It’s clear that digital technologies can positively impact productivity, competitiveness, and employee and customer experiences. However, tapping into those benefits is still a challenge for many businesses and the SaaS companies.
Let’s take a look at some of the biggest digital adoption challenges, and what you can do to overcome these problems.
What is digital adoption?
Before we look at the digital adoption challenges facing businesses and SaaS teams today, we need to define digital adoption clearly.
Digital adoption is the process where employees and organizations learn to use digital tools and technologies to their maximum potential. Some of the key steps involved included:
Learning how to use the tools.
Understanding how to integrate digital tools into workflows.
Working out how digital tools can optimize existing workflows.
As you can see, digital adoption is not just about learning. It’s also about how you can implement digital technologies to save time and money, drive innovation, and make the business more productive.
Now that we’re all on the same page about digital adoption, it’s time to look at the biggest challenges facing SaaS teams and companies on their journey to revolutionize their processes with technology.
Challenges for SaaS teams
The ultimate goal for SaaS teams is to get people to use and love their apps. However, they must encounter many roadblocks along the way.
User onboarding
Everyone knows that complex onboarding flows are bad. But did you know that 74% of customers will switch to rival solutions if the workflows are too complex? That’s enough to completely destroy your conversion rates, even if your product can solve your target audience’s problems.
Of course, complexity isn’t the only user onboarding challenge out there. It’s also things like the quality of your onboarding, including things like offering appropriate help to users with different levels of experience or ensuring that your onboarding content is focused on primary user needs or funneled toward your aha moment.
User adoption
A recent survey posted in Business Reporter suggested that 96% of businesses have faced challenges that stem from poor user adoption. The big issue here for SaaS teams is that companies buy their software but don’t end up using the tools to full effect.
So, while user onboarding focuses on helping people get to grips with the product, user adoption is about ensuring users know how to get value from the product to the point that it becomes part of their daily work or life routine.
Customer churn
Customer Gauge research suggests that software providers in the modern era experience churn rates of as much as 14%, with other surveys suggesting that around 10% is the average. Whatever the truth is, losing users is a perennial problem for SaaS products.
Self-service
Customers want self-service options when it comes to purchasing and resolving problems, with research suggesting that 81% of users prefer to solve issues themselves rather than calling customer service. However, too many SaaS products haven’t moved to meet consumer expectations.
When products don’t offer self-service tools, it can lead to a drop in user satisfaction, higher support costs, and even a reduction in productivity within the business.
Increasing CAC
Customer acquisition costs (CAC) keep on rising. Some estimates suggest these costs have gone up by 50% over the last five years due to digital transformation, increased competition, and changes in consumer behavior.
If customers are expensive to acquire, then you need to improve your conversion and retention rates to justify the increase. Otherwise, you’re just throwing money away.
Challenges for companies
Companies, even those who are actively pursuing digital transformation, can encounter problems when trying to unlock the benefits of new tech.
Employee onboarding
Research shows that 81% of new users are overwhelmed by information during the employee onboarding process. That’s not a huge surprise because a lot of companies have bloated software stacks and complex workflows, on top of requiring new hires to do a lot of reading for HR, contract, and company policy issues.
When we get overwhelmed, we can’t take things in properly. Time to productivity (TTV) is already a big issue when you make new hires. Anything that adds to TTV is an enemy of productivity. Conversely, anything that helps with the process, such as user onboarding tools, is a friend of productivity.
Employee training
Employees spend an average of 57 hours per year on training alone. In the US, the cost of this learning is around $1,000 per user. Training is necessary, but it costs resources and productivity. So, for most businesses, it’s an area that could do with more efficiency, especially for small teams working with tight margins.
Digital skills gap
Digital tools move at a breakneck speed. Even in just the last decade, the type of technology we have at our disposal has changed dramatically. While it’s good news that innovative apps are pushing the envelope, the downside is that often, employees struggle to keep up.
Even today, just 56% of EU citizens have basic or above tech skills. While that’s not an awful number in context, it does show that not everyone is aboard the digital transformation train. Problems can occur when companies try to roll out new tech tools and workflows, but their staff feel uncomfortable using these tools.
Budgetary constraints
Just a few years ago, in the era of low interest rates, there was a lot of money sloshing around. However, things are tighter these days, with the cost of living crisis also affecting consumers. Companies need to be a bit more careful with their spending, which means there is less opportunity to invest in new technological tools and the training required to get staff to a level of competence.
Data security
As businesses become more reliant on digital technology, they open themselves up to various cybersecurity risks. Some of these threats will involve things like cloud computing or IoT devices, while others stem from meeting compliance standards, like GDPR. Balancing effective data governance will still allow for usability across the software stacks, which is something that many businesses are still grappling with, alongside ensuring that third-party vendors and services do the same.
How the right digital adoption platform can help
While all the challenges for everyday businesses and SaaS developers can’t be solved overnight, a solid digital adoption tool will help you move in the right direction.
Usetiful was built as an onboarding tool to help users quickly learn how to become competent at software tasks. However, it comes packed with lots of features that directly help businesses accelerate their digital adoption efforts.
How Usetiful helps SaaS businesses with digital adoption challenges
Here’s how Usetiful can help SaaS businesses with their big digital adoption challenges.
User onboarding: Usetiful is a user onboarding tool. It allows SaaS teams to build onboarding content over their app, meaning they can make no-code tooltips, product tours and walkthroughs, checklists, hotspots, and more to help their users understand their software.
User adoption: Usetiful helps promote user adoption with tooltips, an in-app widget that connects to knowledge base and help articles, and interactive demos to help with new features.
Customer churn: Great onboarding experiences reduce customer churn. However, Usetiful takes things even further by facilitating in-app feedback, providing continuous education, and improving time to value for new users.
Self-service: The Usetiful Assistant, in-app knowledge bases, and interactive guides are all geared toward customer self-service, allowing SaaS teams to improve customer satisfaction, even without a huge customer service budget.
Increasing CAC: Usetiful’s onboarding features help teams improve conversion and retention rates, which soften the blow of rising CAC.
How Usetiful helps companies with digital adoption challenges
Employee onboarding: Usetiful offers a range of features to boost employee onboarding. Product tours, tooltips, and checklists are perfect to acclimatize employees to new tools. What’s more, Usetiful offers personalization and custom language options, meaning even geographically dispersed teams can learn by doing.
Employee training: Digital adoption isn’t just about new hires. It also requires your existing team to learn and embrace new tools. No-code, step-by-step guides are ideal for learning new features, workflows, or tools, helping ensure that your team keeps learning and adding new skills.
Digital skills gap: Bridging the digital skills gap is an essential element of digital adoption. Usetiful helps you to reduce this deficit with user-friendly learning, support for training initiatives, and personalized onboarding that fits around roles, preferences, and different levels of experience.
Budgetary constraints: Everyone is working within a budget. When you use a digital adoption solution like Usetiful, it helps ensure you get ROI from your investments. Additionally, Usetiful can reduce training costs or expensive learning management systems (LMSs) by providing contextual learning.
Data security: Usetiful complies with regulatory standards like ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA, while also using zero-knowledge design when delivering onboarding content. These features ensure you can protect employee data and privacy while ensuring personalized content.
Final thoughts
Unlocking the potential of digital technologies isn’t straightforward. In fact, there are several barriers that both SaaS teams and general companies must overcome to access these benefits. Digital adoption platforms like Usetiful are tailor-made to tackle these common challenges and help your business and employees be more productive and competitive.