The art of the successful CRM system go live…

February 18, 2018 Mark Payne

Picture the scene. You and your implementation partner have been working for months to implement your carefully thought out CRM system. The requirements specification has been met and the day to set the system live has finally arrived. Your excitement levels are at maximum as you look forward to the system streamlining your business processes and delivering your predicted return on investment. Visions of praise from your boss and immediate promotion (with a hefty pay rise) swim through your mind.

Go live day arrives and……

Disaster!!

The system isn’t available on time, users are constantly phoning you as they don’t know what to do or even worse are not even logging on. The data is a mess and your boss wants to know what is going on.

Clearly, I have overdramatised this situation but, in my experience, “go-lives” can all too quickly become “go-wrongs“ if they are not carefully thought through and planned. This blog post aims to detail some of the best practices I have come across to ensure that the day your new CRM system goes live is everything you hope it will be.

For me, the 3 main elements that go to make up a successful go-live are as follows:

• User Management and Communication
• Robust Testing
• Process planning

I will now examine each of these areas in turn.

User Management and Communication

Ensuring a successful system launch starts as soon as the project is kicked-off. This element is largely about communication and how you get your users as excited about the system as you are. Your users and their usage and acceptance (or lack of) the system will largely determine your return on investment. It is not possible to realise a ROI if no one is using the software!

Hopefully you will already have established a project team with broad representation from across your organisation. The project team members should be your greatest advocates for the system and should be communicating progress to the rest of the business. There are a number of other measures you can put in place to ensure that everyone knows exactly what is going on and what to expect:

Internal Communications – work with your marketing team to design and implement an internal communications plan. This can be run like any other marketing campaign and should be designed to get everyone excited and/or intrigued about the launch. This could range from a simple email update to a series of posters put up around the business to some full-on staff events.

Communicate Dates – there is nothing worse than a user expecting to get something and then not getting it. Don’t be afraid to communicate changes to dates, particularly the go-live date, to ensure that expectations are correctly set.

Be realistic about what the system will deliver from day 1 – it is all too easy for users to set too high an expectation of what the CRM software will deliver for them. Manage this expectation through your internal communications plan and, if necessary, through 1-2-1 discussions with the various user groups.

Recognise that there will be resistance – inevitably some users will not be looking forward to using the new system. This may be simply because they are not great with new technology or it may be that they think it will make their jobs harder. Either way, you need to identify these users early in the project and work to ease their fears whilst maintaining that system use is not optional! The easiest way to achieve this is to walk them through how the system will support their specific business processes. This gives you the opportunity to highlight the advantages to them as an individual.

Robust Testing

Nothing will destroy a go-live day quicker than errors that are easily found by users. Preventing this is simple. Ensure that your testing processes are thorough, well documented and completed in time for your implementation partner to fix any issues and for you to re-test them before you go live.

Process Planning

The final element of a successful go-live is the planning of the release process itself. This can be split into 3 main phases; user training, data migration and system release.

Obviously, proper training of your users is essential to their using the system. In my experience, the best training courses are:

Specific – the more the training course speaks to an individual, and teaches them what they need to know to perform their job, the better. Obviously, this has to be balanced with the overhead of creating multiple bespoke courses and course assets like training workbooks.

Practical – the more users can get “hands-on” with the system during training the more confident they will feel using it.

Timely – training should be scheduled as close to go-live as possible to ensure that the knowledge is fresh in users’ minds when they actually get their hands on the system.

Data migration is likely to form a large part of your go live process and accordingly should be given the attention and planning it deserves. My previous blog post goes in to the detail of how to make data migration a success but in summary you should ensure that:

1. All the source data is as clean as it can be.
2. The process of migrating the data has had at least one trial run.
3. The steps that will be followed to perform the final migration are thought out and well documented.

Given that live data migration will more than likely involve some system downtime it is essential that the live data migration plan contains accurate timings and rollback plans should any issues be encountered. This planning can take place during the aforementioned trial runs. CRM systems live and die by the quality of the data they contain so make sure you are comfortable that this element is as risk free as it can be.

Finally, the actual process of system release should be planned and documented. This is particularly important if you are replacing a mission critical service with the new CRM system. The live data migration will form part of this plan but other elements to consider are:

Release process checkpoints – there should be checkpoints in your overall release process that need formal sign-off before progressing to the next stage. These will largely correspond to rollback points and/or the shutdown of legacy systems. It is important to identify who will sign-off at each checkpoint, what the “red lines” are to pass the checkpoints and how they will communicate sign-off.

Communication – as always, communication is key. Make sure your users know what they have to do and when. Ensure they have the necessary details to access the system well ahead of time.

Support – ensure that adequate support provision is in place on the day of go-live and immediately after. This should be even more robust than your “business as usual” support to ensure that users feel they have an avenue to raise issues and that any problems are dealt with quickly. Ideally you should have a representative from your implementation partner on site to “walk the floor” and answers users’ questions as they arise.

In summary, go-lives can go smoothly as long as the work has been put in before the day. Some planning and a good deal of communication are key to ensuring that your vision become a reality.