onboarding process to optimize and improve the experience continually. This feedback will help you identify areas for improvement and adjust your onboarding process accordingly.

Crafting a comprehensive customer onboarding plan is key to the success of any product-led growth business. By providing users the support they need to engage with your product and understand its value, you increase their likelihood of becoming loyal customers and advocates for your brand.

4. Onboarding as a Continuous Process

Now that we’ve covered customer onboarding let’s discuss onboarding as a continuous process. 

Continuous onboarding improves user adoption for any product or service, especially in product-led growth businesses like SaaS companies. Treating it as a one-time event is a mistake that many businesses make.

As users move through the different phases of a product’s life cycle, they need to feel that they are continually discovering and learning new things about a product. Initially, users must experience value early on in the product lifecycle. This early value assists in acquiring new users and leads to growth in revenue. However, retaining users through continuous onboarding is just as important.

A continuous onboarding program helps educate users on a product’s features and benefits while increasing their knowledge of how they can use them to optimize their experience. Consistent engagement through targeted and educational content is critical in keeping users invested in a product. Furthermore, feedback mechanisms allow businesses to recognize areas where the product falls short and adjust the onboarding accordingly.

Creating a community of users who feel that they are continually learning and growing together is key to a successful continuous onboarding program. This community cultivates a strong sense of engagement and advocacy that can lead to more organic growth through word of mouth.

Implementing a comprehensive continuous onboarding program helps deliver value throughout the customer journey, tighten the SaaS sales funnel, and deliver a highly personalized experience that improves the customer’s overall perception of the service or product.

5. Prioritize Product Training 

Developing a successful user adoption strategy also requires prioritizing enhanced product training. While a good product is essential, users must understand how to use it and get the most out of it. 

A comprehensive training program ensures that users have the knowledge and skills they need to use the product effectively and feel confident in their ability.

Training programs should be designed to meet the needs of different users with various learning preferences. By providing them with varying training options, such as live webinars, video tutorials, product documentation, or personalized training sessions, users are likelier to find training methods that work best for them, leading to deeper engagement and increased satisfaction.

An effective user adoption strategy also involves empowering users to be self-sufficient by making training resources easily accessible. Training resources should be available when users need them, whether accessing a searchable knowledge base or an on-demand video tutorial. This approach can lead to better-informed users, higher product usage rates, and increased overall adoption.

Prioritizing enhanced product training as part of a user adoption strategy demonstrates a commitment to user success, and the time and resources invested in training will pay off. Product adoption will increase with well-trained and satisfied users, increasing retention, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.

6. Reduce Adoption Friction

As a product-led growth business, your ultimate goal is to acquire, activate, retain, and monetize users. But sometimes, even the most well-designed products need help attracting and retaining users. This is where reducing adoption friction comes into play.

Adoption friction refers to the obstacles or hurdles that prevent potential users from adopting your product. These can include anything from a difficult sign-up process to not understanding how to use the product. When users face adoption friction, they are likelier to abandon your product and never return.

An effective way to reduce adoption friction is to create a user-centric onboarding experience. This onboarding experience should guide users through the product intuitively and easily. It should highlight key features and benefits and provide clear instructions on using the product.

Another way to reduce adoption friction is by addressing user concerns and providing timely support. When users face challenges or have questions, they need to be able to access support resources easily. By providing a responsive support system, you can demonstrate your commitment to your users and improve overall user satisfaction.

Utilizing AARRR pirate metrics and reducing adoption friction can be particularly helpful in creating a healthy user growth and success cycle.

7. Optimize Processes That Enhance The User Journey

To truly develop a winning user adoption strategy, companies must take the final and most important step of assessing, evaluating, and adjusting the processes contributing to a sound user journey.

This final step requires a comprehensive approach to identify and analyze all touchpoints throughout the user journey. This includes the obvious steps, such as website visits or product demos, and the less obvious touchpoints, such as email communication, customer feedback, and social media interactions.

Through this process, companies can identify areas where the user journey can be optimized for maximum impact. By evaluating the processes contributing to the user journey, companies can uncover hidden growth opportunities, identify areas of improvement, and ultimately adjust the entire user journey to improve user adoption rates.

