| |November 20149CIOReviewCisco Collaboration offers a leap in defining amazing user experiences for both customers and employees when implemented properly and when the technology adoption goes smoothlyand end-users were absolutely delighted with the system. A survey by the CIO following the technology adoption found that every employee asked said they loved the new telephony system. Despite the fact that the company had multiple departments and employees from 4 generations, user satisfaction was universal. Emotion creates or prevents changeWe'd all like to believe that we are logical creatures and make changes based on rationality. The truth is that humans make most decisions based on habit or emotion. It's important to create excitement and positive emotion.In the retailer's case, several events were staged to create hype and excitement around the Cisco Collaboration system. However, a handful of senior managers were simply too embarrassed to admit that the new technology confused them. We identified those managers and provided them training in a private environment.Use-case customizationEvery single use case has to cause the employee to save time and enable new levels of workforce performance. If the tasks feel like a chore, employees won't adopt the new technology.Typically, the people with the most to benefit are the departments for which collaboration between co-workers or customers are constant. Organizations can benefit by simple applications such as personal call management preferences that allow the users to direct how they receive calls, time of day and even how to reach them when they are away from their desks. Sales reps can offer outstanding levels of responsiveness through applications that ensure they never miss an urgent sales call, or allow them to conference in a product expert on the fly. Rolling out first to those employees with the highest benefit will ease the technology adoption.Performance-based trainingEach user needs training in the functions that are relevant to them. Giving generic training to everyone is not cost effective, and results in low retention. In the case of the sales rep, they needed to use collaboration as mobile workers with defined scenarios for customer contact. The administrative assistant for a department, however, was responsible for answering the phones for several managers. For her, the challenge was supporting traveling executives with multiple phone lines.Key for her was the ability to fullycustomize the system to ring all calls on one phone and display the caller and destination, so she could answer or forward each call correctly. It was a major game-changer for her daily productivity. Her training was more intensive and taught her how to use her new system in ways that even her boss would be impressed. She was so enamored with the new system that she decorated her physical phone. Both the sales rep and the admin received identical Cisco Collaboration systems--but they received training in only the aspects of the system they needed--so each one felt like they got a customized system. Adoption analytics CIOs sometimes struggle to identify and prove the effectiveness of the new Cisco Collaboration deployment. In particular, when talking to the CFO about the budgeting and effectiveness of the system, it's important to establish key performance indicators, translate patterns in consumption, ROI and monitor them regularly. Adoption Analytics tools can allow set up and monitor adoption metrics aligned with your company's goals and offer proof points to the business on the value IT and your technology choice has made to the business. ConclusionCisco Collaboration offers a leap in defining amazing user experiences for both customers and employees when implemented properly and when the tech-nology adoption goes smoothly. The keys to smooth adoption are based around human factors, defining business outcomes that align to workforce performance goals and the abil-ity to create a positive emotional association with the new technology. While there may be many logical factors for using the new system, the number one factor in adoption services is the mo-tivation of the em-ployees to adopt the technology.
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