The pace of technology development right now is incredible, particularly in terms of AI developments. It’s only continuing to increase. The enhancements brought to meeting, voice and contact centre capabilities are transformative, particularly in a digitalised workplace.

However, a continual stream of new or updated collaboration and communication tools can be overwhelming to users . This is a prime factor in low rates of tool or solution take-up, causing significant and widespread concern to businesses.

In the collaboration and contact centre arenas, getting employees to use new tools and technologies to their full potential remains the biggest barrier to achieving digital workplace  success. Often users get ‘stuck’ at the basic level of adoption. Once they’ve grasped what they need to do their job, they usually don’t explore the tool further.

So how do organisations overcome this? No matter the size of your operation, you need an effective user adoption strategy  that communicates the benefits of the service or tool to your people and helps them upskill in it. As technology evolves, they’ll be able to adapt how they use the tools. It’s also important that your strategy is crafted to be relevant to your business and people. This helps them learn about it, accept it and most importantly use it.

Investing in putting the right user adoption strategy  in place will unlock the full benefits of new digital workplace technologies and tools. Here are some tried and tested principles to follow when putting a user adoption  programme together.

Your user adoption  programme will need to be tailored to your organisation. However, these tips are necessary for every deployment.

Not every employee will be enthusiastic about moving to new technology and tools. The key to keeping everyone on board with the adoption process is to centre your programme around an excellent, smooth user experience. It’s also important to make sure that when you do launch your user adoption  programme, training and advice are available in a timely way.

The primary aim of your programme will be to communicate extremely clearly to users how the new tool will help them and will make their lives easier. However, careful planning is essential to make these clear messages possible, and to make sure users can get the maximum benefits from the tool.

Start by establishing how you want and anticipate users will use the tool or feature. Make sure you consider how different job roles might impact tool or feature use, and fold that into your planning. With all this in mind, work out your use cases and user scenarios, and be specific about what you need the new tool or feature to do to support these scenarios. This may involve customising the tool to some extent.

Then make sure you’re ready to support a smooth and effective user adoption experience by thinking about the IT user-admin role. A lot of training programmes focus on end users and assume IT administrators will know how to set up the tools, navigate through the configuration choices, and cope with tool management and monitoring. This isn’t always the case and incorrect setup and configuration can lead to an overall poor user experience and adoption.

Effective user adoption depends on employees having absolute clarity around how the new tool will help to make their working life easier. It should be clear it’s for their benefit, rather than just for the benefit of the company.

Without this understanding, employees are unlikely to be motivated to explore the new tool and use the full range of its capabilities. Sparking this motivation is also crucial to making a permanent change to their mindset. This will mean they continue to use the tool in the longer term and stay up to date with new features as they come online.

Focus your primary messaging on why employees should use this tool, not how. Be extremely clear about how this tool will make their working life easier, how it will support their work decisions and how it will secure their data.

Give examples by sharing use cases explaining when to use the tool. Be mindful of the multiple options and preferences for communication in the hybrid workplace. Make sure your messaging uses the communication channels that employees access regularly.

People’s learning strategies vary, as do their training-style preferences, and letting everyone choose how they learn will boost take up. You’ll likely need to use a wide range of approaches to cater for different ages and levels of confidence. These could be as diverse as incorporating gamification through to physical manuals.

Make sure you communicate clearly where your online training suite is located and commit to keeping these resources current.

Activating a new service, tool or technology for collaboration or communication is only the beginning. Many organisations experience a flurry of initial activity prompted by curiosity that subsides as time goes on. 

This is where feedback, usage analysis and data-based reporting come into their own. They’re your best route to understanding how your people use the new technology, what’s affecting their experience, and the shifts you need to make to your adoption programme  to improve usage results. 

The bottom line is that user adoption must be a continual process.

At BT, we treat user adoption  as the distinct process it needs to be for you to achieve your usage and uptake objectives for new technologies. That’s why we’ve built our support into our service delivery. Unlike many operators in the technology field, our User Adoption Service is a dedicated facility that’s not just bolted on to a customer success or project manager role.

Taking this standalone, specialist approach for our User Adoption Service  has been recognised as best practice by our partner Microsoft.

Our User Adoption Service  is run by certified adoption and training specialists. They are experts on our solutions and how to drive people’s engagement with new tools. This encourages the use of the full functionality of your new digital services. Working alongside our product teams, we don’t just deliver technical readiness, but people readiness as well.

Explore what we could offer your organisation by visiting our dedicated User Adoption Services page.