Businesses invest a lot of time and money into Salesforce. User licenses, project implementation and human resource, as well as ongoing maintenance, can all add up. Ensuring that you get the most out of the platform is vital.
Salesforce is a powerful tool for tracking and recording interactions with individual customers. You can view the entire customer journey from its reporting functionality. It’s also useful for monitoring staff in terms of understanding productivity, outlining a working day and seeing how these elements are impacting the success of the business.
Ultimately, if users aren’t putting the data into the Salesforce CRM, you’re not going to get the most out of the platform.
From an admin perspective, part of the change management process within a business is ensuring that users understand how to use Salesforce. Ongoing training, plus tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the platform can be useful activities here. The key is helping users to understand why they should be using it, support them to do their jobs better, and increase personal productivity levels. Laying out the argument, ‘what’s in it for me?’, is the key to successful user adoption.
Salesforce is like your company’s memory. As an admin, it’s your job to make sure everyone is using Salesforce properly, so you can start to see ROI from insights taken from the reporting functionality within the platform.
If users are being resistant to using Salesforce and this issue isn’t being addressed, you will only ever have a partial view of what’s going on in your business. If adoption does not increase, you might be at risk of making incorrect business decisions based on assumptions as opposed to intelligent data.
Here we explore two common teams that struggle with user adoption:
Field Sales Teams
Field sales teams are out on the road a lot of the time so there isn’t always opportunity to gain their feedback on what they’re struggling with on Salesforce and the reasons why they’re not using it.
Common challenges for field teams:
- Having to do virtual training, if they are also remote, which might not have the same engagement level as face to face, so you might not get to fully understand potential issues
- Cutting corners and using ‘workarounds’ if problems aren’t voiced and therefore not addressed
Inaccurate forecasting – if users aren’t logging calls and putting notes into Salesforce, you won’t know how many touchpoints you’ve had with that customer
Solutions:
- Simplify activities for users
- Automate mundane activities
- Encourage best practices in your business
- Hold Salesforce User Group community events to learn more
Customer Service Teams
Busy customer service teams can struggle to find time to log call information. In some cases, it might be that critical information is written down on a notepad and then doesn’t make its way into Salesforce, creating an impartial view.
Common challenges for customer service teams:
- Struggling to remember customer information
- Incomplete contact records
Solutions:
- Simplify administrative tasks and activities
- Help users build relationships
- Empower them to increase efficiency
Tools that can help Salesforce user adoption
There are some great tools in the AppExchange that can help transform the way your business works. Using a CTI, for instance, can increase Salesforce adoption within a business.
Integrating calls and texts into Salesforce with a CTI allows users to communicate with customers seamlessly and easily, without having to navigate away from the CRM. By integrating your communications, you are encouraging best practice and increasing the likelihood that users will adopt the system. Integration can also help with aligning your business processes and ensuring you get the most out of your teams.
Having a tool that can help you work more efficiently and productively inside of Salesforce is key. If users have a tool that makes their life easier then they are more likely to adopt Salesforce.
Put simply, if you give users the tools to simplify admin when they’re inside Salesforce, they will be more likely to update it.
