Why ongoing support is key to software uptake

From making the business case in January 2018 to going live that November, Kantar’s Workday rollout moved at a rapid pace. As their Global HR Operations Director, Nadia Hutchinson ran the 34-week global program and with Kantar having “some of the highest user rates of any Workday client globally”, it’s clear they got something right.

As a leading data, insights and consulting company, Kantar do a lot of innovative digital work for clients. However, Nadia claims they weren’t traditionally good at doing it for themselves. In fact, as a global group broken down by sector, their technology landscape had become fragmented.

Having been brought in to lead the huge HCM project to remedy this, Nadia and her dedicated change and training team had a big, early decision to make. Just how far should they go with supporting their employees after the software launch?

They decided to place real importance on informing and automating ongoing support, and she believes this had a large impact on the remarkable success of the project.

“Straight after implementation, the program rolls off. The change and training people go on to other projects, they leave the organization, often as consultants, and that’s where some of the adoption issues begin to occur.”

To support their employees after launch, it wouldn’t be enough to distribute catch-all comms and generic guides. According to Nadia, “there were two things we needed to understand, our adoption rate and usage of Workday, and also how are people using the tool that we deployed to support them.”

Then there was the support itself. It wasn’t feasible for Kantar’s central HR team to handle all Workday enquiries. According to Nadia, “the only way we could do that [provide real-time support] was to have something that was available digitally, online, that people could access anywhere, anytime.”

“We needed a way to sustain real-time support. The only way we could do that was to have something that’s available 24/7 because, like many global organizations our employee base spans every time zone in the world, but the support team was based in London.”

These requirements led Nadia to our ADOPT digital adoption solution, and to a working partnership with AppLearn, but the lesson here couldn’t be clearer. If you need to decide how much to invest into providing ongoing support to your employees, remember Nadia’s advice:

“People won’t remember what you told them just before the program went live, or as it went live, it’s really after the tool is implemented that the questions really start coming.”

Whatever the transformation project, ongoing support can be the difference, but is not a guarantee of success on its own.