Forum Discussion
Case Study #1: Adoption as a Marketing Campaign
When a user is given new software, the first question they usually ask is, "how do I still do my job?"
Similar to Chandler Milne, I like to think about the job the user is hiring the software to do, and then start early with small gems of wisdom, long before they have the software. Communicating the story about how the software will change the way the user works--for the better--is crucial to successful adoption.
So much of adoption is based on breaking down barriers. Once the user understands the true benefits--saving them time, making them more productive, avoiding that unprepared embarrassment in a meeting, etc.--they will be begging for the change to happen rather than fighting it.
If you don't understand your users, you can't be successful with this approach. We like to give users small bits of wisdom, asking them questions along the way. Then we segment the training we offer them by their roles, job tasks, or business scenarios. For example, the needs of an exeuctive admin who is looking to upgrade from Outlook 2007 to Office 365 is in a very different place from a sales guy, using a Mac, who just started at the company, and previously only used Google.
What if you cannot afford to have the one on one training and support to get users to adopt it? Our struggle is the systems we have in place now work just fine. It seems like Teams is just adding a new way to do the same things. For example, the chat features. We already have Skype for Business/email and those two work just fine. If we are talking about files, well we already use file server shares for that.
How do you get users to change that thinking? This is the struggle we have.
I specialise in user adoption and have come across some software that I think is a game changer.
I agree training has limited effect because people forget much of what they learn and 1:1 support is not sustainable. So I looked at VisualSP which is a software help system on steroids embedded into the Office 365 interface.
Crucially the software provides just-in-time training to users at the point of most need. The training uniquely uses very short video clips - not courses - PDFs, text etc to show how to achieve a given task.
The best part is the walk-thru functionality where you can easily and auto-magically create a guided walk through either existing or bespoke to match a companies intranet - see VisualSP.com. I am not an employee BTW.