Tag Archives: User
CRM Software Blog Members Sponsor & Speak at the Worldwide Microsoft User Group Event – WWMSTUG
We are happy to announce that this year several of our ERP and CRM Software Blog Members are spotlighted as speakers and sponsors of the Worldwide Microsoft Technology User Group – WWMSTUG event held virtually on April 14-15, 2021.
WWMSTUG
Why Should You Attend?
- No other digital event covers as many Microsoft applications in two days as WWMSTUG.
- Join other attendees as they enjoy over 60 educational and professional sessions across more than a dozen Microsoft technologies.
- Be a part of the real world again. We’ve all been stuck working from home for a long time. This event provides an opportunity to get in touch with the real-world working environment again, network with fellow professionals, and be a part of the Microsoft community.
2021 WWMSTUG Sponsors
Diamond Sponsors:
- Ingram Micro
Platinum Sponsors:
Gold Sponsors:
- Alithya
- Blue Horseshoe Solutions, Inc
- Century Business Solutions
- Cincom
- Experlogix
- (ERP Software Blog Member)
- (ERP Software Blog Member)
- Strategic Industry Solutions
- Wolters Kluwer
Silver Sponsors:
Bronze Sponsors:
2021 WWMSTUG ERP/CRM Blog Member Speakers
We look forward to hearing these members of our ERP/CRM Software Blog community speaking at this year’s event.
ERP Software Blog Members:
CRM Software Blog Members:
Sign Up Today
This year’s Worldwide Microsoft Technology User Group isn’t an event you want to miss. With opportunities to network with professionals, advance your Microsoft understanding and abilities, and support our fellow blog members, it’s going to be a Microsoft user group event for the books.
Sign up today at . Want a free pass to the event? Request one by visiting one of the sponsor pages at . We look forward to seeing you on April 14 & 15 at this Microsoft user group event of the year!
By ERP/CRM Software Blog Writer, www.crmsoftwareblog.com
Syncing Dynamics 365 User Permissions with SharePoint
Today, it seems that most companies are using more than one business application. Each application has its own unique features and provides value to different departments. To improve user adoption, some of the applications are likely integrated with one another. This could be either natively or with a custom integration built at the hands of your development team.
While each application has its own unique role, they likely share the same security model per your organizations business requirements. However, integrating security requirements between applications is often overlooked or is a manual process and prone to error.
In this post, we will take a quick dive into how you can achieve this with 2 integration applications – specifically syncing Dynamics 365 user permissions with .
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that your Dynamics 365 org currently has a custom security structure. Additionally, you already have an integration to SharePoint (or you want to). Specifically, it integrates your Dynamics 365 Accounts to an Account folder structure in SharePoint.
Dynamics 365 vs SharePoint security structure challenge
Here’s an example of what your security structure might look like in Dynamics 365. This is an Account (client) record with a unique Account team that is comprised of dynamic users. Only these users have access to this Account record (aside from Admins):
As this team changes, the permissions to this Account record will change. In SharePoint, your admins currently have to manually maintain the security for this clients folders. This is an inefficient use of their time, not to mention it is also prone to error.
The solution
In order to accurately keep up with these changes, a custom process can automatically synchronize the Dynamics 365 user permissions to your SharePoint. As users change on the teams in Dynamics, the process will automatically kick off and refresh the permissions on the clients folders in SharePoint.
This may sound easier said than done, which is why you’ll want to utilize a .
Developers can use both the Dynamics 365 API and the to retrieve the team members from Dynamics and then grant write and read permissions at the SharePoint folder level. If your SharePoint folder structure is currently not organized based on the data you have in Dynamics 365, the MS Graph API can also be used to produce a relevant and consistent folder structure automatically in SharePoint.
If you want to learn more about how you can sync Dynamics 365 user permissions with SharePoint, today.
Beringer Technology Group, a leading Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in and . We also provide expert , , and .
Pro Tips For Quick CRM System User Adoption
It’s been said that anything worth doing in life won’t come easy. Without a doubt, this applies to upgrading your business management systems.
In today’s global economy, upgrading business management systems is more important than ever before. But CRM projects will only be successful if your team understands and adopts the new system quickly.
How can you get your employees to embrace the change?
We’ve consulted twenty industry experts to learn what they’ve found to be successful in streamlining user adoption. These key tips, important warnings, and advice from our members here at the CRM Software Blog can help your employees embrace change and take your organization to the next level.
