Driving user adoption for Lightning Experience using Salesforce platform features

Salesforce Lightning experience offers organizations with flexible and user-friendly interface for managing their customer, both internal as well as external facing applications. A wide variety of organizations are migrating to Salesforce lightning experience from Classic helping them increase productivity, enable new features & functionalities and reduce time to market.

However, sometimes end users do ask this question, ‘Why fix something that is not broken?’ ‘What new features will lightning experience bring, that will be of value to me?’

In this article, we will explore some of Salesforce platform features that will help driving user adoption for this transition to lightning experience.

First off, some of the key questions in user’s minds, while being told about Lightning experience are

• What new functionalities are available in Lightning experience?
• How can Lightning experience drive productivity and user experience?
• How can you help them understand the new system better?
• How can lightning experience address the challenges users are facing with the current system?

We will not be providing response of “Why lightning” here but will go through, how we can utilize Salesforce platform and features to support user adoption as well as measuring adoption — How Salesforce is supporting towards “How can you help them understand the new system better?” in similar fashion of supporting transition execution through multiple lightning transition tools .

Often, users are lost on how to use newer updates, features and process changes pushed by your company. This impacts user adoption and increases service tickets. Salesforce has enabled businesses to utilize the platform itself to support and promote user adoption, thereby ensuring a successful lightning transition. With every release salesforce is empowering salesforce admins/developers/consultants to support their user and system adoption, thereby encouraging users to use Salesforce application for their business.

Some of the key Salesforce Platform features/apps which can be utilized are

Post Deployment Training & Help

In-app guidance

• As announced in the Winter ’20 Release, In-App Guidance is now generally available. You can now add in-app guidance to your org using clicks, not code. To engage directly with your users, write your own content and include action buttons to your chosen URL in the prompts. You can specify the target audience and where the prompts appear and for how long.

• You can share invaluable productivity tips for salesforce users, helping users with training, providing news or getting on-boarded, without leaving Salesforce. If you have faced challenges in user adoption or having continuous costs for user training, In-app guidance comes to your rescue.

• You can place prompts (floating or docking) on object record pages and object home pages (including Home). These prompts can also be scheduled on date ranges and frequency of display.
• Salesforce in-app guidance provides you with an ability to provide contextual help on key features, taking out complexity from the entire process and driving user engagement.

Leveraging Lightning Trailheads and Trailmixes

• Training users before rolling out Lightning is critical and can be achieved through dedicated class room/online training along with Trailhead trail mixes focusing on lightning and lightning features for user training.

Lightning Experience Welcome Mat

• Lightning Experience Welcome Mat enables organization to share the relevant, suggested and key information and details/training's with user when they login or switch to Lightning.
• We can customize the welcome mats to deliver content that’s specific to customer business and users’ roles.

Salesforce Help menu

• Utilizing feature, under “Help Menu” allowing admins to create a custom section and underlying links to resources that will appear in the standard Salesforce Help Menu

Support, Communication & Feedback

Leveraging Chatter

• Announcements in Chatter groups can be used to communicate the changes or enhancements to users on — why, what, who, when and how are the changes going to be roll out to them so that they are prepared for the changes
• Groups can be created to gather feedback from users — Find out what’s working well and what issues users are facing.
• Separate Groups can be created for Key Users / User Group to discuss on the feedback and changes received
• Conduct surveys about specific features and the overall roll-out process. Use survey tools like Chatter Polls, surveys
• Ask open-ended questions to learn about specific concerns and preferences. Use collaboration tools like Chatter polls
• Use announcement to publish new feature roll-outs and other announcements

Custom/Standard Objects

• Ideas/Case object usage for collecting new/update features, reporting issues/challenges
• Custom objects can also be used if standard objects are not accessible due to license type

Adoption & Performance Measurement

Lightning Usage Application

• Get Lightning Experience Adoption Insights with the Lightning Usage App
• Lightning Usage App lets us monitor adoption metrics, like daily active Lightning Experience users, the number of users switching back to Salesforce Classic, and the most visited pages in Lightning Experience. These insights help you understand your users’ needs so you can focus on the issues that really matter.
• Some of the metrics available in the Lightning Usage App include:

1. Daily and monthly active users in Lightning Experience (and the Salesforce app)
2. Daily and monthly switches to Salesforce Classic (total number of switches and the number of unique users that switched)
3. Profiles and users that switched to Salesforce Classic the most
4. Types of browsers used to access Lightning Experience (and the Salesforce app)
5. Pages viewed most often in Lightning Experience

Addressing questions and queries from users about functionality and its new implementation along with right communication, through tools/features mentioned above will help us to increase user adoption leading to successful Lightning experience transition. Enabling users to self-help themselves is the most beneficial for business as well as for users.