How to Ensure User Adoption When Migrating to Unified Communications

What does a unified communications adoption mean? Buying the latest UC technology isn’t going to change anything unless the people using it know what they are doing.

Thankfully, in order to help prevent our readers from making the same mistakes, we have created a quick guide on how to successfully implement unified communications adoption.

Consider your audience

One of the most effective ways to ensure user adoption is achieved when implementing a new unified communications solution is to recognise your target audience and understand what roles they play in the business i.e. what problems might they face in their role and how will UC help resolve them?

In a recent study on what caused the biggest barriers for user adoption when implementing a UC system, 42% of businesses claimed a lack of end-user training was the number one cause for failure. Click To Tweet

Moreover, human beings are known to possess many different learning types and finding a way to harness this diversity and provide adequate learning support for each individual employee rather than a one-size-fits-all approach will result in a much higher success rate overall.

Knowing the technology

After you’ve established who your audience is, you must then look at your UC technology and determine all the ways in which it will be used by your business to improve efficiency, aid collaboration and generate greater engagement with the customer.

Consider the purpose of Team apps and what benefits they offer to users by creating an all-in-one solution where they can openly share information and communicate on multiple platforms such as IM, voice, video etc.

Think about the freedom UC gives by enabling users to make and receive calls from any location, stay connected with the business around the clock and engage with customers more frequently as and when needed.

Formulate a training plan

So now that you have established who your users are, what they will be using the UC application for and how the UC application can help them achieve their goals, it’s time to link everything together and begin your training plan.

For basic training information that is relevant to all roles of the business, you could schedule group training sessions through a live video conference or (depending on how large your audience is) a live video broadcasting feed with an interactive group IM chat window for any questions.

Further training for specific departments can be carried out again with conference calls and screen sharing run-throughs of how to perform certain tasks specific to their roles. These can be carried out on a weekly basis, recorded each time and stored for future use by new employees or by those who were absent during the live feed.

For individual training, one-on-one meetings can be arranged and carried out directly through IM, perhaps for one hour a week until the user is happy with their level of knowledge on the subject.