It may not be easy, but working toward solid user adoption is well worth the effort. Here are a few tips from various Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partners who focus on helping companies like yours.
Plan Thoroughly
To have successful user adoption, it is essential that your team has planned thoroughly before implementing your new business management system. Anticipate challenges ahead of time, such as identifying what obstacles may come up and the reasons why your team may be resistant.
“Create an iterative project plan that clearly defines success through metrics and establishes the strategic priority of the project so users understand it’s something that requires their attention and adherence.” – BroadPoint
Preparing for challenges ahead of time by building the right software team, establishing a clear plan for post-go-live support and training, and knowing exactly what areas you want your new system to improve on can have a big impact on whether your user adoption is successful or not.
Lead Proactively
If you want your employees to be on board with the switch, there must be strong leadership. The leadership team, from CEO to department managers, should be able to clearly explain the reason why the project was initiated.
Successful companies know this. Notice their insights in this area:
“Even if the new CRM or ERP has a lot more to offer, the end-user will be reluctant to adopt it if they find a pre-existing software integration missing. A missing integration often means a break in an existing data flow.” —Connecting Software
“Without the ‘WHY,’ a new system implementation just becomes another task. It’s critical to identify the reason WHY. WHY are we spending the money? WHY are we spending time and effort. What’s the business case? What’s the justification? What’s the ROI? Make a strong case to drive user adoption.” —JourneyTEAM
“Make sure management is on board and leads by example. Users will not be motivated to use the new system if management is still using the same old tools as before to manage the organization.” —JOVACO Solutions
Train Effectively
Without proper training, it’s very likely that your employees will be resistant to the changes your new CRM system will bring. They may be worried the new system will automate them out of a job, or they might simply not understand why the change is happening and how they fit into the switch. No matter what the reason for the resistance, training will help.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 experts offer these tips on training effectively:
“Many working adults are also homeschooling or caring for others while trying to juggle their professional schedules. Create a schedule that allows for multiple breaks throughout the day. We also recommend recording sessions in case anyone misses any topics or wants to simply review again in the future.” —Beringer Technology Group
“Requiring too many fields early on in the sales cycle just decreases the likelihood that a salesperson will fill out any fields—and thus destroys your user adoption. Only require the data that you need, and encourage your sales team members to understand the value of inputting data in “recommended” fields—with understanding comes compliance and user adoption!” —emfluence Marketing Platform
There are a variety of effective training options a company can use when upgrading business management systems. Whether it’s in-person, hands-on training, or using video sessions, if your team is aware of what specific areas your employees need to be trained in you are one step closer to reaching your goal of successful user adoption.
Helping your employees embrace change when implementing a new business management system can be a challenge. But by closely following the tips offered by our contributing partners, you will soon find out that following their advice was well worth the effort.
To hear more from the experts and learn pro tips that you can put into practice today, download the full white paper “19 Brilliant Ways to Promote ERP & CRM User Adoption” at www.crmsoftwareblog.com/19brilliant.
When it comes to user adoption, experience counts! Visit the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Partner Directory on the CRM Software Blog to find a list of implementation and training partners who know how to prepare your users to take full ownership of new software.
By CRM Software Blog writer, www.crmsoftwareblog.com
Set Targets and Track Dynamics 365 CRM User Performance with Ease on Daily, Weekly or Monthly Basis
Looking for a complete Dynamics 365 CRM monitoring solution? Get User Adoption Monitor for seamless tracking of Dynamics 365 CRM user actions!
Recently, our user actions monitoring app – , – had released three new features making it a formidable app for tracking user actions across Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps. In our previous blog, you were given in-depth information about one of the newly released User Adoption Monitor feature – – which helps you to ensure that all Dynamics 365 CRM records have the necessary information required to conduct smooth business transactions. And now in this blog, we will shed more light on its remaining two new features – Aggregate Tracking & Target Tracking.
So, let’s see how these two new features will help you in tracking Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps user actions.
Aggregate Tracking
With this feature, you will be able to track the aggregations of respective numeric fields of the entity on which the specific user action has been defined. For example, as a Sales Manager you want to track how much sales your team has made for a specific period. To know this, all you have to do is configure aggregate tracking for the ‘Opportunity-win’ action. Once the tracking is done, you will get the SUM of the Actual Revenue of all the Opportunities won by each of your team members for a defined period of time. Similarly, you can get the aggregate value (SUM or AVG) of Budget Amount, Est. Revenue, Freight Amount, etc.
