Insights

CRM systems help organisations to better manage and streamline data. Through consistent data capture fields and structured processes, companies can benefit from better reporting and insights. The biggest challenge is ensuring that quality data is regularly captured and for that you need strong user adoption. A good CRM is only as good as its data. So, if people find easier ways to quickly jot down information elsewhere, such as spreadsheets or notes, then a CRM quickly becomes out of date and ineffective.

User adoption is often cited as one of the main reasons that a CRM project fails. So, how do you ensure that your users will adopt a new CRM system? We’ve created this list of tips to help drive user adoption and satisfaction.

How can you improve CRM adoption?

1. Have a clear strategy and ‘why’

Your CRM system should have a clear aim and be built to make your teams lives easier with a clear benefit. Stakeholders need a clear view of “why do we need a CRM system?” The goal could be better sales and pipeline visibility, better reporting and data insights or increasing membership and engagement. A clear goal makes it easier to communicate the value to your team and also measure if you’ve delivered against your goal.

Related resource: How to rescue your CRM’s purpose.

2. Choose the right system for your users

Before adoption, you need the right system. Think who will use the system and what’s needed from it being sure to not overcomplicate what is needed. We recommend Microsoft Dynamics 365 because its ideal for organisations already using Microsoft 365, is very customisable and can be integrated with other systems. Sometimes however, we’ve spoken to organisations that don’t need anything too complex and actually a simple system is all that is needed. For example, sometimes an organisation might not need a full Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM system, but a Power App can fulfil all requirements (and have a much cheaper ongoing licensing cost!) Have a clear view of real needs and ideally break these down into must haves, could have and should haves.

Related resource: Why choose Dynamics 365 for your CRM?

3. Show users the value in it for them

Adoption tends to follow usefulness. If people can see the benefits and value of a system they will be more likely to engage with it quickly. Perhaps showing how much easier data capture is and how much time they can save without manual report creation. By showing the benefits, people will want to use the system as it should make their lives easier.

4. Involve key teams and people early

Resistance to change is often resistance to being excluded from decision making. If the people who will use the system are involved early in requirements gathering or user testing, then they are much more likely to champion adoption rather than block it. This is especially important for team leads and managers, whose attitudes to the system can shape how the rest of the team responds. It can also be the everyday users that have the best insights into what is really needed, how the system will be used and where the real time savings and value is. Getting people involved and bought in early greatly improves the chance of success. An agile project delivery really helps this with regular user testing too.

5. Create CRM champions

Having internal CRM champions, ideally from different teams or departments, really helps to give people go-to contacts when they need support. Ideally these champions have much more extensive training to help with internal questions as a first point of contact. This also has the benefit of being more cost effective for training. Champions also tend to pick up user feedback organically, which feeds back into your improvement cycle and continuous improvement to make your CRM ever evolving and adapting to any business changes.

6. Get the training right

Training for a new system is critical but it can be a place where budget often gets cut. A two-hour group walkthrough on go-live day is rarely enough. A better approach is training champions, as mentioned above – or a “Train the Trainer” approach. This reduces cost and also build in longevity and resilience, so if new people join the company, you can have them trained internally by your champions or super users. A benefit of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is that it’s a well known and widely used platform, which means that there are lots of public communities, resources and user groups available free of charge.

7. Build a feedback loop

CRM systems aren’t meant to be implemented and then left alone. Businesses change, processes evolve, new requirements come in. Your CRM needs to be updated to match how your business operates. By having a simple feedback mechanism, you can capture any changes that might be needed. This doesn’t need to be complicated – a team channel, a survey and regular agenda item in a team meeting. When you do get feedback be sure to act upon it or respond so people can see that their feedback is valuable and listened to as they will engage more in future.

8. Use gamification where it fits

Gamification is a popular method for driving adoption and usage. Leaderboards, badges, dashboards and some healthy competition can help drive people to engage more to see results and payoff. This is particularly effective for sales team where gamification can be fairly simple with leaderboards and easy tracking but can be broadened too. This could be a proper gamification tool or it could be as simple as making clear dashboards setup that can be centrally displayed so everyone can see the data they need in a clear and visual way.

