I recently attended a psychology lecture at Manchester Met Uni. So what’s this got to do with user adoption in CRM? Well – the answer is “a lot.” Generating the right environment for the individuals in your CRM user community to change their behaviour and start using your CRM system effectively is no easy task. Many of us have the battle scars to prove that! So I’d like to share the lessons I learnt from the Manchester Met lecture and how to apply this piece of psychology to the world of CRM.
User Adoption Plan
It’s been long understood that you need a cunning plan to improve user adoption in CRM. We have written many articles on the subject and used the phrase ‘education not training’ in video posts:
In other words, we need to explain the rationale for CRM and the culture behind it, rather than just training people how to use a piece of software. The CRM Pocket Book explains this in the context of your CRM strategy. The point behind ‘education not training’ is to create motivation for people to change their behaviour and to take responsibility for maintaining consistent, accurate, relevant and timely information with the CRM system. Accurate data about customers and prospects, pipeline and relationships, goals and aspirations, customer satisfaction and loyalty. In turn, this helps build the insight needed to deliver the ultimate goal of CRM – to make it easier for people to do business with you.
Most plans for CRM user adoption have revolved solely around motivation. At Manchester Met I learned that the application of the science behind psychology to human behaviour change has three components, not just my one.
CRM Motivation
As I said, we’ve talked about motivation before. And capability is not so hard to address – we just need the right devices for the different user environments and enough broadband speed, wifi or 4G connectivity to make it easy to use. So ‘opportunity’ is the one that we need to focus on in the context of applying psychology to improving user adoption in CRM. The lecturer at the Uni broke opportunity into two further components:
To create the physical opportunity for people to use the CRM might not be as easy as it might appear. There needs to be sufficient time during the day for people to be able to get to grips with some aspects of the new CRM. This could be new ways of recording data, new ways of reporting, new ways of filtering and using information, and new processes that introduce efficiencies. This might not be so easy if the user community is already strapped for time and therefore finds short cuts around your new system. So you need to plan time for people to make changes in the ways they do things.
To create the social opportunity for people to change their behaviour and adopt your new ways of working is not a one-size-fits-all exercise. The social environment and the culture of your organisation may be very different from other companies; it may also differ from one department to the next within your own organisation. So the trick to creating the right social opportunity for people to adopt CRM is to make it ‘the way we do things around here’. Make it the norm. And that starts at the top. If the senior people in your organisation have not changed their behaviour and started gaining advantage from the new CRM system, then why would anyone else bother?
Managing through CRM
We have long advocated ‘managing through CRM‘ as an essential part of effective CRM. A vital component in being able to deliver the insights you need to make it easier for people to do business with you. And now we have some science behind our ‘best practice’ advocacy.
So here is a checklist for you to consider as you strive to improve user adoption in CRM:
- Motivation: create effective ‘what’s in it for me?’ messages for the user community
- Capability: make it fast enough to use easily on the right devices
- Physical opportunity: give people the time they need to learn
- Social opportunity: make sure your senior people ‘manage through CRM’
My thanks to Dr Kelly Ann Schmidtke at Manchester Met Uni for her lecture. It’s helped me put some science behind our view of best practice in CRM adoption.
