In any organisation, we have to continually evolve, improving our services, techniques, and practices to best suit the needs of the business. The key to this is improving our digital adoption processes. Not only does top-tier digital adoption improve the knowledge retention rate, but it can also improve productivity, employee engagement, company culture, and ROI when done correctly.
In this complete digital adoption guide, you’ll learn about what digital adoption is, why it matters, and 8 digital adoption strategies for immediate impact.
What Is Digital Adoption?
Digital adoption is the process of learning how to use new technology to its full potential. This means providing your employees or customers with the tools they need to adopt technology and learn to use it fully. This may be video walkthroughs, in-person training, or offering on-page interactive guides to support user learning, within a given context.
It’s important to note that digital adoption isn’t just about rolling out new software. It’s about ensuring employees and customers can navigate, understand, and make the most of the tools you’ve invested in. The process is as much about employee buy-in and culture as it is a learning and development piece.
Digital Adoption Challenges
The main digital adoption challenge is the lack of training when introducing new software or overcomplicated learning processes. This, in turn, leads to poor user engagement, burnt-out employees, and an overload within the organisation. It also means a poor return on your investment due to low uptake and usage.
A study by Bain & Company found that only 8% of organisations achieve their desired business outcomes from digital investments. These stats show how adoption doesn’t just happen overnight, it requires a strategy and continued effort. As much as we’d like a plug-in-and-go style solution with immediate returns, digital adoption simply doesn’t work that way.
The future success of your business depends on how well your employees can adopt and use new technology. This means avoiding:
-
Wasting hours searching for documentation or struggling to use tools.
-
Poor onboarding preventing users from realising the value of your product.
-
Complex onboarding mechanisms that provide more questions than answers.
-
Digital adoption platforms that aren’t scalable to your growing business needs.
-
Clunky, out-of-context solutions that create a fragmented onboarding experience.
With Omniplex Guide, organisations eliminate the friction of learning new systems by embedding real-time, in-app support that transforms users into confident experts. Customizable guides, walkthroughs, and knowledge banks are all at your people’s fingertips, allowing them to learn as they use the new technology. This leads to increased engagement, uptake, and knowledge retention.
Why Digital Adoption Often Fails
Digital adoption often fails when training feels disconnected from daily tasks, forcing users to step away from their workflow to learn. Without real-time guidance, users often struggle to retain information, leading to errors, delays, and frustration.
Traditional methods rely on external courses, manuals, or IT support, leaving employees overwhelmed or disengaged. This disconnect can cause frustration, low hands-on engagement, and a lot of time spent away from regular roles and responsibilities.
When digital adoption doesn’t go as intended, support teams often bear the brunt of the chaos. IT teams and learning and development departments can often be buried in support tickets, with questions that should’ve been answered during the digital adoption process.
Employee understanding is crucial to the success of digital adoption. Without it, the tools become ineffectual and slow the daily processes of the business. Digital adoption often fails because the onboarding process isn’t clear-cut enough, communication is messy, or the training doesn’t include in-context walkthroughs where employees can actively get a feel for the software in a safe and secure environment.
This isn’t a technology problem – it’s an adoption problem. Without clear, contextual support embedded into workflows, tools meant to enhance efficiency can inadvertently create bottlenecks.
-
For employees, this can cause them to feel overwhelmed from juggling too many apps and processes.
-
For IT Teams, this means the burden of constant support requests.
-
For Leadership, this can mean unclear ROI and a lack of visibility into adoption rates.
Omniplex Guide bridges this gap by embedding real-time, in-app guidance directly where users need it. This reduces the reliance on overwhelmed support teams and ensures deadlines are met without unnecessary stress. Your people can immediately access support from the in-app platform at any time with quick, clear solutions that keep processes moving forward.
What Does Successful Digital Adoption Look Like?
Successful digital adoption isn’t flashy. Simply, it means that your people can continue with their daily tasks without too much interruption, despite the introduction of new software and technology. This success shows an increase in efficiency, less time spent in training seminars, and more metrics for leaders that show knowledge gaps and room for improvement.
Traditional training often feels like a stopgap measure. Between the manual updates, outdated content, and hours of retraining sessions, it can leave both employees and L&D teams drained. When processes or tools change, the cycle starts again: updating guides, redistributing training materials, and re-explaining workflows that should have already been intuitive. With businesses now managing an average of 177 SaaS apps for every 1,000 employees, app fatigue is real. Organisations cannot afford to spend weeks learning about new apps and software anymore. Instead, their people need to hit the ground running. In-app training and support is the best way to do just that. It reduces the complexity and focuses on empowering employees and customers alike to unlock the full value of these tools.
