Without user adoption, any software is rendered to nothing more than a fancy screensaver. If your organisation is struggling with employee adoption, user error and user experience with Salesforce, we have some suggestions to make the most out of your investment. Here are our top tips to increase user adoption and experience with Salesforce:
- Consulting your stakeholders
Ideally, this stage is completed before implementing any new software, process or major transformative activity. Stakeholders determine the success of a business, and without their support you may not be able to unlock all benefits Salesforce has to offer. We recommend holding a workshop with your stakeholders prior to implementation to openly discuss concerns and design a roadmap. Once your stakeholders realise how much easier Salesforce can make their working week – adoption rates will soar!
- Training
Your colleagues may be excited by the functionality of their new CRM, but without the correct skills and experience, new users can quickly get lost and frustrated. Thorough training is a must for fostering excellent user experience – and it is a win-win. Skilled users will be able to manage, improve and adapt your system for all your business needs. If you don’t have the necessary knowledge, there are many training options offered by certified third party consultancies and, of course, Salesforce’s trusty (and free!) learning platform – Trailhead.
- Configuration
Once you have sourced or upskilled your Salesforce resource and your users have spent time interacting with the new CRM, it is a good idea to take a look at how Salesforce is being utilised day-to-day by your workforce. Are certain vital fields being ignored or is information being entered improperly? You can configure objects in your org to guide and assist your users, adding compulsory fields to alert for errors, dropdowns to encourage correct data entry or defaults that make life easier for your colleagues. You can completely customise Salesforce to your business and your users, and this is a surefire way to boost adoption and engagement.
- Onboarding
Organisations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by up to 82 percent. Businesses can often fail new employees in their first few weeks by not providing all the tools necessary for them to succeed – and this includes training on their various tools and applications! Weave Salesforce training into your onboarding plan with guided sessions, 1-2-1 training and Trailhead modules.
- Strategy
We have already mentioned designing a roadmap with your stakeholders, which is great for the initial implementation. Building Salesforce into your strategy doesn’t just fix your immediate issues and align your processes, it also sets you on a path to grow and improve your organisation. Perhaps you are a charity wishing to increase regular donors or a property leasing company who wants to reduce admin burdens and boost productivity – Salesforce can underpin any strategic or transformational changes to ensure that these changes are successful and scalable.
- User adoption tools
If you have already tried following our first five tips to no avail, perhaps your organisation is too large to quickly make these adjustments and improve your user adoption in this way. There are a number of brilliant solutions available on the Salesforce AppExchange, for example, one of our partner organisations, Apty, allows companies to create a custom layer of guided assistance for users. This can be as objective as you wish, and it means new employees can benefit from Salesforce within their first few hours on the job.
- Salesforce Partners
These solutions all sound great – if you have the time and resources to make the changes. If your struggle with user adoption is negatively impacting your business, perhaps you could consider reaching out to a registered Salesforce Consultancy such as Performa IT who can accelerate your user adoption and employee satisfaction efficiently and effectively.
For more information, email hello@performa-it.co.uk or give us a call on 0117 230 2390.