Lessons Learned: User Adoption and CRM

We talked today about some great technologies, and there were a few questions about what types of businesses or users would find them relevant. There was even less discussion or information available about quantifiable returns or profits to be made through utilizing tools like wikis, collective intelligence and social network analysis. Ultimately, each business needs to decide how "bleeding edge" they should be. But, in my experience, even the most standard, relevant and profit-driving tools can be a challenge to implement:

For the past three years, I've been working on building and deploying a customer relationship management (CRM) solution for institutional equities to three business lines across three countries. The tool is best-in-class, combining client contact information, research distribution, trading platform integration and deal participation history with the ability to record contact with clients as part of the traditional workflow (i.e. sending an email). The project has been extremely challenging because, despite a clear vision -- and even clearer, quantifiable ROI -- we have had problems driving user adoption.

We focused on a few key things in selecting our vendor. Simplicity was paramount, and we wanted a "no bells and whistles" application that focused on our core needs. We defined the purpose of the tool as 'quantifying client service' (allowing us to record when we communicate with clients, in order to 'bill back') and 'improving internal communication' (through alerts to internal stakeholders when clients are contacted): together, these approaches help us get paid where we spend our time and spend our time where we get paid. Management is vocally supportive of this project, and a team of full-time administrators are available to train using interactive guides. So...

...what's the problem? Technology is still dependent on the people using it. Work habits are hard to change, particularly when they attempt to move individualistic people toward collective goals. In this case, the CRM required users to aggregate information about their client relationships that was previously perceived as part of their 'personal' competitive advantage. Users like my high-maintenance financial services types, can be incredibly intolerant of any problems, opinionated about how things should be done and generally uninterested in the "technical details" that they feel are unrelated to their business. So...

...what have I learned? Be patient, be very, very patient. Have strong management support for change. Know your client, and make sure the technology you're implementing is relevant (not just cool!). Everything is sales. Focus on convincing each user why the tool is important to them.