In the early stages of your salesforce.com implementation, user adoption dashboards play a very important role. You want to know whether users are making effective use of the investments you’ve made and incorporating them into daily life. Adoption is so integral to any new technology or process, Salesforce.com even provides some sample metrics for comparison on the Salesforce AppExchange.

 

In my experience, the best implementation is one that eliminates the need to measure adoption because you’ve delivered a solution that Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service rely on to do their jobs better. It sounds easy but, we know that only 41% of organizations fully achieve or exceed expected business results from their customer relationship management (CRM) deployments. Did the 59% of organizations that didn’t meet their CRM expectations rollout a solution that wasn’t easily embraced by multiple departments?  

 

In one implementation I worked on previously, the company had struggled with user adoption for several years before finally tackling the problem head-on. I met with end-users and recognized that some key, internal processes required users to fill out standard slides and forms in PowerPoint and Word formats and submit those to a series of dynamic approvers based on a complicated set of opportunity criteria. Users had to capture duplicate data entry, route emails and documents around manually, and send ‘remember to send’ reminders when approval requests were forgotten. In addition, because people were capturing data in Word and PowerPoint, some of the key information wasn’t reportable in their CRM system. It was no surprise that the users weren’t adopting!

After a business process review, we determined that the entire approval process could be automated in Salesforce, eliminating the Word forms, automatically creating PowerPoint slides for internal review—applying approval criteria and dynamically routing to the appropriate reviewers. We also developed reporting and related lists that provided end-user visibility into the status of each record in real-time.

 

End users were so pleased with the improvements to daily life—and managers went from shaking their heads at disappointing data in user adoption dashboards to not having to worry about user adoption dashboards at all.

 

Would you like to stop watching your user adoption dashboards? Read more Bluewolf case studies, download our Salesforce Consulting datasheet, or reach out to our team for a business process review.