If you were given a choice between two different boat drivers (helmsmen) to take you on a cruise, one with a license, one without, who will you choose? Even with no upfront cost, you will choose the helmsman with the license. Health before wealth, right?
Likewise, it is vital that if you are migrating to a new system or upgrading to the latest version, the system is used and worked as intended. From first-hand experience, I know that companies assign IT teams to build a tutorial or provide user training on products they have recently purchased to deploy to the employees.
Trialling a product for two weeks and then expecting your poor IT team to know the in’s and out’s of a new product is not the ideal way to go as key features of a system may go unnoticed. It's pretty much the blind leading the blind in other words.
Therefore, Implementation and User Training provided by the company that you purchased the product from is most definitely recommended. Let’s be honest now, no one else will know the product better than the creators themselves.
Investigating the business case
To prove this point, let’s now investigate two anonymous case studies for Mail Manager. Company Square and Company Circle.
Company Square had been trialling Mail Manager for two weeks and have recently purchased the product along with our fast track service.
The Implementation team had immediately got in touch with the client within 24-hours of purchasing and booked in a pre-implementation call in order to collect the necessary information regarding Company Square’s software environment and office processes. This is so that the implementation runs smoothly on the day.
As Company Square had availability for the following week, the implementation and user training were booked in. The implementation took around an hour and a half to complete, however, we had recommended to block out 2 hours to allow any issues that arose during the session.
The implementation is carried out on a single machine and the MSI is configured so that the settings and preferences are rolled out to all users.
In the afternoon, the training was provided online. Company Square had gathered everyone in a conference room and clicked on the meeting link provided by the Implementation team in order to provide the training. A recording of the training was requested by Company Square for people that were not able to attend. This was provided by the Implementation Consultant immediately after the session. The training consisted of different ways to file, tips and tricks of Mail Manager, and how to use the search function quickly and efficiently.
Two weeks later, the implementation team had a catch-up call with Company Square to ensure that everything was running smoothly. They did not need to contact Support for any reason, had no complaints, and they now love Mail Manager and basically cannot live without it.
Now let’s look at Company Circle.
Company Circle had been trialling Mail Manager for a month and had purchased the product without the fast track service.
Company Circle’s internal IT team had installed Mail Manager themselves and had deployed the software out to all users. The employees were given a quick brief on Mail Manager and were shown one way on how to file.
Curious users had then accessed the user preferences due to the MSI file not being configured properly and played around with the settings which caused mayhem as emails were filed away into incorrect locations. Now let’s guess who the managers had to get in touch with in order to rectify this... Yes, the IT team. The IT team themselves were extremely busy due to the Christmas period so this was only rectified after a week.
Some users had no knowledge of Mail Manager as they were not present during the briefing, therefore, they were not filing any emails. This meant that the tool was not used to its full potential.
All issues were being escalated to the Mail Manager Support team which was time-consuming.
Expert implementation and training
You can spend a fortune on a new benefit portal for your company, but without any training on how to use it, the employees will not be able to take full advantage of the features and the capabilities you have paid for. It is a loss/loss situation for both the employers AND the employees.
Let us look after you. It’ll be a win/win for all.
