Two words have dominated the discussion around the future of work: digital transformation. With a shift to remote and hybrid work, companies are rapidly turning towards enterprise software to manage just about every facet of their business: From payroll and customer relationship management, to internal communication and resource planning. 

With burnout and turnover already at an all-time-high, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your digital transformation is actually improving your employees’ experience. You’ve likely spent time thinking about your product UX, now it’s time to think about your Employee UX. The first step? A digital adoption platform.

The defining feature of a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) is its ability to combine a front-end experience for users — in this case, your employees — with a powerful back-end analytics and insights dashboard. According to Digital Adoption Platform provider, WalkMe, by helping employees better navigate the growing roster of apps in their workflows and identifying pain points through robust data and analytics, businesses can improve their employee UX and optimize their digital transformation.

The right way to manage the app boom

Amidst all the uncertainty and change over the past two years, we’ve found ourselves in a golden age of digital products. A recent Gartner survey found that 83% of CEOs intend to invest more into “digital capabilities” in 2022, with the research firm projecting that enterprise software spending will grow to $6.7 billion this year. That’s nearly as much as companies spend on hardware. The future of work, it seems, will be defined by the tech stack.

While this app boom means that your teams have more ways than ever to improve their workflows, it also means that your organization now has more apps to onboard, manage and optimize. Today companies, across all departments, use 129 apps on average, and every time your employee needs to switch apps, it takes them an average of 23 minutes to get back on track. . You were expecting apps to transform and scale your business; instead your employees are frustrated, your IT department is overwhelmed, and your CIO can’t say if any of this is moving the needle. One Boston Consulting Group study found that 70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives.

So how can companies do better? Enter the digital adoption platform, or DAP. A DAP is something that sits on top of your existing tech stack to ensure that the digital transformation of your organization is being effectively adopted by those who use it.

To understand how this works, let’s start with your employees’ app habits. Your average sales person uses around a dozen or so apps to close a deal from start to finish. There’s an app for lead generation, customer management, pricing, contracting and so on. On top of that, they’re also navigating a number of other HR apps to track their expenses, log hours, submit PTO and manage benefits. That’s a lot of workflows where things could easily go wrong. 

Think of a DAP as a digital concierge, connected to all your enterprise apps, ready to assist at a moment’s notice. Instead of digging for onboarding documents, employees can just pull up the DAP, say what they want to do, and the DAP will open the relevant app and offer on-screen guidance through every step of the process. It makes the everyday lives of your employees that much easier, and, importantly, requires zero changes to your existing tech stack. 

Solving problems across your tech stack

Of course, better employee UX doesn’t just begin and end with the front-end. The true power of a digital adoption platform is the data and insight into how employees are using the digital tools available to them. A few years ago, this might have been a minor issue, as decisions around what apps a business uses were largely centralized and thus fairly uniform. What was an issue for one employee was likely an issue for everyone else. 

These days, however, digital transformation is an ad hoc process. One team sees an app they like and they start using it one way, while another might struggle to fully grasp the benefits. This leads to an uneven employee UX — the way your sales team uses Salesforce might be drastically different than your account team. With the analytics a DAP provides, you can see exactly where your employees are getting hung up, implement changes to the front-end experience to better guide them, and see the ROI on your tech stack grow. 

With robust analytics at hand, decision-makers finally have visibility into how much value their suite of digital apps create — they can now see what’s moving the needle and what’s not. And it’s that kind of data-backed and informed decision-making that drives real business results. This is why Gartner projects that by 2025, 70% of organizations will use digital adoption solutions across the entire technology stack to overcome bad employee UX.

A lot of the talk these days around digital transformation focuses on the apps. It’s true that there are so many new and innovative enterprise software solutions to transform and scale your business. But the reality is that it all starts with your employee experience. If your employees are struggling, that impacts the return you see on your digital transformation investment. 

A digital adoption platform ensures that your employees have a holistic, uniform experience across all of the enterprise apps they use. Better employee UX means that you’re making the most of your digital transformation investment—and that includes getting more accurate insights into how well your workforce is performing with the tech stack at its disposal. The result? Better information that ultimately drives better business outcomes. 

Digital transformation is the starting point. A digital adoption platform ensures the intended business outcomes.

Curious about how a digital adoption platform can optimize your digital transformation? WalkMe can help drive better employee UX and accelerate your digital transformation. For more information on the connection between digital adoption and digital transformation, check out WalkMe’s latest eBook, Digital Adoption for Dummies.