The Secret to User Adoption & How-to Change Behavior
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- Category: Digital Marketing
- Published on Monday, 27 June 2011 09:07
- Written by Le Digitale
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A number of years back, I was doing some consulting for a Fortune 500 company that had a call center in Baltimore; this particular call center was notorious within corporate headquarters for having customer service reps that were “difficult.” The latest bit of “difficulty” was the low number of reps to use a new pre-packaged call center application (~20% user adoption rate), instead of the “home grown” one that was implemented 5+ years prior. (FYI, the reason the reps had a choice of two applications is because all of the functionality hadn’t been implemented in the new offering yet.) My assignment was to,”Go figure out what the f*** is wrong with those guys, and get them to use the new app.” So off to Baltimore I went.
Once I arrived at the Baltimore office, I walked around and started talking with some of the customer service reps -- the usual suspects; some who were sharp, some not so sharp, but a whole lot of indifferent people working in that call center. Indifference isn’t too unusual at a call center (especially one in a big city); no-one dreams about one day working at a call center, and even those who really enjoy serving customers well and / or are brand champions eve eventually become jaded with the amount of negativity they hear from upset customers who call in (The last time you called customer service because you just wanted to say,”Thank you” was ...). Also, factor in - while working at a call center might be the best job in a smaller town, in a major metropolitan area its not -- so the pool of candidates you get for these jobs aren’t going to be the best of the best in terms of talent. All of these are contributory factors to a user base that will be “difficult.”
In addition to sizing up the user base, I asked for their perspective on the usability of the application, I pretty much got 1 of 3 answers from everyone:
“It sucks.”
“It is too slow.”
“I don’t know how to do [insert job task here] on the new application.”
Whenever I tried to dig deeper, I’d usually get some rolled eyes and eventually a response like,”I’ve gotta get back to work, buh-bye!” Not very helpful, but the feedback wasn’t unusual for a new application.
So finally I made it around to the call center manager, and chatted him up a bit. I asked him why he thought adoption of the new application was so low, and if he had any ideas what to do about it. There was a bit of a dramatic pause, then he said,”For people to internalize anything new, they need to be exposed to it 7 different times, 7 different ways. These guys have only been taught how to do the same thing they’ve been doing on the old application once, in a classroom setting. Over the next few months throw in some cheat sheets, online demos, and the occasional e-mail re-educating and reminding the team how to do something -- user adoption is going to increase significantly.”
What was fascinating about the “7 different times, 7 different ways” mantra, was not the application done at this specific call center (FYI, it did work), but the fact that this was a key to changing behavior. Its easy to teach the motivated how to do something, but how about people who are indifferent and could really care less? This lesson’s application is not limited to employee training, this lesson is also applicable to digital marketing and eCommerce.
If you want someone to change behavior, have you exposed them to your message 7 different times, 7 different ways?