In my last blog [Invested Users: Best Practices of Maximizing User Adoption, Part 2], I discussed NexJ's second set of three best practices for user adoption, and why planning, partnering, and encouraging leadership are crucial steps in the process of engaging your users with your CRM.
Today, I'd like to discuss the last three of the 9 best practices for user adoption, which are engaging, offering, and measuring.
Engage
Engage users and encourage them to proactively come up with new ways to use the system throughout the entire process. Because your users are the people regularly interacting with the system and regularly doing their work within it, they are also the people who are best positioned to come up with new ways to make the technology work for them, rather than the other way around. Technology has the ability to make our jobs less time consuming and more efficient, and with high user adoption rates your users can be finding new ways to leverage that technology. They can come up with good questions about the system's functionality and good ways to incorporate the capabilities of your CRM product into their daily lives or good ways to leverage the CRM product to make their jobs easier overall. As a result, when a new problem comes up in your company, your users will be trying to find ways to involve CRM and leverage it to solve that problem.
Additionally, engaging your users can increase your overall user adoption rates because as each new user becomes more engaged with the system, and as they continue to do their work within it, users who have not adopted the technology yet will see their coworkers engaging with it and will see the benefits of it within their workplace. This leads to increasing the adoption simply by having your users engage and use the system.
Offer
Offer your users something tangible to gain by investing their time in the system. Nobody wants to waste their time, especially when their workday is already full. If users believe they won't receive any benefits from your new CRM, then why would they bother to invest their time in it? To maximize adoption, users need to be getting more out than they're putting in, or there's no impetus to engage with the system at all. Present the benefits of the system and offer your users these benefits. Let your users know why there's a point to this change, and why they want to invest their time. Even if something about the system adds time to your users' individual workflow, if they receive time savings, additional information, a complete view of the customer, or other benefits in the long term, then users can see the returns they can get on their investments. Much as your company wants high user adoption to maximize your investments in the CRM, your users want to maximize the investments of their time, and will return high user adoption rates if the system is presented as beneficial, personally, to them.
Measure
Measure both quantitative and qualitative results to get an accurate picture of user adoption. In a previous blog, I discussed how to measure your user adoption rates, and the effectiveness of comparing quantitative and qualitative results. Quantitative measurements tell you how many users have accessed the system and how often. Qualitative results tell you how the users are using the system and how helpful it is; your real measurement of effective usage. Because users can log into your system, without actually using it, it is possible to have extremely high quantitative results without having high user adoption. My previous blog covered why measuring qualitative results give you the true measurement of your user adoption, and its effectiveness. Qualitative results give you a more accurate picture of what they users actually think of your system, and give you a more accurate measure of your user adoption success.
By following these best practices to user adoption, your company can work with your users through your technology change, and be prepared to measure the success of your user adoption. Also, for more information on user adoption, see our whitepaper "Invested Users: How to Maximize User Adoption."
