A digital adoption platform (DAP) is software that shows guides inside another application, and walks the employee through it one click at a time while they use it. It is also called in-app guidance or a walkthrough tool. A small box appears beside a button and says, for example, "Step 2 of 6: click New Lead". When the employee clicks, the next box appears.
Companies buy it when they roll out new software. A new customer relationship management (CRM) system or a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite can have hundreds of screens. Staff forget much of a two-day classroom training within weeks. Then they make mistakes, or they call the IT service desk. A guide on the screen, at the moment the employee needs it, avoids both.
How does it work? The DAP is added to the application in one of two ways. It can be a browser extension, a small add-on installed in Chrome or Edge. Or it can be a few lines of code that the application loads with each page. The DAP reads the page that the employee is looking at, and recognises its buttons and fields. A member of the training team records a guide by doing the task once, click by click. The DAP then shows those steps as boxes to every employee who starts the task. It does not change the application itself.
Consider a housing finance company that moves its 900 branch staff in Tamil Nadu to a new CRM. A loan officer in Madurai opens the CRM on her first day and clicks "Add a lead". A guide of seven steps appears. At step 4, the guide checks that she has typed a 10-digit mobile number before it lets her move on. During the first month, the DAP records where people stop. It shows that 38% of staff leave the guide at step 6, where they upload the applicant's PAN card. The training team adds a tip about the largest file size that the CRM accepts. The next month, only 9% stop there.
A DAP is different from a learning management system (LMS). The LMS teaches a course before the employee needs the skill. The DAP helps during the task itself. The two are often linked: the LMS can open a guide, and the DAP can report which guides each person finished. A DAP also has a weakness. When the application changes its screens, guides that point at old buttons stop working and must be recorded again. A large language model can now draft a new guide from the changed screen. One of the earliest products of this kind came from a company founded in Israel in 2011. A company founded in Bengaluru in 2014 makes another of the main products.