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Top Five Tips for Successful Product Adoption
Thought Leadership //17-05-2017

Top Five Tips for Successful Product Adoption

by Gordon Wilson, Chairman, Advanced

Product adoption is all about making sure your firm fully embraces and uses a new product or service to its full potential. You’ve invested significant amounts of time, effort and money into the technology platforms that your firm uses so it’s only right that you maximise the benefit you get from it.

In our position as leading software providers to the legal market we’ve managed to build up extensive expertise around ensuring your use of technology is as beneficial for you as possible. Here are our top five tips for a successful product adoption:

1. Have a plan

Successful adoption always starts with a plan for how you’re going to roll out the new product or service, and below are some things you may wish to consider when formulating this plan:

  • Who will use the new product? – Will it be everyone in your firm, or just certain members of your team and will each group have a different training need? For example, with Laserform Hub your banking team may use Laserform Hub differently to your conveyancing or finance teams.
  • Who will train your colleagues? – You may have a team dedicated to running all of your training, in which case you might want the software vendor to train your trainers, or you may wish for the vendor to provide training to all individual colleagues. With Laserform Hub, we offer you the choice and it can be delivered either remotely or onsite.
  • When do you want it to be rolled out? – You need to think about the timescales for the roll out to your colleagues. Do you want this to be delivered within a few weeks to everyone at once, or would you prefer to phase this in gradually to each of your individual teams?
  • How will you communicate the plan to your colleagues? – Once you have devised your plan, it’s important to effectively communicate this to your colleagues, for example you may wish to discuss this as part of a team meeting and follow up with an email, detailing your plan and including timescales. It could be that once you’ve discussed the plan with your colleagues, you need to make adjustments.

2. Ensure colleague buy-in

It’s essential to make sure all of your colleagues understand what the new product or service can offer them and why you’ve chosen to use it - Everyone is much more likely to use something that makes things easier for them.

You may want to setup one to ones with individuals or team meetings with different groups, to share with them why you’ve chosen the new product and to listen to any suggestions or concerns they may have.

3. Assign product champions

An extension to getting colleague buy-in is by giving some of your colleagues the task of being an expert and champion for the new product within your firm. Their role is to ensure everyone fully understands how the new product works, and support the rollout across your firm.

You may want a group of product champions if multiple teams will use the product. It’s vital that the champions are enthusiastic about the new product and will be able to encourage usage with their peers.

4. Obtain regular feedback

Ask your colleagues for feedback about any new product, especially within the first few days and weeks of using it. If they have problems and haven’t asked for help, they’ll be unlikely to want to continue to use the system.

Often, short anonymous questionnaires can provide you with the best feedback, as your colleagues will be more likely to be open about what they really think. Some of the questions you might want to ask include:

  • On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy to use is the new product or service?
  • On a scale of 1 to 10, how much will the new product improve your work process?
  • Would you recommend the new product or service?
  • Do you have any additional feedback about the new product or service?

5. Training refreshers

With software suppliers moving to Cloud based solutions, new features can be much more rapidly deployed, which means that it can be easy for your firm to be out of date and not get the most out of the product, so it’s worth regularly checking with your software supplier to find out what training they offer.

With Laserform Hub we run webinars several times a month and also offer bespoke webinars for all new customers, to ensure you get the most out of our service.

These webinars showcase new features, provide you with the opportunity to feedback to us any comments you may have and are useful if some of your colleagues haven’t used the software recently and just need a refresher.

Thought Leadership Brand
Gordon Wilson

Gordon Wilson

PUBLISHED BY

Chairman, Advanced

Having joined the company in September 2015 with a track record in leading business growth, Gordon has since driven the successful transformation of Advanced. In 2023, Gordon stepped down as CEO to become our new Chairman.

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