9. Review the system regularly

Tying into the feedback loop mentioned earlier, but having time set aside for stakeholders to regularly check-in on the system is very valuable. Quarterly or even twice a year, regrouping to identify any regular challenges or friction areas, review usage data and review if any new features could be valuable. If you have a CRM partner, system reviews should be happening anyway, especially when considering system updates and upgrades that need to happen for security purposes.

Related resource: The Future of CRM: Dynamics 365, Dataverse, Power Platform and AI. Watch our video discussion on what the future of CRM may look like and how microservices may be the future.

10. Make sure design and UI is considered

A well-configured CRM should feel easier to use. These can be simple changes – adding branding, ensuring the right terminology for fields, and removing any unnecessary fields from forms so only the key information is shown can make a real difference to everyday experience and usage. The less that a person needs to click around to different screens the better, so tailoring forms, dashboards, and navigation to match how your team actually works rather than the out-of-the-box defaults can be a huge help.

11. Test thoroughly before go-live

Testing catches configuration errors early and should be a part of implementation. You CRM partner should cover testing as part of CRM implementation, however there will also ideally be user acceptance testing (UAT) giving your team early access to features as they are developed to test iteratively. It can be easy to underestimate the amount of time needed to test a new system but getting time set aside to test before go-live so any errors or improvements can be made before wide use is very beneficial. If someone logs in on day one and a key field is missing, a workflow isn’t triggering, or data hasn’t migrated correctly, that tends to leave a negative first impression that’s hard to recover from.

Related resource: Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementation guide.

12. Use reporting to spot adoption issues

Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives you the reporting tools to track usage at a granular level – who’s logging in, how often, which features are being used, and where data quality is dropping off. These reports can give valuable insights quickly into adoption and usage. You can set up automations to get a monthly report to make this as effective as possible and have any low activity in teams as something to investigate.

13. Tailor the system to your language and processes

Generic field labels and out-of-the-box processes will work but may be unfamiliar or not exactly aligned to how your organisation works or says something. This is just a small friction but can mean extra mental load when using the system. Ideally, you should configure fields, labels and processes to match how you work. For example, if your team uses “classification” but out-of-the-box is labelled as “rating”, you can change this to match your language.
Charities and nonprofits especially benefit from this as CRM language is very corporate by default. We’ve built a charity accelerator, Evo 365, that gives charities a more ‘out-of-the-box’ charity solution built on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

14.Connect your other systems

Data shouldn’t have to be entered in multiple places. Not only is it a waste of time for people doing more manual admin, but it can lead to human error, being entered in one place only or mismatched data. Microsoft Dynamics 365 integrates natively with Microsoft 365, including Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. System integration has definite benefits but integrations can come in many forms – two-way data sync, simply surfacing information etc. Having integrations in place can add costs or complexity, so it is worth considering the value vs cost.

Related resource: Integrating Dynamics 365 with SharePoint Online. This can be a great idea for document storage as SharePoint storage is much cheaper than Microsoft Dynamics 365, which can help to reduce ongoing storage and capacity costs.

15. Build and maintain good documentation

Long CRM manuals go unread and out of date quickly. Short, role-specific reference guides tend to be more useful (ideally one or two pages covering the most common tasks for a given user type). Most CRM systems also have publicly available free resources that are kept up-to-date, as well as videos, communities and user groups. Your champions can help filter what’s worth sharing with the wider team.

A final note on user adoption

The key to maintaining good user adoption, usage and long-term success is realising that a CRM is an ongoing commitment. It is worth setting aside ongoing budget for building in new features, improvements and updates. For Microsoft Dynamics 365 there is a regular bi-annual update cadence that is worth being aware of – you can find out more in our best practices for Dynamics 365 updates article.