Dynamics 365 User Adoption and the K.I.S.S. Principle

I will wager that you are familiar with the Keep It Simple (K.I.S.S.) Principle, which encourages simplification over complexities. It’s no surprise then that the K.I.S.S. Principle goes hand in hand with User Adoption. So how can we incorporate K.I.S.S. into planning our CRM projects?

Streamline Business Processes

Dynamics 365 and previous versions of Microsoft CRM incorporate Business Process Flows on Cases, Leads, Opportunities and other areas. There’s no easier way to streamline your business process than by implementing Business Process Flows!

Often times, we are brought into organizations without a streamlined business process. How do you go on if you work for a company who doesn’t have a sales process? Work with management and end users to define your business process. Streamline it! Simplify everything! Find the commonalities that exist across your organization and incorporate it in your business process. Here’s a great article that can help you with this: End Users are the Most Important! (But Management is Important, too), the first blog in this series of a deep dive in User Adoption.

Once you have identified your streamlined sales and service business processes, put them into Business Process Flows. Build stages and steps beneath each stage to help your end users go through the process. And remember to use your CRM Ambassadors / test group / Super CRMers to test and verify the process before you go live.

Minimize the Number of Required Fields

Don’t throw every field from a report onto your forms as a required field. I hope you chuckled as you read that, but it has happened. Too many required fields decreases user adoption. It creates a huge barrier to successful user adoption. Use required fields sparingly in your CRM system and you will be rewarded with end users who enter their data and information in the system.

Select Appropriate Field Types

When you are building new fields in CRM, select the most appropriate type. Use Option Sets or MultiSelect Option Sets versus free text. Use Two Options and view as a checkbox to make some fields very intuitive. Leverage the Calculated Field and Rollup Field types to let the technology behind Dynamics 365 do some heavy lifting for your end users.

Keep Forms Clean

Nobody likes a cluttered form. Keep it clean. Keep it simple, silly! Utilize out of the box permission levels and security roles to show only the necessary fields, forms and sections to the group of users who need it. Dynamics 365 is full of fantastic features like this that make your system more user friendly and can help increase user adoption at your organization.

Need help figuring out how to keep it simple in your system? We are User Adoption experts at Beringer Technology Group.  Let us help you make sure you don’t miss the mark when it comes to User Adoption.

This blog is part of a series that will focus on a deep dive in User Adoption. User Adoption is so very important in a CRM implementation and is often overlooked. So, what can you do to help encourage adoption for a system? Over the next several months, we will look at ten ways to help with User Adoption at your organization.

If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us at 800.796.4854. We can help you with all of your Dynamics 365 needs. Beringer Technology Group is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and has proven excellence in Managed IT Services.

Beringer Technology Group, a leading Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and CRM for Distribution. We also provide expert Managed IT Services, Backup and Disaster Recovery, Cloud Based Computing and Unified Communication Systems.