Target Tracking
Using this feature, you will be able to allot sales targets to your team members and keep regular track of it in Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps. You can set targets in both count & value. Consider a scenario where you want to appraise the performance of your sales team. With this feature, you can set a target for each of your team member,s and based on the tracking result will be able to analyze their performance easily. You can now track the performance of your team members using this feature in the following ways:
Target based on Aggregation Value
If you want to track the total sales value generated by your team members then you can use this feature and set the target in aggregate value. Once set, you can now monitor the performance of your team members by comparing the aggregate value of the target set and the total aggregate value of the target achieved by them on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Target based on Count
Similarly, if you want to keep tab on the count of sales made by your team members then you can set the target in the count. Once set, you can now monitor and compare the target set (in count) and the total target achieved (in count) by your team members on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Target defined for Fixed Interval
In the above two scenarios, the Targets were defined with the Interval set as ‘Recurring’. In such cases, tracking will be done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Other than that, you can also define the Target for a fixed period of time by setting the Interval as Fixed.
After you set the interval of Target Configuration as fixed, you can define the Start Date and End Date for which you want to set the target tracking.
With this, you can easily monitor and compare the target set and the total target achieved (both in count or aggregate value) by your team members for a given fixed period of time.
A handy app to have at the time for appraisals, isn’t it?
So, wait no more! Satisfy your curiosity by downloading User Adoption Monitor from our or and exploring these amazing features for a free trial of 15 days.
For a personal demo or any user actions monitoring queries, feel free to contact us at crm@inogic.com
Until next time –Wish you a Safe and Glorious New Year!
Keep Tracking Us!
Can You Boost CRM Technology Acceptance and User Adoption?
User adoption of new technology has been an issue for as long as technology exists. Software is no exception. Organizations deploy new software hoping it will have a big (positive) impact, and sometimes it seems that very impact gets in the way of user adoption. This is very much the case for new CRM systems. A lot changes when they are deployed, and user adoption is often a struggle.
Tips and Best Practices For CRM User Adoption
Following the launch of CRM Software Blog’s white paper 19 Brilliant Ways to Promote ERP & CRM User Adoption, we talked with Connecting Software’s experts and asked for their take on the subject.
Here the tips we got for you. focusing on user adoption tactics and best practices that we have found helpful.
Don’t make the new CRM take care of everything
There are many things that a CRM can handle, but for which they are not the best option. For example, a company starting with Dynamics 365 can store the documents relating to their prospects and customers there. Nonetheless, a DMS like SharePoint is the best option because you can have team collaboration and version control. It is simply a matter of getting the Dynamics 365 integration with SharePoint provided by Microsoft working and then making sure to Protect Dynamics 365 Documents in SharePoint From Misuse.
Consider doing end-users training asynchronously
Asynchronous training has taken a boost with the remote work environment. This offers end users complete control over their learning, is more flexible to accommodate other tasks, and is more respectful to their own learning pace.
Increase communication before and during the process
Often user awareness and motivation are not achieved because of deadlines. Other times, the adoption of the new software feels like a trial-and-error process from the end-user perspective. The use keeps trying to find their own workarounds and solutions, which are often not aligned with what management had in mind.
Make the users workflows change as little as possible
Identify all the pre-existing workflows. This means identifying all stakeholders and all usage scenarios that existed before, not forgetting all involved software. Although you are going to change the core of it with the adoption of the new CRM, make sure you are not breaking the workflows themselves.
When integration between systems existed before, make sure to keep it
Missing features and missing integrations are the worst obstacles to user adoption. Don’t expect users to replace an existing software integration with manual data transfer, or you will get a lot of upset and reluctant users. Find a way to get that integration working in the new system. For example, a company going for Dynamics 365 online can go for tools like and easily keep their existing integrations with Dynamics.
Even if the new CRM has a lot more to offer, the end-user will be reluctant to adopt it if It finds a missing pre-existing software integration. A missing integration often means a break in an existing data flow. We had such a case with a when they moved to a cloud CRM. Fortunately, they found the perfect workaround, as described in the case study.
Takeaways
Take your time to plan your CRM deployment with technology acceptance and user adoption in mind. It is worthwhile to identify all existing workflows and all end-users and stakeholders. You need the big picture not only for everything your CRM will cover, but also for anything that relates to that or that should integrate with your CRM. Trust me, this extra effort will pay up!
At we specialize in integrating the new CRM with whatever you determine is essential and we can do it keeping security and regulation compliance. and they will gladly book a remote call with you to explore your needs.