Optimizing processes that enhance the user journey is the first step toward building a successful user adoption strategy. The final step of evaluating and adjusting the entire user journey from end to end is critical to achieving long-term user adoption success, fostering customer loyalty, and driving growth for product-led businesses.

According to a Statista survey conducted in 2022, 90% of respondents reported that their company had already made considerable strides toward cloud implementation. 

This finding highlights the growing complexity surrounding the future of sustained user adoption. 

Among various cloud computing models, Software as a Service (SaaS) emerges as the largest segment of the global cloud market, generating revenues upwards of 100 billion U.S. dollars as of 2019. Unsurprisingly, it is now the most widely adopted cloud technology worldwide and is currently deployed by many organizations.

Increasing cloud adoption worldwide means that companies must be mindful of users’ challenges when using their software. To promote user adoption, companies must understand the user experience and offer comprehensive training to ensure users navigate the learning curve and reach that “Aha” moment. 

Launching a successful user adoption strategy can be demanding, so it is important to stay agile and adaptable to ensure that you are meeting the intended outcomes.

As businesses implement the steps outlined in this article, remember that continuous strategy evaluation will enable you to refine and pivot your approach accordingly. Taking this iterative mindset will ensure that the adoption strategy is effective and well-received by users. 

Always remember to prioritize empathizing with users and making constant improvements in your implementation to achieve the desired results.

A wonderful team of Digital Adoption, Digital Transformation & Change Management Experts.

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Humane Society  of the Palouse

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The Five Freedoms

Hsop is dedicated to providing the animals in our facility with the highest level of care possible during their stay with us.  adhering to the five freedoms ensures we are giving the companion animals in our care everything they need to live a healthy and happy life.  staff monitors each pet at hsop individually to identify their specific mental and physical needs, so we can be sure to give them the most humane treatment during their temporary stay with us.  our shelter is committed to providing animals with:.

1. Freedom from Hunger and Thirst

An adequate and healthful diet, with ready access to fresh drinking water.

2. Freedom from Discomfort

An appropriate living environment including a clean and comfortable resting area. 

3. Freedom from Pain, Injury, and Disease

Prevention or rapid diagnosis, and treatment for injury or illness. 

4. Freedom to Express Normal Behaviors

Sufficient  space, exercise, and ability to be with animal's own kind.

5. Freedom from Fear and Distress

Conditions and treatment that avoid mental suffering and stress. 

Enrichment Program

Help us keep our pets happy!

Here at HSoP we strive to ensure our animals receive the highest level of care possible. This includes physical, mental, and emotional stimulation while they stay with us. We do our best to make sure each animal in our facility receives all preventative and necessary medical attention, as well as enrichment in their kennels to keep them entertained. Did you know animals can go stir crazy when they are confined in a small space for periods of time with no distractions? This is a common issue for animal shelters nationwide, and we are determined to limit that likelihood as much as possible for the animals here at HSoP.

The staff here at HSoP are dedicated to making sure each animal has plenty of stimulation both physical and mental, to keep them from getting bored. Our wonderful volunteers help with this by taking the animals out of their kennels for some free time in a different area.

Thank you Nylabone for donating roughly 250 Chews!

Our dogs enjoy going to their outside kennels and side yard to play fetch, stretch their legs, and change their scenery! Our cats love to get out of their kennels and go into our adoption room so they can stretch their legs, chase some toys, and get some extra special cuddles!

We want our animals to have a great experience here while they wait for their new homes, so we are starting an Enrichment Program. This program will be dedicated to finding new and innovative ways to keep our furry friends busy and happy in their kennels!

To achieve this goal of ours, we need your help! We have created a Wishlist on our amazon of all the items we think could be of great use for this program. We hope you will take a moment to browse through our list and pick a few thin gs you would like to donate to our furry friends here at HSoP!

https://a.co/1SSv51R

Donations can be mailed to 2019 E. White Ave. Moscow, ID 83843

Thank you Starmark for donating 25 treat dispensing chew balls!

Thank you Petfinder Foundation for your grant of 15 Kong Toys to benefit our canine friends of HSoP. With this grant we are able to provide our dogs with both mental and physical stimulation. Keeping our animals happy and healthy during their stay with us is our number one priority. With donations and grants like this, we can continue to give our animals the highest quality of care possible.