Focus Research Insight: 40% of buyers called User Adoption their biggest apprehension about purchasing a CRM system. How do you expect a vendor to help with training during a CRM deployment?

I agree entirely with Simon. I would add that IT's business value is all but entirely dependent upon the ability to align IT investments and deployments with business goals, needs, policies, practices and processes. If a vendor appears or demonstrates that it is unable and/or unwilling to assist in the "heavy lifting" needed to identify, prioritize and standardize those business elements as part of the solution configuration and installation processes, I'd seriously consider finding another vendor.

It has been my experience that the reason for poor adoption is because users are not trained on how to use the new system to serve the customer. You can't rely on a CRM vendor to develop and deliver you user training, unless they know your process. In a recent Siebel implementation, our internal training department had to revamp the training to make it process based. This was a lot more difficult than it sounds, as we were not a process based organization and so did not have our process documented.

We assigned a process work package leader who was responsible for documenting the process and creating the documentation for our Knowledge Management system. We also changed the way we documented in our KM, so that our agents could easily refer to the process instead of just the business rules.

Contact me if you'd like to more about my approach and methodology.

For a small business, it is likely to be absolutely essential that the consultancy/implementor provide training to the users of the system, as there really will be no other resources to handle the chore.

As the organization increases in size, it becomes more and more likely that the internal organization will be a better fit to create and administer training. In some cases perhaps with the implementors, in other cases not.

User adoption is one of the most critically important, yet least understood challenges with CRM. Quite simply, if your people do not use your CRM, your system provides no value to your organization. Unfortunately, few organizations understand what drives (or prevents) user adoption and they do not devote the necessary resources to drive and sustain effective user adoption.

Here are some common challenges & misperceptions with user adoption:
• User adoption is all about changing behavior of end-users; it is not a technical issue.
• Training and communications alone are not sufficient to ensure your users adopt your system. There are many more organizational and behavioral issues that need to be addressed in order to get effective user adoption.
• There are often many barriers to adoption that actually prevent users from adopting your CRM. Unfortunately, many organizations do not identify these barriers or take action to remove them.
• The software vendor and system integrator that help you address your technical and process issues are typically not qualified to deal with the organizational and employee change issues that are critical to user adoption. Many times these vendors have technical expertise or “business” expertise (MBA’s), but they lack the advanced knowledge of psychology or organizational development that is most needed for changing employee behavior.

If you want to learn if your project is at risk of failing due to low user adoption, check out our free online assessment http://trituns.com/trituns_services.php . For detailed discussions on these issues, check out our blog at http://trituns.wordpress.com/ or our website at http://trituns.com/