Companies in all industries around the globe are heavily investing in CRM technologies like Salesforce to help them streamline internal processes, improve data quality and enhance customer experiences.  But the majority of these have historically struggled with overcoming the challenges of bringing new recruits up to speed and helping them to interact with the CRM and company data effectively. 

Successful employee onboarding is not easy, but it can become a valuable way of retaining new recruits, improving digital adoption and helping businesses achieve a more effective digital transformation.

20% of staff turnover occurs within the first 45 days of employment

Reviewing processes

Whenever a technology, new way of working or a change program is introduced, there also needs to be a review of the processes that surround it and the potential impacts. A full review of current processes, followed by a measured approach to updating these processes will help companies achieve greater adoption, benefiting the workforce and the company. Users need to be trained, but what is the best way of achieving this across the entire workforce? How can new processes be quickly adopted across new and existing users? What is the best way to train the trainers? And how can the changes be analysed and reported for digital transformation programs.

Overcoming the barrier of change

One of the biggest barriers to adoption of new technology is users being unprepared to learn something new and reluctant to change. Failing to communicate and implement change creates confusion, employee disillusion, and compromises the company's ability to move forward. 

So how do companies overcome a reluctance to change?

All users, not just new employees need to be encouraged and empowered in their daily job roles. Leave a typical user to 'work-it-out-for-themselves' will result in processes diverging, poor compliance and bad practice. Give a user the tools to do the job effectively, is total employee empowerment. Provide these tools to new recruits as part of their employee onboarding and the outcome can be exceptional.

Forward thinking and insightful organisations are overcoming the barrier of change by embedding onboarding and training as key elements of their digital transformation projects.  Some have described it as an insurance policy.  They have seen the benefit of seeking innovative ways to empower employees to embrace new technology, enabling them to use it the way it is intended, ensure process compliance, and leverage their investment potential to the maximum.

Understanding the importance of employee onboarding and digital adoption within digital transformation projects is driving success for many businesses.  After poor adoption of Salesforce, this German automotive parts manufacture was close to assigning the whole experience to the scrap heap. In this case study see how Improved Apps onboarding and training tools encouraged users to engage with Salesforce to drive digital transformation and steer the business towards its overall goals.

Digital adoption tools increase Salesforce engagement and boost digital transformation

Employee onboarding, communication and training are a fundamental to enabling transition and engagement in the long term. Organisations increasingly need digital adoption tools to successfully nurture their culture, reduce the time for employees to ramp up, and continue to develop their workforce so they can remain productive and open to continuous change.

Tools by Improved Apps are empowering Salesforce users with up to date, personalised, contextual information and critical alerts precisely when and where they need it. By adding these tools into a Salesforce environment, new employees are being steered to succeed and be productive from their first day. They can access useful and relevant help and training content directly from anywhere within Salesforce, including:

• Bite-sized chunks of help, relevant to the employee & focused on the task-in-hand
• Easy to understand definitions, processes & procedures at the point they need it most.
• Interactive guides, reading lists and related help subjects encourage employees to learn quickly or jog their memory.

Companies who adopt these tools are empowering their staff to perform better, faster, and more accurately. New employees realise early on that their onboarding is not static, and the help and training available at their fingertips can be tailored to their job function and responsibilities and can even change based on data in the record they are viewing. For example, maybe they choose a specific competitor against an opportunity, in this case, competitor-specific content is provided, with essential selling points against that competitor, to help them with customer conversations.

Communication and training benefits companies and individuals

Digital adoption solutions like Improved Apps' native tools for Salesforce, are designed to drive change across a business. Employee onboarding becomes the start point for change and encourages greater process compliance across the entire workforce. Where these tools provide the greatest benefit is where they show real time insight and analysis of communication and training engagement.

Users tasked with setting up onboarding help content, can benefit from the off-the-shelf help and support content from within the tools. This enables the trainers to properly train other users, and effectively create help content at the point of need for all types of user. 

As users engage with Salesforce, and make use of the help content, real time insight is available for author-users and admins to analyse digital adoption.  Continuous monitoring of activity, particularly for employee onboarding helps companies make adjustments based on real data, which ink turn amplifies the effectiveness of transformational change.

For further information on digital adoption solutions and how native apps can drive successful employee onboarding, visit improvedapps.com