Whether you’re a consumer or a business, buyer or seller, if you’re not adopting the latest tech to help you save money on purchases or keep track of competitors’ prices, the chances are you’ll be losing out somewhere.
Long gone are the days of Googling the name of the product you require, and choosing simply from either Amazon or eBay, then just clicking to buy, assuming the advertised price is the one you’ll have to pay. Nowadays there are a plethora of online tools to help you source exactly what you’re looking for, whether you’re in the purchasing department of an SME (Small or Medium Enterprise) or just a citizen buying a pack of printer cartridges.
Consumers and employees alike can benefit.
More and more businesses are using price trackers to either keep tabs on their competitors’ offerings, while individuals seeking the best deals on goods and services are using the same type of technology for smart shopping. But with all this technology evolving so fast around us that by the time we have become accustomed to its use, an even newer innovation comes along. The cycle of learn / adopt / re-learn just never stops. As a result, consumers of a certain age, especially those in their sixties and beyond, often need to rely on their offspring such as teenaged grandchildren to teach them how to cope with it all.
But the good news is that the technologists are recognizing these problems and offering help. Regardless of whether a consumer or company employee is in their twilight years or their teens, coping with keeping up can be a serious inconvenience. That’s why more and more digital adoption platforms (DAPs) are springing up to enhance people’s interaction with tech – be that online shopping or just sending out a few emails.
A digital adoption platform is essentially a teaching layer of software that runs alongside the primary ecosystem that it is designed to enhance. Crucially, it runs on an AI-driven architecture that hyper-personalizes its output as a digital assistant dependent on the needs of every single user account. For example, if a DAP was running alongside accounting software in the workplace, if a new employee were to log in to the accounts package for the first time, the DAP would monitor their activity and proactively offer tooltips (or voice generated instructions) as soon as the newbie encountered problems. This would occur most often in stages of the workflow where most people tended to have previously made errors.
DAPS and dashboards
However, as the employee became more skilled, the DAP would step back and remain invisible until the operator either encountered a new screen for the first time or started making unforced errors – perhaps due to tiredness, boredom or a hangover! In short, using a DAP alongside any sort of software, in commercial or domestic settings, anywhere in the developing world, is like having an experienced friendly assistant sitting at your shoulder, only making their presence known when necessary.
A further advantage to DAPS in larger corporations is the reporting dashboard aspect of their output. If, say, two hundred call center employees were all encountering difficulties at the same places in workflow, the chances are that it’s either bad user experience (UX) design, or maybe confusing user interface (UI) presentation. In that case, management can watch patterns developing in software use inefficiencies and make changes to the software itself. Conversely, if one or two individuals were making mistakes in data entry or procedural errors, but 99% of their colleagues weren’t doing so, then it’s almost certain that those individuals needed extra training. Such matters can be passed to HR. The basis of these results can also be used to identify high performing individuals as promotion candidates.
If the price is right, they come on down!
Returning to price tracking software, such platforms can also have DAPs running alongside them to assist newbies or the innumerate in their quest for the most advantageous prices. As mentioned above, price trackers can also be used to keep track of any ecommerce provider’s competitors.
Price trackers can either be installed as browser extensions on any device or can be used via a stand-alone web page by the user pasting an Amazon product code into the search box. In either event, a dashboard appears that shows a price history of the item in question. In that case, if a seller proclaims a ‘special sale price’ of $99 for an item that is usually claimed to be offered at $199, the tracker reveals the truth. The graph might show that the price of the given item was indeed $199 for one week three years ago but has fluctuated between $75 and $125 ever since!
In that case, price tracker users can either mentally extrapolate from the pattern of price undulations when it will next be cheapest, or some price trackers offer that facility by use of fairly simple algorithms.
It’s easy to see how a price tracker offers benefits to almost anyone buying or researching online. The addition of a DAP to help those less technically adept acts as a bonus. It won’t be long before DAPs come as standard with any software from email clients to the metaverse, which is great news for everyone.
