I’d like to focus in on the point made here of user adoption. In order to ensure that employees can learn the solution and use it efficiently, training should be taken seriously.

As CRM consultants, we strongly believe that having all employees on board is essential to the success of the solution. Therefore training should be conducted until employees feel that they can navigate and use the system with ease to perform their daily tasks. Follow up training should be done as a refresher and to train on new functionalities.

You may also want to consider an incentive plan for employees during the learning curve to encourage enthusiasm of use. Provide employees an avenue to give feedback and take their suggestions seriously as after all, they are your people in the trenches using it every day.

Off the back of what we have been doing with clients we have recently released a new system called Tactile CRM – http://www.tactilecrm.com – it is aimed to be easy to use and to help small businesses start using CRM as it is free for two users to use to start with.