Digitalizing Businesses: What are the main findings?
Companies are widely adopting digital technology if we measure it by the fact that they have equipped themselves. But getting users to use it properly remains a challenge.
To prepare its «Digital Adoption Trends 2023 » report, Whatfix surveyed over 1,100 business software users. One of the results highlighted is that 84% of employees say there are essential functions and processes in the software they use every day that they don’t know how to use.
Since 2014, the European Commission has summarized the main indicators of Europe’s digital performance in the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI).
In 2021, only 55% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) reached at least a basic level in the adoption of digital technologies. Businesses are getting increasingly digitalized, but the use of advanced digital technologies remains low.
Employees are struggling to stay afloat as information and applications flood their digital workplace... Finding the information they need to do their jobs is often a challenge.
Application proliferation and adoption difficulties
At the same time, employees are affected by what is now commonly called «app-fatigue». For most of us, it is difficult to use more than 5 applications at work, or in our personal lives for that matter.
Compare this figure with the more than 5 million applications available on Google, Apple, etc. “stores”.
This fatigue is due to the sheer number and, great variety of applications that overwhelm us. They also come with constant changes, updates and evolutions of the paths that generate unnecessary complexity and stress.
Companies have spent years digitizing “all-in-one” products. These solutions had the advantage of being highly integrated, but often provided only average functional coverage.
Thanks to the development of SaaS, we have seen a proliferation of specialized tools, dedicated to precise operational needs.
Indeed, Best-of-Breed (BOB) offers are enjoying their heyday, and for a very good reason. That said, each application has its specificities, and it’s not easy to master them all. Especially if you only use them occasionally.
In an excellent joint Ebook «How to digitalize your tools», Aircall, HubSpot, SalesLoft, Refract and, Plecto, summarize the limitations of these Best-of-Breed solutions:
- The diversity of applications means that training takes time: users must adapt.
- Even if most of these solutions have APIs, integration problems are real.
- By their very nature, these solutions correspond to several platforms to address each specific use, making it complex to maintain a single repository.
Do not lose the user and guarantee strong adoption
The major publishers are aware of this and are attempting to respond with “super-app”. Obviously this concept could emerge in the next few years.
Although their scope is not yet clear, the underlying idea is to offer a single point of access, a more user-friendly experience, and a greater capacity for personalization.
However, we can imagine that they will penetrate the private sphere more quickly than the richer and more complex professional environment.
Digital adoption in the workplace
The stakes are certainly high for publishers, but also for enterprise customers, these are not rhetorical questions.
Incomplete digitization has a direct impact on companies’ productivity and profitability:
- Investing in little-used or unused applications is a waste of resources,
- Dissatisfied employees implement workaround strategies that are not validated by the IT department, putting the company at risk,
- A poor user experience undermines employees’ confidence in the company’s projects, degrading the famous «employer brand», at a time when companies are facing new challenges in terms of recruiting and retaining talents,
- Finally (and this is undoubtedly the most damaging consequence), poor use of company applications impacts relations with customers and partners. loss of quality, lack of responsiveness and precision in rendering services… consequences are numerous.
Conversational access to boost digital adoption and usage
Agora Software’s conversational AI has been designed to improve the day-to-day experience of employees by simplifying access to their corporate applications.
Collaborative tools and messaging systems are already deployed, and users are used to them.
All that remains is to connect them to the applications to offer users a more intuitive path.
In addition to desktop and mobile application access, they can converse with the solutions in place.
Thanks to the conversational mode, one sentence replaces (at least) 9 clicks, which is a real productivity booster.
We explain it all in our white paper, which you can download here!
Want to understand how our conversational AI platform optimizes your users’ productivity and engagement by effectively complementing your enterprise applications?