How Digital Adoption services drive behavior change

Change is not easy. It is safe to say that people typically don’t like changes, especially at work. Change is something that brings uncertainty, creates the need to do things differently, and disturbs our daily routine. But let’s take a closer look at the purpose of the change, which is typically improvement – either of cost efficiency, productivity, or user/client satisfaction.

I think that everyone would agree that the intentions are good. Someone who introduces the change wants to improve the “as-is” state, while recipients of the change want to do better job in a more efficient manner. In theory then, everything works out. That said, we need to ask ourselves why 90% of people resist change (Forbes). This is the true challenge that organizations of all sizes struggle with. How do you introduce a change that will both work from an IT perspective and get user buy-in? How do you ensure that users are actively engaged, and will use it as it was assumed by the organization? How do you mitigate the risk of poor satisfaction and low adoption of introduced changes to avoid direct negative impact on the project ROI? To successfully manage change, we need to answer all of these questions.

Let’s take an example. A few years ago, I was asked to run a project whose goal was to introduce a “Virtual Assistant,” an IT bot to help users find answers to their most common IT questions. The idea was simple – we put a user interface as an avatar on the intranet and fuel it with knowledge articles, thereby reducing the number of calls to the service desk. After few weeks of development, we successfully launched the application and started thinking about further implementations. Everything went well except for one thing – nobody was using my carefully developed bot. That important lesson helped me realize that to successfully introduce something to users, good project management and an excellent technical team are not enough.

This is a rather basic principle and condition for effective change, but the enabler is something else. To truly enable all the change capabilities, we need to engage people and give them service, information, knowledge, and communication methods tailored to who they are, what they need and what they do, so at the end of the day we explain how the change will affect them. When introducing any change to the organization we need to prioritize one important aspect – people. It is necessary to introduce the change so that it will be tailored to specific needs of your employees, communicate it accordingly, and describe the specific value and benefits to ensure that users understand why it is happening.

With all these principles in place, Capgemini developed a unique Digital Adoption offering to support our customers in their change and transformation journey by enabling the acceptance of new digital tools, assets, and processes. We ensure that users are motivated, engaged into digital transformation activities, and satisfied. As a result, we achieve high adoption of transformation programs and changes, increased awareness, and faster ROI for investment projects.

Listen to our Podcast to know how focusing on user experience is driving digital adoption at workplace.

To succeed at change, we need to make sure that each adoption element we introduce will be valuable for the audience. Developing personas and user journeys allows us to understand users’ role in the organization, priorities, analyze pain points, and understand how the change will impact their work. Based on that, we can select specific adoption, communication, training methods, and areas we need to cover to successfully support the change. One of the methods that has proven highly successful in changing behaviors to achieve specific business outcomes is enterprise gamification. Game mechanics such as points, levels, challenges, leaderboards, and incentives make the change more effective, leading to higher and more meaningful levels of engagement. With Digital Adoption we not only apply game elements and techniques to the business, but also, thanks to gamification, we engage multiple groups of employees to increase their motivation. This enables to invite a wider range of stakeholders across the organization and helps develop a change ambassadors’ network to support the change during and after core project activities are over.

Our first Digital Adoption portfolio was introduced almost five years ago and we have since supported over 30 large global organizations in making sure that benefits from introduced changes are clearly visible for them and their employees.

For more details on how we can help with your organization’s Digital Transformation, you can reach out to me via LinkedIn or Twitter, or email me at michal.przybylowski@capgemini.com