Adopting a new, digital platform brings disruptive change for everyone involved. Ensuring that users enthusiastically adopt new, standardised ways of working can be one of the hardest challenges.
The deceptively simple answer is to ensure that any digital solution aligns precisely with the needs of day-to-day users, but an uncompromising, user-centric solution often comes at a high cost. What’s more, the situation becomes even more complex when users are very diverse, perhaps working across different international markets or multiple operating companies.
In other words, how far should you go to optimise your implementation to best meet the diverse needs of different users?
Divide and conquer
NTT DATA helped a leading high-end car manufacturer tackle this problem when it wanted to deploy Salesforce throughout its global dealership network.
The company sells cars in two very different types of market: Affluent primary markets which account for three out of every four of the company’s cars sold globally, while secondary markets across the rest of the world account for just one in four. The deployment therefore needed two different strategies.
In the primary markets, user-centric delivery was the top priority because nothing about the project could be allowed to impact negatively on sales, even in the short term. Therefore the client needed a customised Salesforce platform for each dealership to deliver the best possible experience for users and their car-buying customers.
This uncompromising focus on the user experience successfully delivered on its key goals. However, the project also ran over time and over budget and will be very resource-intensive to support in the longer term because of the degree of customisation. The satisfaction and high adoption of the users outweighed these short term challenges and thus there was no impact in service.
In the secondary markets, the priority was to roll out a cost-effective, off-the-peg solution that could give the car maker the sales visibility it needed. With very little customisation, the rollout was achieved fast and on-budget. Thus the cost & time objectives were but to the detriment of a compromised user experience. Meaning that, take-up and engagement with the platform was slower.
Where do you fit in?
The anecdote above is showing different ends of the spectrum of tackling deploying complicated systems. It is not asking the question, which one are you? or even where on the spectrum do you sit? It is saying that within the bounds of your own digital strategy you will modify how your work and what you deliver to match the needs of the greatest drivers for that programme.
In an ideal world we’ll always give users what they want, and with major software platforms increasingly including APIs that make it much easier to integrate custom features and create a bespoke user experience. Though that doesn’t address the interoperability of all systems to satisfy users… but it’s a start.
With our extensive experience of helping clients with deployments right along the spectrum from customer-centric customisation to efficient, standardised solutions, NTT DATA can help organisations identify the optimum approach – or approaches – in each situation.
A recipe for success
It takes time to develop the perfect recipe for each project. NTT DATA recommends allowing around six weeks for analysis and change planning before recommending the optimum formula in the form of a bespoke ‘cookbook’. Get it right and any upfront investment will be repaid in full through faster and more wholehearted adoption by all the key stakeholders.
Investing in new digital solutions is a big commitment. Get in touch to find out more about how NTT DATA supports clients to help maximise the benefits.