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Projectline’s Customer Engagement Group is excited to present a blog series exploring what a Technology Adoption Program is and how it can benefit both you and your customers. The first installment provided an overview of Early Adoption Programs. Here is the second installment in the series.
Now that we’ve heard what Early Adoption Programs are all about, I’d like to focus on one of the two previously mentioned types of EAPs: the TAP, or Technology Adoption Program.
I’m a big fan of www.acronymfinder.com. If you plug the ‘TAP’ acronym into that site, you will find “Technology Adoption Program (various companies)” as the second entry.
This definition is found in the following Acronym Finder categories:
- Information technology (IT) and computers
- Organizations, NGOs, schools, universities, etc…
- Business, finance, etc…
So if you’re working with or for a business or organization that needs to vet a technology product prior to its formal commercial release, one of the best ways to do so is via a TAP.
A TAP is a type of beta or pre-release program that allows a business or organization to collaborate with its customers and/or partners by making pre-commercial release software available to them for testing and evaluation in a controlled environment. Both the business and its external TAP participants benefit.
Let’s look at what a TAP does:
- Captures valuable feedback about the functionality of a single technology product or suite of products, which allows for product improvement. This feedback typically comes by way of the submission of “bugs”, which are issues or problems found by participants during testing.
- Validates the usability of feature sets or the functionality of the pre-release product in a customer’s own environment and compatibility with other systems.
- Helps businesses identify which features are most important to their customers, as they typically begin when product teams are seeking this early feedback.
- Builds trust and creates product buy-in by allowing for a limited set of a business’s influential customers and/or partners to act as trusted advisors.
- Helps to create a feeling of partnership with a business’s customers and/or partners by engaging their participation to help make the product better and specifically suitable to their own needs.
Now let’s look at how a TAP is administered:
- A TAP can be administered (or put in front of) a business’s customers and/or technology partners, using any number of IT infrastructure tools and communications mechanisms, but the broad objective is to make pre-release software available to a limited set of external organizations.
- A TAP’s exposure and access to software should be strictly controlled, using legal nondisclosure agreements for participants, to limit the risk of leaks to the broader public.
- TAPs typically offer a support channel to their participants, so that all technical questions can be quickly addressed and remedied.
- TAP rules, restrictions, and duration should be clearly and explicitly defined to all participants in advance of admission to the program.
All Technology Adoption Programs are a little different, so we’d love to hear from you. What benefits have your business and its customers realized as a result of running TAPs? How did the TAP experience impact your business? What worked well? What didn’t work so well?
And if we can help, please don’t hesitate to ask…