The returns on investment a Mobile Digital Adoption Platform can capture from technology deployments to field workers
It’s important for any mobile technology initiative to fulfill its promise of a return on investment. After all, your organization has likely spent millions of dollars investing in mobile technology under the expected promise of business transformation -- whether from increased sales activities or cost savings through operational efficiencies.
Too often, the assumption is that mobile workers will adopt the technology from day one and that they’ll use it effectively when they’re in the field. Mobile app engagement is all too frequently taken for granted.
The reality, however, is that engagement doesn’t just happen.
And when your mobile workers can’t use their application and devices the right way, it causes significant problems for your business -- and the promised ROI isn’t realized.
You might search for reasons why engagement isn’t happening, but the answers are usually very simple: poor training on mobile applications before deployment and little focus on ongoing app learning and support.
Antiquated training methods such as one-and-done classroom instruction and archaic tools such as PowerPoint decks simply don’t get the job done. Those methods treat the learner as a passive recipient of knowledge, which runs counter to practically all credible knowledge retention strategies. More importantly, they fail to meet workers where they’re at with technology.
Digital training offers a substantial if not dramatic return on investment over traditional training.
And yet, significant challenges remain for most companies in making sure mobile workers are properly trained and engaged on their apps and devices.
But there is a better way to train and support your mobile workers to ensure engagement and deliver ROI. A Mobile Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) can ensure that mobile technology deployment is successful -- in terms of effectiveness, less redundancy of efforts, less downtime, easier onboarding, higher employee satisfaction and lower turnover rates.
Mobile DAP Benefit #1: Greater Effectiveness & Better Information Retention
People generally forget what they learn in training.
According to the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, approximately 70% of any new information is lost within 24 hours of training; after one month, about 90% is lost. With technology-based training, information retention increases by 25-60%.
Research about how people learn shows that active learning -- through interactive activities, scenario-based learning and job-related simulations -- increases engagement and results in much better retention of new information. And digital training is exceptionally well-suited for active learning -- workers can learn from anywhere, train in real, job-related scenarios and refer back to lessons at any time.
Better information retention means less money needs to be spent for retraining and fewer disruptive events in the workplace or at the work site as well as other problems that can emerge from poor mobile app engagement.
Mobile DAP Benefit #2: Less Downtime and Easier Onboarding
Field service organizations face huge staffing challenges because of high turnover rates combined with an aging workforce, which makes a well-trained workforce extremely difficult to maintain.
70% of service organizations say they will be burdened by the knowledge loss of a retiring workforce in the next five to ten years. Further, these organizations say they will need an additional two million workers by 2021 to meet market demand.
A ServiceMax survey found that 82% of field service companies have experienced unplanned downtime over the past three years. The source of the downtime in 60-70% of the incidents was human error – in other words, incidents due to poorly or improperly trained workers.
Digital training also leads to easier onboarding of new hires. With digital onboarding, employers can spread out the onboarding process over a longer period of time, which can prevent new workers from feeling overwhelmed. It can also require less time for in-person training and less time spent by workers getting the information they need.
Digital training ensures that onboarding materials are presented to each new worker consistently and that employers can track which items have been completed as well as staying in compliance with legally required forms.
Mobile DAP Benefit #3: Increasing Employee Satisfaction and Reducing Turnover
Being properly trained to do a job is extremely important to workers -- and they are increasingly willing to switch jobs when they are not offered good training options. Many people assume that once workers receive training, they are more likely to leave a company and seek other opportunities elsewhere. But the opposite is true.
Properly trained staff are happier and more likely to stay in their jobs. In fact, companies are three times as likely to lose workers when they don't provide training -- a Louis Harris and Associates poll found that among workers with no or poor opportunities for training, 41% said they planned to leave within a year; among workers who said their company offered excellent training opportunities, just 12% said they were planning to leave. Among newly-hired workers, 42% said they were more likely to stay when receiving the training they need.
Mobile DAP Benefit #4: Achieving ROI of Your Mobile App
When workers are trained up front on their mobile apps and devices, they are then ready to use their technology effectively on day one. And by continuing to leverage on-demand, on device training, reinforcement will ensure long term engagement and the realization of the operational objectives that were intended.
Leveraging a Mobile DAP is a key way to provide an immersive training experience for solution implementations, new employee training and ongoing employee engagement, ensuring understanding and adoption. A Mobile DAP supports the training team with contextual training tools specific to the technology the worker needs to learn and ensures workers are using technology as intended for maximum efficiency and productivity. It also enables critical analysis that shows how workers are using technology, identify issues, measure adoption and help to iterate future versions of the solution.
Read more about how our Mobile DAP helped Nestle USA with their digital training for a new mobile app deployment that delivered the company a solid ROI.
About Skyllful
Skyllful is a leading provider of a mobile digital adoption platform that helps companies with large, mobile workforces deploy mission-critical enterprise mobile applications smoothly and successfully. With deep expertise of mobile technology and best practice field deployments as well as a leadership team with decades of experience working with large enterprise mobile workforces and applications, Skyllful offers a platform for empowering field workers to use enterprise mobile apps more efficiently and effectively, maximizing the positive effect of mobile application deployments.
Skyllful’s approach to technology-driven training and engagement combines on-device, on-demand, contextual-based simulations, reinforcement activities, deep analytics and reporting on field readiness for an enterprise-wide view of mobile employees’ impact on the organization. Whether a company is deploying a new mission-critical workforce app or seeking to improve its workforce engagement with existing apps, the Skyllful platform is easy to use, intuitively designed and proven to increase productivity and deliver greater returns on investments in technology.