Empowering Customers with Seamless Adoption

Whether it is an easy-to-use mobile application like WhatsApp or a complex SaaS-based product like O365, if the adoption is not carried out well, the usage and growth of the product will not be a success. In this blog, we have highlighted the importance of seamless adoption technique for every customer. The key topics covered are understanding adoption, identifying the need to drive adoption, benefits of software product adoption, adoption success metrics (various approaches), and successful adoption outcomes. 

This blog mainly focuses on the following:

• Difference between deployment and adoption
• Factors essential to drive successful adoption
• Benefits of this to the customer – like collaboration, cost reduction, increased product-people engagement, and work efficiency

Understanding Adoption

So, what exactly do we mean by the term "adoption"? Many people think that a product's "deployment" is the "adoption" of a product. But that is not true! Let us understand this by considering a SaaS-based product like O365/M365. Do we deploy O365? No, right! Microsoft already does deployment on the cloud, we just enable the license & services, and Service Desk/IT Team may install the office partly on our local machines. The servers are also deployed over the cloud, and we only need to configure them as per our needs. But this activity is not adoption. In my view, adoption is a set of activities that an organization undertakes to make the product usable across the organization & its users in the easiest way possible.

Identifying the Need to Drive Adoption

When any organization wishes to improve their employees' productivity and provide better services to their customers, they search for a solution that is easy to procure, deploy, and maintain. It is called envisioning. Once the solution is procured, the next step is to make it available to the employees so that they can be more productive; this is called – empowering. So, the question is, will it increase productivity once the solution is procured and made available? Will it provide better services to its customers? Will it provide better ROI? The answer is NO!  

The answer can be “Yes” only if we drive value through the adoption process. We need to make the employees understand what the product can do or, better, what they can achieve more out of it by organizing training and workshops, and sending various product features that relate to what they do every day and that can make their work productivity easier that will increase Adoption of the solution. That is why I rely on the success mantra "Envision," Empower", and "Drive Value through adoption."

Benefits of Software Product Adoption

There are several benefits if Adoption is carried out for a solution:

1. Increase in usage of the product/solution - When employees understand what the software can do and how it will benefit everyday work, they start using it. But if only proper guidance/training is imparted.
2. Reduction of repetitive tasks - Let's understand this by an example. Suppose the HR department wishes to send "Birthday Wish Emails" every day to various employees. They can achieve this by maintaining a master sheet and sending daily emails by tracking the DOB. We can reduce this by using a tool from O365, "Microsoft Flow," that is designed to perform repetitive tasks without human intervention or less human intervention. This I can say from my own experience where our customer departments rely heavily on "Microsoft Flow" to automate everyday repetitive tasks in my project. We achieved this by training the users to get more out of the solution purchased.
3. Better customer insights & experience - After all, CSAT matters, right? When we introduce a solution that will help employees to get accurate & timely information from their customers, business leaders can analyze and plan their business strategies accordingly. It will help them plan which area needs more improvement, work on it, increase CSAT scores. 
4. Increase in digital development and culture - When we correctly drive Adoption, focusing on what is important now, we unlock digital development, and employees work towards enhancing their skills and learning to reach their goals while benefiting from this new culture.
5. Excellent return on investments - When employees' efficiency and productivity in any organization show growth, customer satisfaction and service renewal expectations automatically increase. This means more business pouring in from existing ones, and potential customers can also be targeted, thereby achieving a better return on investments.

Adoption Success Metrics (various approaches)

So, how do we measure Adoption? In order to answer this, there is no single parameter by which we can measure Adoption. It differs from project to project and business to business. However, products like O365 come with tools by which you can measure Adoption on various workloads that are being used or not used. This tool is called "Adoption Score," and it gives you an analysis/dashboard of various workloads that are being used, how many users are using a particular workload (Outlook, Teams, etc.), and compare their usages. Stakeholders and adoption specialists can use these scores to plan their adoption strategy. For example, they can look for answers to why a particular workload is not being used or less used, if any training is required, or if the users are aware or not aware of using it and what they can do to increase the usage.

Duties of an adoption specialist:

1. Product Onboarding
2. Sending communication
3. Introducing the product in the organization
4. Identifying the most needed workload(s) to begin with
5. Training Users
6. Identifying bottlenecks/challenges
7. Technical Support/Handholding

Successful Adoption Outcomes

A good software adoption not only provides help & assistance required to use and understand the product but also works out ways to reduce work time and ensure value realization happens. It is a process that should be followed to align customers' needs and the desired outcome – successful product usage. If Adoption is not carried out well, however capable an organization is, the software product becomes a shelfware product after a certain period of time. There will be challenges, and overcoming those challenges will mitigate software adoption hurdles, increase efficiency and usage of the product, and provide better delivery techniques. Good customer success can only happen by applying a good adoption process.

O365/M365 - Microsoft 365 is a SaaS-based interrelated collaborative pool of products from Microsoft, which helps organizations/individuals to increase productivity and collaborate with cross-functional teams in real-time, anytime, anywhere, and on any platform. Microland helps to deliver IT operations faster at a significantly lower cost and with improved scalability. With extensive experience in implementing top-notch solutions, Microland makes it easier for enterprises to adopt NextGen Digital infrastructure. Contact us to start scaling your business faster.