By Ana Neto
Software engineer since 1997, she is now a technical advisor for Connecting Software.
is a producer of integration and synchronization software solutions since 2004. We operate globally and we are also a proud “Top Member 2019” at CRMSoftwareBlog.
Sisense Q4 2020: Analytics for Every User With AI-Powered Insights
Sisense News is your home for corporate announcements, new Sisense features, product innovation, and everything we roll out to empower our users to get the most out of their data.
Every company is becoming a data company; there’s no getting around it. Savvy organizations know they don’t need to fear data and analytics — they see better insights as the pathway to a brighter future.
Yet a recent Gartner survey shows that 50% of organizations lack sufficient data literacy skills to achieve business value. With our Q4 release, Sisense is bridging the skillset gap to help organizations unlock business potential faster with AI-powered explanations, an enhanced live data experience, and a robust new reporting service.
Smarter insights with AI-powered data explanations
Looking at a chart, it can be difficult to uncover actionable insights. Data doesn’t yell, “Your sales increased by 10% last month because an influx of men aged 18-24 in Seattle bought more beard-trimming kits without any promotion.”
Often, to find those types of insights, you slice, dice, and filter. However, this requires a level of familiarity with the data itself. Most of us don’t have the time to dig deep into the data to get rich intelligence that we can use in our daily and strategic decisions.
Now you don’t have to! Sisense fuses your business expertise with deep insights through the power of AI-powered Explanations. Sisense Explanations provides easy, deep data exploration for every user, across the entire data journey.
To start, Sisense does the heavy lifting by highlighting anomalies and points of interest in your data for further exploration. Or a user can simply click on any point to discover the driving force behind the data. Sisense leverages all of the dimensions in your data and runs combinations to determine the exact impact that each variable has on a data point.
As another example, if your sales went up by 10%, Sisense might explain that the increase was attributable to both a specific product category and a certain age group of customer with a visual display of the breakdown. Within seconds, any user can understand the data without the need for specific technical expertise and get the deep intelligence to uplevel every decision.
Fast insights: Enhanced live data experience
With the global economy, your business doesn’t stop at 5 p.m., so why should you limit your data-driven decisions to those hours? These kinds of round-the-clock decisions require the most up-to-date information, which can only be surfaced with the aid of real-time data. Our goal at Sisense is to continually make sure your most critical real-time decisions can be made with ease.
For every query, Sisense translates live widget information into SQL data. This quarter, we released a new translator service to reduce the time and cost for these queries on your Snowflake live connection, with other live connections in beta. Reduce data query time by up to 70% and give your live widgets up to a 15% performance boost!
Code-savvy users can crack open the optimized SQL code that drives live visualizations to easily understand and validate the logic. It’s also simple to track, monitor, and optimize activity on your live data sources to better understand the context of your live queries.
Deeper understanding with next-level reporting
As you bring more robust intelligence to everyone at your company, we continue to make it easy to effectively communicate repeatable and ad hoc reports with a new reporting engine. Now, reporting is better than ever with the ability to generate PDFs and images at scale to share reports with everyone in the organization.
Create robust reports that feature your customizations such as Sisense BloX to ensure every insight is visible and can be understood. The technology is packed in a new microservice and has dedicated queues that can be managed to scale so your reports are always delivered on time at the scale you need.
Toward a data-powered future
Think of all the data your company is sitting on. Now think of all the hoops you need to jump through to make sense of any of it. There are countless decisions you and your colleagues make every day that could be enhanced with the right insights, drawn from your complex array of datasets. Bridging the skills gaps to allow your organization to successfully leverage its datasets is challenging, but with the enhanced functionality of the latest Sisense release, you’re one step closer to becoming a truly data-driven organization.
Mindi Grissom is Director of Product Marketing at Sisense. She has over 5 years of experience in the technology industry, helping thousands of organizations transform their business with data and analytics.
Pro Tips to Streamline User Adoption For Your CRM Project
Are you in the process of implementing a new CRM solution? Or do you plan to do so in the future? There’s no doubt that upgrading to a modern business management system is essential to support remote workers and to compete in a global, connected economy.
But that doesn’t mean user adoption will be without its challenges. A variety of factors can contribute to employees resisting the switch and dragging their feet during implementation.
By using these pro tips, you will be able to help your employees embrace change as you take your organization to the next level.
Download: 19 Brilliant Ways to Promote ERP & CRM User Adoption
Plan Thoroughly
Before you begin implementation, plan ahead to get all employees on board with the change. Notice a few ways you can support user adoption before the project even begins:
- To help each department feel that their perspective is represented, include a variety of staff members on the CRM selection team.
