Change is hard. Even when we welcome it or acknowledge that it’s good for us, our human nature tends to reject the unknown and seek comfort in familiarity. But when it comes to business tooling or process changes—particularly at scale—we don’t usually have the luxury of opting out. This is especially true when organizational efficiency and the company’s bottom line are at stake. This leaves some asking what is change management and does it matter?
Any kind of change—be it ripping-and-replacing old software, sunsetting legacy features, or adding new functionality to your app—comes with a learning curve. But when it’s done right (and for the right reasons), the long-term benefits of the change greatly outweigh its short-term challenges.
Alongside change management professionals, product and operations teams have an important role to play in guiding users—whether they be customers or employees—through change and helping them realize the full value of the new tool, process, or feature.
In this blog—the final installment in our inefficiency series—we’ll explore how product experience and digital adoption software like Pendo helps companies of all sizes drive change and accelerate lasting adoption of new products, apps, features, and processes.
Facilitating change
For customer-facing software, product teams should have a seat at the table early in the planning process. They can leverage quantitative product analytics data (along with qualitative user feedback) to get a complete picture of how customers are engaging with existing products or features, what they want and need most from future offerings, and how much value is associated with their requests. This information is invaluable for helping organizational leaders make objective decisions about where the business should invest or divest time and resources.
Product teams play an equally important role once the change is underway. They can closely watch the analytics data to understand how users are engaging with the new products or features (and use that information to continually adjust their onboarding and training motions); as well as in-app messaging to prepare users for impending changes, onboard and support them at scale, and nudge them towards ideal behaviors if they stray.
For employee-facing software and processes, operations teams should partner closely with change management leaders in a similar capacity. They can assess business-critical processes, license utilization, and other key data points to understand exactly how employees are leveraging existing tools in their work today, so they can make the right decisions about what should (or shouldn’t) change tomorrow. They can also help deploy in-app polls to survey employees on what’s working well, or what they’d like to see improved, in order to make the right investments in the right tools.
With a digital adoption solution, operations teams can help business transformation leaders manage and accelerate change or tool and process migrations, too. They can use cross-app analytics to understand how employees move between the apps they use every day, and see how any new tools stack up against other products in the tech stack. Plus, they can use in-app guides to welcome, onboard, and support employees across the business.
How to spot inefficient change management in your organization
- A lack of visibility into user behavior makes it impossible for product, operations, and change management teams to validate product and process decisions with data—for example, making the decision to sunset a feature, replace an existing app or product, or update business-critical processes.
- Your users feel caught off-guard when a migration or change happens because they missed external announcements and weren’t made aware of the change within the context of the product.
- Your users feel as though they’re on their own post-go live, and lack access to contextual walkthroughs and support.
- Your newly released features or workflows are not widely adopted post-migration or go-live.
How to use Pendo to drive change, efficiently
- Leverage a product analytics tool like Pendo Analytics to make decisions about which areas of the product or process should be built, improved, or retired based on usage trends.
- Use paths and funnels to understand the user journey and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Gather feedback within the new product using Pendo Feedback or through polls and surveys to understand what’s working well or what needs to be improved.
- Communicate in-app using Pendo In-app Guides to gauge customer and employee sentiment pre- and post-change or migration; and to onboard users, demonstrate key workflows, and deliver ongoing support.
Accelerating adoption
As products and workflows change, companies need to continually revisit and revise the guidance they provide users to get the most value possible from their software. After all, it’s a shame to invest so heavily in change—whether it’s a feature update or process overhaul—only to see it not embraced. The best way to drive adoption of new products, features, and processes? Do it in-app.
By using your product as a vehicle to deliver scaled enablement programs, you not only give users the option to self-serve their learning experience, at their convenience—you also ease the burden on your training and development teams by guiding users to desired behaviors in a highly scalable way. This contextual, in-app education also ultimately results in less waste (e.g. costly digital or printed materials) and operational inefficiency (e.g. person-hours dedicated to delivering enablement), and gives users the chance to get up to speed, at their own speed.
Bringing enablement and adoption programs inside your product with a product experience solution like Pendo also gives you the ability to tailor your outreach.This allows you to make the learning experience as relevant to each user group as possible, based on their unique needs, jobs to be done, or any other relevant metadata or behavior—ultimately improving adoption and knowledge retention.
How to spot inefficient adoption in your organization
- You rely heavily on human-led or 1:1 enablement programs to educate customers or employees on new tools or processes, resulting in adoption latency.
- You spend a significant amount of money and time creating physical or digital enablement resources that—more often than not—go unused.
- Your users don’t understand the value of key features or areas of your product, or don’t even know they exist.
- You struggle to make training feel personal at scale.
How to use Pendo to increase product or process adoption
- Use a product analytics tool like Pendo Analytics to understand existing user processes, identify opportunities to inform desired behaviors, and segment or target in-app guides for specific user cohorts.
- Use in-app messages and tooltips to increase information retention, educate users on key product features they’re likely to benefit from (based on their usage analytics), and demonstrate how to complete complex workflows with walkthroughs or embedded tutorials.
- Set up an always-available Resource Center where users can access all relevant training materials at their convenience.
Download the full inefficiency report to see even more ways Pendo can help your organization operate more efficiently, at all stages of the user journey.
