Here are several excerpts from an article by Christopher Bucholtz, CRM Killer: The Inability to Acknowledge Issues Before Implementation. Check out the complete source article for much more:
Adoption is truly the CRM killer. If your employees won’t use your CRM system, your investment is an utter waste.
However, the way many organizations look at adoption doesn’t help matters. All too many adoption failures are attributed to the users — those darned stubborn employees who can’t be bothered to deal with change, even when it’s for their own good.
This stems from a major misperception — that adoption revolves around modifying user behavior, often after the CRM solution is in place.
In reality, the seeds of adoption issues are sown long before the system is even implemented. They are symptomatic of failures in planning, and those failures stem from the inability to acknowledge issues within the organization before the CRM selection and implementation process begins.
Look Within
Organizations have to lay ground rules at the start of the CRM discernment process, making it clear that neither honesty nor candor will be punished. If that isn’t possible, then organizations should call in a third-party consultant who can look at the organization with an objective eye — and they should listen to the recommendations that result.
Another great technique for paving the way to user adoption is to get the actual users involved with the selection process. Too many selection and implementation teams are made up of IT people and senior executives; while these are the natural decision makers, it’s absurd to think that they have the same detailed understanding of day-to-day requirements as front-line employees.
By expanding the selection team with people from sales, marketing and customer service, organizations can introduce real-world understanding of what will work and what won’t early on. Having these eyes available during the demo phase of selection is invaluable — they’ll be the people using the CRM application most frequently, and they’ll be able to spot things that will work well — and things that won’t — quickly and instinctively. Once the implementation is complete, these team members can transition to becoming advocates and mentors for peers who are slow to embrace CRM.
