Strategies for Ensuring User Adoption and Engagement post Salesforce Service Cloud Implementation

You’ve done it! You’ve implemented Salesforce Service Cloud for your customer service staff so that they can provide a positive customer experience when help is needed. You’ve built it and now they will come, right?!?

The answer has a much higher likelihood of being, “YES!” if you’ve followed the best practices of intentionally planning your implementation with the needs of your users in mind from the beginning. Let’s quickly review some of those best practices.

Before you started configuring and coding, did you…

• Identify all the different groups of people who would be using your Service Cloud? 
• Gain an understanding of their goals and the barriers preventing success? 
• Ensure the goals of management and staff are aligned? 
• Become intimately familiar with staff processes and then determine how to configure the system for effective and efficient use?

As you proceeded to build and launch your new system, did you…

• Explore pros and cons of the many different Salesforce tools and techniques to ensure the right selection (e.g. flows vs. workflows vs. process builders and record types vs. dynamic page layouts)? 
• Get your users involved in testing (because regardless of how well you plan, no one can know how a user will use the system better than a user)? 
• Provide appropriate training?

We did our best, now what?

If you are still in the pre-launch stages of your Service Cloud implementation, perhaps there’s time to circle back and devote some effort to the best practices listed above. If you’ve already launched, and you’re wondering what else you can do to ensure strong user adoption and engagement, then here’s what you’re looking for.

Interesting, as you may observe, these suggestions relate to the same key concepts presented earlier:

Let’s explore these in greater detail.

Gather feedback

• First of all, did you accurately and adequately identify all your stakeholders? Perhaps during your launch, you learned you missed a group of people who need to or could use the system, but you didn’t know about them or you didn’t correctly identify their needs as different from other stakeholder groups.If this is the case, you’ll want to work quickly and closely with this group, or at least with a champion among the group, to determine what if any changes to the system are necessary to accommodate their needs and what training the group needs.
• Both anecdotally and objectively, gather feedback from the stakeholders you knew about. Using a combination of any form of information gathering which works for your organization, including interviews, surveys, direct observation, indirect observation, baseline and benchmark comparisons as well as customer feedback, assess whether the system is being used as intended and whether it is working as expected. Are the earlier pain points resolved or at least improved? Though obviously unintentional, have any new pain points been introduced?
• What does management think? Direct line, middle and senior management care about different aspects of your business, but they all have an influence on user adoption and engagement. Are you providing each level of management with the information they are looking for (i.e. reports and dashboards), and in a format and frequency that works for them? Have you explained to them the importance of user adoption to their goals, and asked for their help in communicating to their staff? This will help ensure management support & alignment.

Respond, adapt and continuously improve

• Regardless of the amount of planning and testing, there are likely to be aspects of the user experience which differ from what you anticipated. Often the issues may seem minor, and only take fractions of seconds to accommodate, but they can have a compounding negative effect on users. Listening to your users, and addressing the issues which impact usability will pay dividends toward long term user adoption. Plus, when users have confidence their input is valued, they are more likely to engage and contribute to continual use and improvement.
• Your users are your customers, and users of Service Cloud who support your business’ customers every day have a keen sense of how impactful being heard can be. Business needs change, sometimes quite frequently. You need to have a system in place to intake and address bugs and enhancement requests, in a timely manner, to ensure maintenance and scalability of your system. When users have confidence that the system they use every day is being actively managed and improved, they are more likely to use and engage. 
• Have you incorporated Salesforce guided actions and in-app guidance? Using these to guide an agent toward appropriate next steps and as informational walkthroughs of features can improve onboarding, supplement training and support a seamless learning experience.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

• We’re all human, except for the AI Chatbots trying to be human. We like to be kept in the know. We like to be informed. We make our best decisions when we have relevant information and are not forced to rely on hearsay and assumptions. Make sure to communicate frequently with your users, and especially with your champions.
• Do you leverage the Salesforce feature Chatter, to relate conversations to relevant records in your system, enhance results of searches, and encourage your users to stay in the system? Do you share feedback with users who make suggestions? Are you informing your users when a change is being introduced? Do you share stories of the impact the system is having for your customers and your business?

Empower your users

• Did all of your users participate in the initial training sessions? Have you made the sessions available for review, since not everyone learns new skills the first time they receive instruction? Have new staff joined recently who didn’t get the advantage of the initial training? What is your plan to ensure that training is always available, including when new changes are introduced? When your users are provided with the instruction they need to use the system, you empower them to do their jobs and serve customers in the best way possible.
• And finally, who wouldn’t enjoy a little fun and maybe even gamification? It can enhance the daily experience. Have you turned on the confetti feature? Seriously, it can make a real positive experience and it doesn’t cost anything. Also, introducing a little competition, designed to reward desired behaviors, can go a long way toward turning a ‘have to’ into a ‘want to’ and achieving strong user adoption and engagement.

To summarize, once your Service Cloud implementation is live, if you want to increase user adoption and encourage a high level of engagement, be sure to:

• Gather feedback
• Respond, adapt and continuously improve
• Communicate often
• Empower your users

Adoption primarily depends on motivation. If your users understand why proper usage is important, if you’ve designed the system to make their jobs easier, if you listen to your users and reward positive behavior, and if you collaborate with them to make using and improving the system fun, you will achieve high user adoption and engagement. 

If you’d like to discuss these ideas further, or if you’d like to share stories of your journey, reach out, I’d love to engage with you!