You’ve Just Deployed Your Mobile App. Now What?

Why a mobile DAP is essential to high adoption rates and ongoing engagement. 

You’ve just deployed a new mobile app to your workforce. Congratulations! 

But that’s just the start. Your mobile technology only works well if it can be used correctly by your frontline workers. And your deployment will require care and feeding to ensure that your mobile workers are proficient with their apps and devices.

There are several issues that require ongoing attention for your mobile apps in the field.  No matter how well initial training may have gone, some workers will inevitably forget what they’ve learned. When they do, they’ll need assistance and if they don't have an easy way to get help when out in the field or at a customer site, it can cause real problems for your operations. 

Your app will undoubtedly have regular updates and/or process changes that will also cause confusion for workers if they haven’t been adequately trained. And finally, the routine onboarding  of new employees requires proper training to get new hires up-to-speed quickly on their apps.

A mobile digital adoption platform (mobile DAP) is a crucial tool for making sure workers are using their technology tools as intended and supported on a continuing basis as updates are issued and improvements are made. 

A mobile DAP offers many features for supporting a training team on an ongoing basis. It enables critical analyses that show how workers are using technology, identify any issues with learning or workers who need more assistance, measure adoption rates and help iterate future versions of the digital solution. A mobile DAP also provides the means for regularly reporting your project’s progress and ROI. 

If you’ve just finished deploying a mobile app to your workforce, these five key benefits that a mobile DAP offers are especially vital to ensure your deployment is successful and workers are using their technology tools correctly and continuously:

The mobile workforce is hugely diverse with technology proficiency by workers ranging from none, to beginner up to expert level. Just as each employee has a different level of experience with technology, each person also has their own preferred way of learning. 

A mobile DAP is equipped to create a variety of training resources that allow different types of learners to proceed at their own pace. These include videos and walkthroughs, hands-on instruction and simulations.

By offering simulated training content where workers need it, when they need, a mobile DAP ensures the use of the most effective strategy for knowledge retention, where workers can interact with training lessons on the devices they are actually using to do their jobs. Delivering training content where and when they need it is especially critical for mobile workers. Even while out in the field, employees can refer back to prior lessons and videos to refresh learning concepts as needed, which encourages workers on the front lines to perform their job functions more efficiently. 

A mobile DAP facilitates an easier onboarding of new hires. 

With digital onboarding, employers can deliver training in a more manageable, self-paced approach, which can prevent new workers from feeling overwhelmed. It also reduces the need for in-person training and the time required for workers to get the information they need to get up to speed quickly.

With a mobile DAP, onboarding materials are presented to each new worker consistently and employers can track which items have been completed as well as staying in compliance with legally required forms.

Software applications are continually updated with new features. Depending upon your software vendor or internal development cadence, that could mean minor updates as frequently as 1-2 times per month or major updates every quarter.. To keep workers up to date on app updates, they need to know when new features are rolled out and training on how to use them effectively. A mobile DAP can fill in gaps that often occur from app updates, by getting users familiar with process and feature changes, even before they are formally rolled out in the production application.

4. Providing contextual training that helps workers better retain knowledge

A mobile DAP supports the development of a learning curriculum that consists of short but impactful training courses. Each can continuously refresh educational objectives and help learners consolidate the information for longer-term retention. 

By creating an understanding about how the training applies directly to their job, this kind of microlearning approach improves retention by introducing new concepts in bite-sized pieces. Each smaller piece can then be focused on a specific concept that is relevant to the learner’s job and workflow. This adds additional motivation for the learner to retain the information as well as the ability to practice and apply the concept right away. 

With a mobile DAP, the bite-sized, contextually-relevant training content -- in the form of interactive simulations -- can then be deployed to mobile workers. Instead of thinking about training as a long-form content delivered in one session, a mobile DAP supports a micro-learning approach with an on-demand archive that makes information available to workers in a way that's easy for them to find and consume when they need it.

Perhaps most importantly, a mobile DAP provides essential visibility into digital training programs. Managers and team leaders need higher-level access to see their whole team’s progress. It’s often necessary to identify anyone who needs extra help and to make sure the team is on track if a new application is being launched. 

Training or program leaders need the highest level of visibility to see all field workers’ progress, identify regions or teams that are having issues or need extra help, and for accountability purposes. This is essential to monitor workers’ progress, identify who needs extra help and deploy those resources early to areas of the training that aren’t successful. And users also benefit from having a dashboard to track progress toward their own assigned lessons. 

As we’ve outlined above, the launch of a new mobile app is just the beginning of the training journey for mobile workers. A mobile DAP offers key features for providing education and support on an ongoing basis.

Read about how Skyllful’s digital adoption platform -- the only DAP purpose-built for training mobile workers -- helped Nestle USA get their employees up to speed on new tech quickly, created a better way for the company to train its mobile workers and enabled a successful launch of a new enterprise app.

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.