The success of a Salesforce implementation heavily relies on its adoption by its users and any failure in user adoption has the potential to cause a variety of different issues that can manifest themselves in different ways. A couple of common problems associated with user adoption-related issues are that:

• The challenges and pains often felt by end users are not always easily identifiable as having the root cause of ‘user adoption’.
• Issues around user adoption rarely fix themselves.

Solving user adoption is very much an iterative process and it begins with attaining the knowledge that there is a problem and some of the ways this is seen within a Salesforce system are with:

Low user login rates

One of the easiest ways of monitoring user adoption is to track and review regularly user login rates. It stands to reason that if users are not logging into Salesforce when expected that at a very high level there could be a user adoption issue. There are also many ways that this simple metric can be ‘tuned’ to be more useful such as to use this to identify ‘groups’ of people that are not logging in as expected – It may be that it’s users from the same business area.

Irregular data updates

Irregular data updates often impact users and business areas that are not responsible for the data updates but rely on the accuracy of the information.

If users are not updating records on a regular basis and in a consistent manner it will quickly become very difficult for a business to reliably use the data. For example, irregularly updated Opportunities make it very difficult to accurately track deal progression and forecast sales with any certainty. This can have the compound effect of not allowing those business areas reliant upon ‘trusted’ data to make ‘fact-based’ decisions with confidence.

Poor data quality

Poor data quality is often seen along with ‘Irregular Data Updates’ issue and is where users enter incomplete information or inaccurately onto records that can cause significant challenges in producing accurate reporting and forecasting as the inaccurate and incomplete data cannot be relied upon. For example, the misuse of ‘Other’ for a closed lost Opportunity reason or incomplete/incorrect contact information.

These are just a few of the common issues arising from poor user adoption and once identified there are several features and options available with Salesforce to aid in increasing positive user adoption.

Tracking User Adoption

You cannot make improvements without being able to identify that something has improved and therefore the first step is to identify and agree on how user adoption will be tracked and what the KPI’s are for each metric.

Managerial Approaches

The principle of leading by example helps dramatically with user adoption, such as referring directly to Salesforce data when holding meetings and utilising Salesforce dashboards for reviewing data and the ‘if it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist’ approach.

Communication to users of the decision reasons for implementing Salesforce and the benefits that it brings to the business while also offering a ‘feedback’ mechanism will dramatically help their team transition to a new way of working.

User Experience

It’s important that a system works for the business, however, it’s also important that it works for the users and does not make their jobs harder – for example, a cluttered page layout, lots of mandatory fields, increased or duplicated manual effort will all impact successful user adoption.

Making users part of the process for implementing and constantly fine-tuning Salesforce allows them to feed into the final solution and allows them to influence how a ‘tool’ they’ll use to make their jobs easier and more effective is configured will dramatically help with increased user adoption.

User Training

User training is an essential element of successful user adoption and should not only form part of any initial implementation strategy but should be continuous.

Your Salesforce org will continue to evolve beyond the initial implementation and users should be provided with regular training on changes – training not only offers the opportunity for users to learn new skills but also acts as another feedback forum and opportunity to identify user pains for further improvements.

User adoption is one of the most common issues in new and existing Salesforce organisations and requires a continuous and iterative approach.

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