- Don’t simply replace a paper task with a digital one. Show that you have your employees’ interests in mind by designing a system that helps them accomplish more in a day with fewer headaches.
- Give extra attention to long-time employees that may be particularly resistant to change.
- Users need to know that they will have support to help them transition to the new system. Let them know right from the start what the ongoing support and training program will be.
Lead Proactively
Before they give their full support to the project, employees need to know that management is backing the decision 100%. Show leadership support from the beginning by doing the following:
- Ensure all employees in leadership roles understand the reason and goals for the project and are able to explain them clearly.
- Be on the lookout for “super users” – employees that are passionate about learning and are embracing the change. Develop a plan to share their enthusiasm and knowledge to help others throughout the onboarding process.
- To drive user adoption at the individual level, set goals for everyone involved, not just the company.
- When unexpected challenges come up, leaders should show their concern and proactive interest in finding a solution.
Manage Expectations
When employees meet with inevitable challenges throughout the project, they need to feel that they are understood and their needs are being given priority. Help them along the way through:
- Maintaining clear communication. Project updates should be honest and informative to help users feel included in the entire process.
- Employees should not be expected to maintain their full-time job responsibilities in addition to planning, testing, and training. Put plans in place to offset workloads and give employees the time they need to fully focus on their implementation assignments.
- A CRM implementation project can be stressful for many of the individuals involved. Patience and tolerance for missed deadlines or mistakes will go a long way in supporting user adoption.
Train Effectively
Your new system will be of no benefit if your employees can’t use it properly. Take these steps to ensure proper training:
- Provide an overview walkthrough before training to help users understand the big picture so they can understand how their role contributes to the process.
- Demonstrate how the new system will benefit them specifically and how their effective use of the application will make their work more productive and fulfilling.
- Make training sessions specific to your organization. For example, use industry-specific terminology instead of generic examples that are included in vendor training data.
- Support learners of all kinds by providing a variety of training options, from one-on-one, group, or video training sessions.
Every CRM project will have its challenges. But by taking the appropriate steps, you can ensure the success of user adoption throughout your company- making the project smoother, quicker, and ultimately a success.
To hear from experts in the field and learn more steps you can take to make a success of user adoption in your company, download the full white paper “19 Brilliant Ways to Promote ERP & CRM User Adoption” at www.crmsoftwareblog.com/19brilliant.
Looking for a Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Partner? Browse our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner Directory.
By CRM Software Blog writer
20 Microsoft Partners Give 19 Brilliant Ways to Promote CRM User Adoption
Why is user adoption such a challenge for organizations implementing new business management systems? There’s not one easy answer. Employees may be resistant to change, training may be inadequate, change management may not have been well planned, or leadership may not be fully committed. In most cases, it’s a combination of factors.
In this white paper, 20 Microsoft Partners share the knowledge gained through thousands of ERP and CRM implementations to help get your employees started on the right foot. These Partners have shared best practices, important critical warnings, and bright ideas so you can quickly to help you realize the full value of your software investment.
Get expert advice from:
Download the white paper now “19 Brilliant Ways to Promote ERP and CRM User Adoption” to see how you can help your employees embrace change and take your organization to the next level. www.crmsoftwareblog.com/19brilliant
Looking for a CRM Partner? Browse our directory of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Partners by location, name and industry focus.
By CRM Software Blog writer, www.crmsoftwareblog.com
Data Completeness a must for Data Quality – Track completeness of Dynamics 365 CRM records with User Adoption Monitor!
In our previous , you were briefly introduced to the latest three new features of – one of our popular Dynamics 365 CRM user actions tracking app. Being one of the , User Adoption Monitor has always helped organizations around the world to enhance its Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps user productivity by monitoring user actions and providing credible analysis of their performance.
In this post, we will see how User Adoption Monitor can further improve the overall user productivity throughout the organization with its latest feature – Data Completeness.
Data Completeness feature will help you to track and ensure the completeness of any entity record in Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps. With this feature, you can choose the field(s) in any entity record that are essential for an organization to be captured and ensure that data is within CRM. If it is not captured, then the status of that record will be shown as ‘Incomplete’.
Now, let’s see how this is done.
Consider a scenario where you have discovered that most of the records in Contact entity does not have the necessary contact details of customers such as Email id, Mobile no. or Company name. Since the details are not readily available, you often spend your time searching for the right contact information. And in business world where time is of essence, every minute counts as it determines whether you win or lose a potential deal or customer.
