The One Metric You Should Enforce Your Vendors to Prove

Over the last few years, we’ve participated in hundreds of public tenders and RFPs where organizations are on the hunt for their next digital workplace solution. These processes are often well-intentioned and diligently planned. Yet, time and time again, we’ve noticed a recurring pattern that raises a significant red flag — a pattern that can subtly derail even the most promising digital transformation initiatives. 

If used correctly,  digital workplace platforms can actively influence how supported, seen, safe and comfortable employees feel. When thoughtfully designed and regularly upkept, the digital workplace becomes not just a place to get work done, but a space for sustaining employees’ mental health. 

Typically, the vendor evaluation journey goes like this: 

1. The demo: The customer team is impressed. They see the sleek user interface, experience the intuitive navigation, and are amazed at how easily configurations can be made. It feels familiar, user-friendly, and sparks a collective thought: “this looks like something our employees would actually want to use” or “this would help me enormously and seems easy to admin”.
2. The checklist: Next comes the feature comparison table. It’s chock full of every possible function, integration point, and capability imagined across a myriad of vendors, often built for different use cases. The customer’s approach shifts towards knowing how many functionalities they can check off the list. This includes whether a certain integration exists, without asking how that integration actually works. The focus becomes narrowed from end-to-end experience, to refined functionalities.
3. The evaluation: Finally, the scores are tallied. Each ‘yes’ to a feature is scored or evaluated . At the end of the evaluation process, the platform with the longest list of available features ranks highest. Sometimes, certain features are set as must-haves that don’t end up mattering in the bigger picture. It’s a seemingly objective way to make a complex decision. 

The unfortunate (and not always apparent) result of this process? Features win over engagement. Versatility wins over quality of the experience. The individual preferences of a select few stakeholders unwittingly overrule what truly matters for the collective productivity and long-term success of the digital workplace. 

This happens because one of the most fundamentally critical success metrics is consistently overlooked, underemphasized, or entirely absent during the vendor selection phase: how many users are actually coming back to use the platform, day after day, week after week?

Why you should be asking for DAU/MAU 

For the better part of a decade, our commitment has been to consistently disclose our DAU/MAU (Daily Active Users/Monthly Active Users) rates to prospective and existing customers. 

On average, across our entire customer base, our DAU/MAU consistently hovers around 30-40%. For some of our best-performing customers, those who fully embrace the platform’s capabilities and benefit from internal champions, these rates exceed 50%. To provide some context, Andrew Chen, a leading voice in product growth and user engagement, defines anything above 20% as ‘great’ and 50% as ‘elite’ in the world of software engagement. These are not just arbitrary numbers, but rather, benchmarks for healthy, habitual product use. 

Let’s try to put that in a tangible, relatable perspective. Imagine your organization has 50,000 employees. When you choose a Digital HQ solution that has a DAU/MAU of 30-40%, that means an incredible 15,000 to 20,000 of your employees are actively coming back to the platform, logging in, interacting, and leveraging it every single day. That is active, persistent engagement, and an actual behavior change at scale. It’s a system that is helping people get their work done, find information, collaborate effectively, and connect with their peers. That level of consistent, daily interaction is the bedrock of real productivity improvement and a strong internal culture. This is why we believe in the importance of this metric. It goes beyond transparency and pride in our results: it’s a core indicator of value delivery. 

The troubling reality 

What’s concerning is what we’ve observed when this metric isn’t prioritized. Sometimes, customers, perhaps swayed by a dazzling array of features of a lower price point, end up choosing a vendor who simply cannot share these critical usage numbers — or worse, won’t. In some even more disheartening scenarios, vendors will vaguely claim high usage during their sales cycle, only to later, post-implementation, admit to abysmal engagement rates, often under 15%. We’ve even seen instances where one of the larger, more well-known vendors in the market publicly reports a DAU/MAU figure as low as 10-12%. While they boast a wide ecosystem and a long set of features, the stark reality is that if the system isn’t being used enough, it simply cannot create meaningful, organization-wide impact. It becomes an expensive, under-utilized, digital shelfware. 

We understand why this happens. RFPs don’t always explicitly ask for DAU/MAU. It’s inherently harder to measure and present than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in a feature list. It doesn’t fit neatly into a pre-defined line item. But here’s the crucial distinction: this metric represents the absolute difference between a project that merely launches, and a platform that genuinely sticks, and becomes indispensable to your daily operations.

The insidious cost of low engagement 

Organizations frequently underestimate the sheer volume of time and human effort poured into launching a new intranet, employee portal, or knowledge hub. It’s not just about the technical implementation: it’s about the often monumental task of internal adoption and changement management. If your teams don’t habitually use the system, the project doesn’t fail with a dramatic implosion. Instead, it fails quietly, insidiously, and often unnoticed by those at the top. Usage gradually fades. Employees, by nature, revert to the path of least resistance: fragmented Slack messages, endless email chains, disjointed shared drives, or worse — no effective communication or knowledge sharing at all. The very problems the new system was supposed to solve persist, just in a more expensive, less visible way. The organization continues to grapple with inefficiencies, disengagement, and a missed opportunity for genuine digital transformation. The investment, both financial and human, largely goes to waste. 

Arming yourself with the right questions

Next time you find yourself evaluating a digital workplace vendor, challenge them. Push beyond the feature list and the glossy demos. Ask them these pointed, critical questions: 

• “What is your average DAU/MAU across your entire customer base?” This gives you a baseline understanding of their typical performance, not just a curated highlight reel. 
• “Can you provide us with real, verifiable examples of engagement rates from customers of a similar size and industry to ours?” Ask customer introductions to find out about their actual usage. 
• “What is your typical engagement rate 12 months after launch?” This may be the most crucial question. It separates the initial hype from sustained adoption. Many platforms see an initial spike, but long-term success lies in the results further down the road from implementation. 

If the vendor’s answer is vague, evasive, filled with qualifiers, or unavailable, consider it a serious warning sign. If their response is “we don’t track that”, or “that’s not a metric we focus on”, then it may indicate that it’s a vendor who either doesn’t understand the value of their product, or knows their numbers are too poor to share. 

Remember, you’re not just acquiring a new software. You are investing in a potential behavior shift, a fundamental culture change, and an entirely new, more efficient way of working for your entire organization. 

Closing thoughts

When you embark on the journey to acquire a new digital workplace solution, pause and ask yourself: “Will this tool genuinely help my organization work better, collaborate more effectively, and connect more deeply every single day  — or does it risk becoming another expensive system we pay for but rarely use?” 

Go beyond choosing engagement. Demand it from your service providers. Enforce it as a non-negotiable metric. And crucially, continue to measure it long after implementation. Because in the end, the most feature-rich, beautiful, or cost effective platform is entirely useless if it’s not the one your people enthusiastically come back to, day after day. 

If you're ready to learn how Happeo can help your teams with long-term, sustainable engagement, book a demo now!