The third and the most important step in an adoption
strategy is to facilitate a sustained adoption of the social collaboration platform.
Social Collaboration is not likely to reap in immediate returns, given the long term
nature of community building. Hence one of the big risks enterprises face is
the decline in the adoption rates with time.
Nurturing a vibrant community requires a strong user base,
active engagement and positive word of mouth promotions. Below strategies can help enterprise
communities remain active even when left unattended for brief periods of time
- Accessibility
Your collaboration platform should ideally provide multiple mediums of access to increase the number of logins. This could include Desktops / Laptops, mobile phones and Tablets. Also it is advisable to provide a Single-Sign-On and make the system available through both intranet and internet.
For a collaboration platform to be successful, you need to form a core team of strong advocates (a.k.a Champions) who can help drive the initiative among other people. Champions will provide powerful examples, act as role models and mentors, evangelize your community and collaboration goals, and generally help supercharge adoption.
A champion should have the following qualities:
o
Energetic and self driven with a never say die
attitude
o
Possess a good understanding of the platform
features and be able to link it to business processes
o
Well networked within the organization
o
Respected within his area of influence
o
Innovative – willing to try out new methods to
drive adoption
The number of champions you should have will depend on the organization structure and use cases.
- Content
One of the biggest benefits of having a social collaboration solution is to centralize your organization's knowledge. This is as one of the primary driving factors for stakeholders visit the community and using it for their daily activities. It is critical to ensure presence of quality information on your social collaboration platform. Additionally, Users should be able to locate the correct information as quickly as possible. This is where features like Gamification help via features like ‘Correct Answer’
People often need some incentives to motivate them to do something. Use of Gamification techniques like Missions, Badges, can help tailor experiences to maximize user productivity and reward key behaviors that reinforce the goals.These advanced gamification techniques can also be used by internal and external communities alike, allowing employees, customers, and partners to earn points and rewards for their contributions to business goals.
During the initial stages, it is important to highlight success stories even if they are small and build on them. This can be done via announcements, newsletters, webinars, etc. This help get the stakeholder trust within the system and also provides a good chance for other participant to gain new ideas on how to use the system better.
Collaboration needs to happen not only at a business level but also at a technology level. Integrate Social Collaboration Platform with other complementary systems like CRM, Document Management, etc to allow a seamless flow of information.
Gather Customer Insights and Customer Insights through community analytic reports. This will allow you to identify improvement areas to better align the platform to customer needs.
User friendly GUI, Attractive themes and help mechanisms can go a long way to improve the user sentiment towards a community. Also you can look to include some innovative mechanisms similar to Google Doodle. After all, it is all about User Experience.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. And same is the case with user
adoption. The trick is to have a systematic approach to it and make your
stakeholders understand the VALUE of it.
“Training often gives people solutions to
problems already solved. Collaboration addresses challenges no one has overcome
before”— Marcia Conner
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