In order to overcome this situation, you can make use of the ‘Data Completeness’ feature of User Adoption Monitor. For this, you have to go to Entity Configuration in User Adoption Monitor, configure a new data completeness entity for ‘Contacts’, choose the mandatory fields for which data needs to be captured and save it.
Now, whenever a new record is created in Contact entity, this feature will ensure that all the mandatory field selected by you is duly filled. If no data is entered in those fields then the status of that record will be displayed as ‘Incomplete’.
Once the data is duly filled in those fields the status of the record will be displayed as ‘Complete’.
In this way, you can ensure that the user never skips information while entering data in the CRM and all the newly created records in Contact entity has the essential information as required.
But what about the already existing records in Contact entity?
No worries! User Adoption Monitor has made provision for this scenario also.
In order to check the completeness of the history records you have to just create a separate on-demand workflow for ‘Contact’ entity.
After the workflow is activated, open any existing record in ‘Contact’ entity, go to flow and click on the newly created workflow.
Once the workflow has run, the status of the record will be displayed as per the completeness of the record.
Quite handy, isn’t it?
With this feature in hand, you can rest easy and will no longer have to invest precious time in search of essential information. This will further enhance your productivity and overall output in terms of meeting business goals.
Now, all you have to do is go to our or and download User Adoption Monitor for a trial period of 15 days and explore this latest ‘Data Completeness’ feature for yourself.
While we have been talking about data quality and completeness, there are chances of errors while entering data and we have another cool app to ensure all is in order – () – 1 Click to Undo changes in Dynamics 365 CRM Records in Bulk – Restore History Changes & Deleted Records as well!
Feel free to contact us for personal demo at crm@inogic.com or more information related to User Adoption Monitor or any of our .
Until then – Be Safe, Be Healthy!
Why database folks should care about User Research
I attended a training session at Redgate this week by Chris Spalton. Chris’ session topic was “An Introduction into Planning User Research.” Chris pointed out that there’s much more to User Research, but that planning the research is particularly important as it is the foundation for everything you do later.
If you’re a database administrator or developer, you may not immediately feel that User Research is related to your job — that’s someone else’s job, right?
While that used to be true, the world of tech is changing fast. There are reasons you should reconsider.
Understanding your customer is key
One of the most important aspects of Agile development methods, DevOps, and Digital Transformations is a focus on your customer.
IT folks traditionally have thought of their colleagues as their internal “customers” — DBAs and others used to act more as a sort of internal service provider in a cost center. DevOps and Digital Transformations notably shift this and bring IT into a position to be creative and partner equally with others in the organization to generate value for external customers.
It’s easy to be a bit cynical about this and think, “That’s not the way it is in my job.” If you feel that way, I challenge you to take the initiative to change your own perspective! There is no need for database specialists to wait around for someone to give them permission to start thinking about their organization’s customers and to start being a creative collaborator with others.
Give yourself permission, and very likely it will have a positive impact on your career.
The User Research planning approach is suitable for all sorts of customer interactions
I found that a lot of what I learned about planning User Research is also useful to think about when framing all sorts of conversations:
- Think carefully about how you define the problem space, as this impacts everything afterward
- Remember that you are not your customer — and neither are your colleagues. In other words, try to clear your natural bias that you already understand your customer. You don’t!
- Scope and prioritize your goals for learning carefully, but bring extra questions in case there is time to gain more insights
- It is useful to gain insights from not only current customers — ex-customers, prospects, and others working in the space may hold valuable insights
- You won’t cover everything about your research in one session. Plan your research over phases, from initial broad questions, progressing through interaction, showing proposals, and finally testing
- Plan, prepare for, and structure your calls carefully in a way that respects your interviewee’s time, and allows them freedom to answer honestly and openly
After attending this session, I believe that learning more about User Research will also help me build my skills for other interactions and projects, too.
Participating in User Research connects you to your colleagues
As a DBA or database developer, you may not conduct your own user research. Quite possibly, you already have colleagues who conduct User Research. This may go by different names in different organizations, and the research may be conducted by people in software development, marketing, sales, or customer success teams.
Keep an eye out to identify where user research is happening in your organization and ask your manager and teammates if they know how and when this works. Reach out to the teams who are doing this research and ask if you are able to join in sometimes, even as an observer, so that you can learn to better understand your customers. Taking this initiative can open many doors for you and help you bring your career into a new phase.