8 Digital Adoption Strategies for Immediate Impact
If you are looking for practical digital adoption strategies that’ll make an immediate impact, here are some actionable steps to drive adoption and maximise ROI for your business:
1. Simplify Onboarding
Deliver intuitive, step-by-step guidance directly within the tools employees use daily. In-app support allows people to refresh their knowledge and work through the issues they need at the time without involving support teams.
2. Enable Learning in the Flow of Work
Support users with contextual tips and resources right where they need them. Remove time-sapping in-person training events and enable people to learn as they work, allowing them to soak up more practical knowledge without stepping away from their daily roles and responsibilities.
3. Track Progress
Use analytics to monitor adoption rates and identify gaps in real-time. Leadership teams can spot any potential issues with employee understanding earlier before they become a problem. It makes it easier to see what works for your cohort in terms of L&D so you can tailor your approach moving forward.
4. Eliminate Resistance to Change
By involving employees in the planning process, you create a sense of ownership. Employees buy into the process more, feel valued and listened to, and are more likely to engage in training and development.
5. Offer Role-Based Training
No one wants to learn systems or processes that they don’t need. Tailor your learning materials to specific teams, roles, or skill levels with segmented lists and guides. This way, people only learn what they need to, rather than needlessly knowing the entire program inside and out.
6. Prioritise Ongoing Support
Digital transformation is never “one and done”—keep users engaged with regular updates. Refresh guides using the data gained from the back end, update walkthroughs for clearer understanding, and add new ongoing support for new features or processes.
7. Streamline Tools
Avoid app overload by ensuring that employees only focus on the most impactful apps. Find which tools work best for your people and strip them back for more effective and efficient workflows.
8. Communicate the Why
Clearly explain how new tools will improve workflows and reduce frustrations. This clear communication lessens worries about new technology and its impact on jobs, as well as giving employees the opportunity to understand the business direction and their integral role in it. As a result, employees are more likely to be engaged with the new tool.
Omniplex Guide case study
One organisation used Omniplex Guide to reduce employee onboarding time for their CRM system by 50%. It was a hefty goal, but one that Omniplex Guide rose to.
The results?
-
3 months saved in onboarding time.
-
600% reduction in IT support tickets.
-
Employees gained confidence in their tech faster.
-
Marked boosts to employee productivity and morale.
The Cost of Poor Digital Adoption
According to a report by CFO Tech India, lack of digital adoption or poor digital adoption costs enterprises over $1.14m a week, worldwide. This is money that businesses simply cannot afford to be throwing away on lacking digital adoption solutions.
When digital adoption fails, the cracks begin to show across every layer of an organisation. Employees spend valuable hours juggling tools they barely understand, IT teams are buried under a mountain of support tickets, and managers scramble to make sense of unclear ROI.
For employees, the day-to-day impact is immediate. The frustration builds, morale dips, and productivity takes a back seat. People feel ineffectual, which turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy of low mood and morale. Struggles with technology and changes to daily roles can have a huge impact on self-worth and their consequential output level.
Meanwhile, IT teams are forced into firefighting mode, answering repetitive questions and resolving preventable errors. This leaves little time for innovation or strategic improvements. IT teams are at their best when they’re working preventatively, not reactively which is often the case with poor digital adoption.
With the help and support from interactive walkthroughs, and real-time, accessible support directly within your software application you can minimise employee frustrations, improve knowledge gaps, and empower your people to solve their own issues, without involving support teams.
Digital Adoption with Omniplex Guide
With Omniplex Guide, teams regain control. Employees receive in-app, real-time guidance that eliminates confusion and offers clear-cut support and training. As a result, IT support requests decrease as users find the answers they need within the software itself. At the same time, managers can focus on driving results, confident in the knowledge that their teams are equipped to thrive.
At the heart of a strong adoption strategy is the right tool. Omniplex Guide empowers teams to adopt new systems seamlessly with:
-
In-App Guidance: Step-by-step walkthroughs tailored to specific roles and tasks.
-
Personalised Support: Contextual help based on where users are in their journey.
-
Real-Time Analytics: Track usage and optimise training strategies.
-
Automated Updates: Ensure all training materials stay current without extra effort.
