The best decision a company can make in this day and age is moving from an outdated legacy system to Salesforce. Any department can benefit from this change, but the fastest and most obvious improvements in employee and customer experience usually stem from a customer service department’s move to Salesforce. 

Moving all customer data into a single interface is a game-changer for organizations. We all know old habits die hard, but those bad habits you learned while using your legacy system will be detrimental to your success with the platform. Here I’ll identify the top five bad habits to leave behind when moving from an old legacy system to Salesforce. 

1. Recreating Your Old Legacy System  Salesforce probably looks different than your old legacy system — which is a good thing. Embrace it! Salesforce spends millions of dollars researching, testing, and building their products with businesses like yours in mind. The more you leverage out-of-the-box configuration, functionality, and terminology, the easier it’ll be for your organization to seamlessly upgrade with every release. Plus, becoming fluent in the “language” of Salesforce means you’ll be able to learn and share tips with experienced Salesforce users in related forums and support networks. 

2. Using a Separate E-mail System  The best way to drive adoption of Salesforce among your employees is to show how it truly can be a one-stop shop, where everything agents need to do their jobs is in one, easily navigable interface. One of Salesforce’s biggest productivity boosters is that much of its functionality can replace or drastically reduce email traffic. 

Encourage your employees to use Chatter instead of email to ask questions and strengthen internal team communication. Spend time producing articles for Knowledge publication, and utilize the approvals process within Salesforce to eliminate back-and-forth emails, drafts, and comments. Not only will you decrease overall inbox clutter, but answers to common questions can be searched and viewed by many others who may be looking for the same answer, instead of being buried in one person’s inbox. 

3. Believing Users Always Know Best  Improving the employee experience is a top objective for organizations in 2016. At Bluewolf, we believe that end users best know how their system should work; after all, they’re using it every single day. However, moving to a new system often triggers an influx of end user requests, from custom object creation to profile changes and more. Just because a certain change might benefit an end user doesn’t mean it will benefit the business. Make sure there is a solid business case for any change and establish a governance strategy to prioritize user requests, manage releases, and train users. 

4. Keeping Old Data Fields According to this year’s The State of Salesforce Report, data is the biggest issue for companies across the board. 76% of companies struggle with data integration and quality, and 70% of Salesforce users waste time entering the same data into multiple systems. Capturing too much data can sometimes be just as detrimental to your both your employee and customer experience as capturing too little data.

When moving from an older system to Salesforce, take inventory of which fields you use and ditch the ones you don’t, especially if the fields you don’t use house bad or irrelevant data. You’re starting off with a fresh, clean Salesforce environment; this is the best time to do a little spring cleaning and leave some fields behind. Only bring over what you need to track and use for your analytics.

5. Using Old Methodology  The waterfall approach or methodology refers to a chronological software development process that progresses through fixed sequential phases. It is usually associated with older software, heavy documentation, and development that make changes very expensive and time-consuming. In the world of on-premise applications, all new releases (which are usually infrequent) require a lot of work and management.

Welcome to enterprise cloud software. Salesforce attributes much of its success to its agile approach to software development. To those of us accustomed to large, bureaucratic companies with a waterfall mentality, moving to Salesforce and developing in it may seem nerve-wracking. The sheer speed, flexibility, and evolutionary nature of agile development stands in stark contrast to the approaches of the old guard. Agile methodology and Salesforce go hand in hand though, so don’t be afraid to fail early and often. This is the time to build a usable, sustainable solution as agile methodology emphasizes early delivery, continuous improvement, and swift response to change.

To learn more about how the best companies use Salesforce, get your free copy of The State of Salesforce. For IT professionals, download the special report here.