You just deployed a brand-new CRM company wide, only to find whispers of insurrection in the tea room and your sales team continuing to use Excel to manage their leads.
Stats showing a mere 33% of your users are logging into the system.
This is a bad situation to find your company in, a plague upon an organization charging forward into the world of modern customer relationship management systems. Unfortunately, this is hugely common, more so than you probably think!
Sounding familiar? The problem could be attributed largely to a lack of end user training.
It’s only too natural to brand end users with blame once new or upgraded CRM systems are deployed, however instead of performing an inquisition, the responsible project team ought to instead take into account its own role in coaching staff and managing change in a socially minded fashion.
Let’s assume IT for example is the responsible function that must ensure the end users are supported in the use of a brand-new CRM system.
The pressure is on to promote positive sentiment from the users so they proactively accept the new system. This is often due to an emphasis on compliance and return on investment to justify the pricey CRM project rollout.
A project team who is implementing a new CRM system will measure success often on the explicit results, rather than the implicit factors that influence the company and the overall success of the operation. With this in mind, we can isolate some key mistakes that are made during this process.
You didn’t account for training within your budget.
Project budgets are normally planned very closely to resemble a cost that is established in the scoping of the roll out. Careful consideration must be made in these instances to include costings for end user training.
This is often overlooked as an afterthought however, this is a critical catalyst for CRM project failure, where end user adoption rates plummet to untenable low rates.
Several firms don’t include end-user coaching / training into the overall price of their systems’ rollouts and are left scrambling for funding and resources at the tail end of the CRM deployment.
An honest training program ought to account for ten percent to thirteen percent of the overall budget, nonetheless most firms underestimate the price and also the resources that are required.
You have not established any understanding or connection with your end users.
Let’s face it, for training of any type to be effective, it’s not enough for the trainer to be a master of the CRM that is being implemented. The trainer additionally must be able to connect with the audience to present and teach in an interactive and interesting manner. Problem is, IT professionals aren’t known for their stellar communication and soft management skills, and often it is these technical professionals who are tasked with the role of training.
“We tend to place subject-matter consultants in coaching positions, and that’s the worst. We should always be tasking individuals like an expert in education and adult learning into those roles.” – Anonymous
Big mistake! Your admins and developers will often make terrible trainers. At Sentia, we utilize specific staff for instance, that are technically well informed but are predominantly teachers, employing human governance psychology to more effectively train and manage new users on the Sentia platform / CRM.
Trainers with robust communication and social skills are best able to get a scan on their audience and tailor their instruction consequently. IT professionals, on the opposite hand, feel so comfortable with their material that they run the danger of presenting the content in too elaborate and technical ways, or conversely, often find themselves oversimplifying it.
