Is your IT investment under-utilized?
22. February 2022
Create awareness about your IT investment to ensure an effective adoption.
I realized the importance of adoption about 15 years ago. I was in a semi-small start-up, and we built a CRM on top of Salesforce. This was back when Salesforce was essentially nothing more than a database with a UI on top.
Our investment in this CRM had one flaw, and it was not a design flaw. The flaw was that people were not using it. So, we derived no value from it. So, the investment had failed even though the implementation had been a success.
There can be any number of reasons why people don’t use your IT investment, and already by just even thinking like that is the first step to failure. People don’t need a reason NOT to use a piece of software. They need a reason to use it.
Awareness
Before starting using your IT investment, your users need an awareness that it exists.
Some software is so engaging that it adopts itself. Outlook, for example, usually does not need any adoption effort. That is why we consider email one of the best ways to reach people because we know they use Outlook. We can consider email as a source of attention.
Another source of attention that is on the rise is Microsoft Teams. In most offices using Microsoft 365, people don’t wait to receive an email from Teams before opening Teams. It’s already open, and they reacted to being tagged in Teams before receiving an email notification about it.
The solution to adopting under-utilized IT investments is obvious in the year 2022.
Notifications in Teams
Microsoft Teams is a great place to get attention, create awareness and increase engagement. That is why it is the most powerful tool at our disposal to help adopt our under-utilized IT investments.
Notifications are familiar to everyone. They are helpful to get attention, but they do not REQUIRE attention. They pop up on your phone, but they are also easy to dismiss. It’s powerful too, and to quote Spiderman’s uncle: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Notifications are great and can help you derive the latent value from your existing IT investments. However, if misused, they will inevitably be blocked by your users, and we miss this golden opportunity.
Pling is Coming
That is why we have invested heavily in a new product launched in Q3 2022 in collaboration with Microsoft.
Simply put, it is a notification bot in Microsoft Teams. However, it is integrated heavily into Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Power Automate, and other products. More importantly than sending many notifications, it is designed to allow both companies and users to fine-tune which notifications they do NOT want. Giving the users control will enable us to reap the benefits of notifications without losing the chance and annoying users. And while the users have control, the companies can override those controls and get extra important messages out to their users.
We designed Pling to integrate deeply into other systems. Yes, we can use it for announcements, but it is more powerful when being used for reminders and as part of an interactive flow in products that are useful but do not get sufficient attention.
Early testing with our most adventurous customers has shown that user engagement of the intranet has increased by almost 300% after using Pling.
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