When deploying or upgrading a relationship management system, success of the project often hinges on people actually using the system. In fact, according to the February 2016 Forrester report, CRM Success Hinges On Effective Change Management, 46% of those surveyed Agree or Strongly Agree that user adoption struggles were encountered during their CRM implementation.
Effective change management helps address this area, especially when users have easy and contextual access to resources like training walk-throughs, cheat sheets, and videos.
With Microsoft’s recent addition of Dynamics 365 release of their customer engagement capabilities (sales, service, and marketing) they have included a killer tool for providing the right help/reminders at the right time: Learning Paths for Dynamics 365.
Tailor Guided Tasks to your processes to drive user adoption
Deployments of Microsoft Dynamics 365 typically include configuration. Fields are added to forms and business process flows are adapted to support the way your company operates. These updates make the system speak your language and drive your processes—and these are exactly the things that should be reinforced inside of the system (without having to search for documents held in a different system or dig around for printout reference cards).
Dynamics 365 Learning Paths provide this personalized step-by-step help. Users are literally walked through a scenario with guidance on where to click and what type of information to enter.
A key enabler is that this guidance can span multiple pages. For instance, moving through a sales process may involve work with a Lead, Opportunity, Account (etc.) and part of learning this relationship is to move between records at the right time. Learning Paths allow you to show how and when to move between records.
It’s also worth noting that once users are comfortable with using the system, they can opt-out of this guidance. This means people won’t feel “nagged” about how to use the system after they’ve become familiar with it.
Reinforce training with Sidebar self-serve help
Walk-through guidance on its own is helpful up to a point but sometimes you’ll need to provide additional reference material. There is a balance between the amount of content on the page and the depth that people might need.
Too much information with every step can make an otherwise simple system seem cluttered and confusing. Learning Path has a great way to handle this with an expanding sidebar where you can provide this self service material.
Examples include:
– Videos
– Slides
– Checklists
– Links to other content (e.g. SharePoint content)
Tying these tools back to user adoption
Training and communication are important aspects of driving effective change in an organization and Learning Paths provides ways to engage with users right inside of the application. There are plenty of uses, but here are a few examples to get the ideas flowing.
Set up walkthroughs so users can follow along during initial training (and reference them later) – This is especially helpful when users are very unfamiliar with both the system and the process. It’s also a great way to help in trainings where there is a high student to instructor ratio.
Use Learning Paths when introducing new or updated processes – As usage of the system grows there will undoubtedly be tweaks made to the way information is displayed on the form or how the business process flow progresses. Offer new and updated Learning Paths to help support these changes.
Create role-specific content when it’s useful – Learning Paths recognizes who the individual user is, providing them the appropriate context based on their security roles. So, for example, when looking at a Contact record a sales rep and customer service rep could see different content that helps them with different processes and key information relevant to their role.
Regularly update sidebar content to include answers to frequently asked questions – the nature of learning paths makes them a great first-stop for this kind of information. Make this an easy (and in-context) place to provide answers to FAQs
Embrace the configurability and personalization of Learning Paths and iterate, iterate, iterate! Even well planned changes will have bumps in the road—don’t look at these as static content. Consider including a link to submit questions if your current content doesn’t cover something.
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