Have you ever heard the saying “If you build it, they will come,” Unfortunately for online booking software this is not true. Too many businesses successfully implement a booking software solution, but adoption falls flat. To ensure success with your booking software implementation, we have outlined the best practices for online booking software adoption including everything from naming a sponsor, setting a strategy and ensuring a sufficient budget to engaging the employees, promoting the software and measuring progress.
Here are the top 7 mistakes businesses make with their online booking software adoption efforts:
- Not naming an adoption sponsor
To ensure successful software adoption for online booking software, it is important to name an adoption sponsor. This person is preferably an executive stakeholder. Responsible for protecting the adoption budget, leveraging HR support, recruiting software champions and ensuring objectives are aligned with metrics. The most critical objective in this role is to ensure that there is executive-level support for the software solution across the business to remove any adoption roadblocks.
- Not having an adoption plan
For online booking software, the adoption planning phase is more important than the implementation phase since employees and customers can always choose not to use the software and use existing technology. It is vital to have an adoption plan that outlines the efforts to increase software usage, how you will measure success and ensure that adoption is not failing.
- Not having enough budget
According to research, too often businesses will use up all their budgets during the implementation phase and will have nothing left over for adoption phase. Plan on spending half of your total budget or more on software adoption activities to ensure success.
- Just doing employee training
Every employee is vitally important to the success of software adoption and just training them is not enough. We recommend that you identify employees during training who are embracing the online booking software and designate them as software champions. These champions will be crucial to raising awareness and adoption throughout your business. Strongly encourage all employees to share the availability of booking software with their networks.
- Not getting to the adoption phase as quickly as possible
It is better to release a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as soon as possible than to wait for a fully-baked solution. This allows the opportunity to gain valuable feedback from employees (and software champions) about the online booking software and keeps enthusiasm strong for adoption phase.
- Not promoting online booking software across all your marketing channels
Too often, businesses do not do enough to communicate to their customers and prospects that online booking software is now available to use. Use the web, marketing emails, social media and mobile apps to promote availability. It is important to focus on the benefits that online booking software provides. Remember that all of these promotional efforts take content, graphics and lead-times. Communicate with your marketing teams as soon as you begin implementation, so they have proper time to prepare for promoting the software launch.
- Not tracking metrics
It is important to track the adoption of online booking software across your business. If internal and external usage does not meet your business objectives, then additional training and promotional efforts would need to be deployed.
Conclusion
Online booking software has a tremendous competitive advantage for businesses who implement it. The software allows your employees to be more productive while allowing them to better understand their customers. To achieve these results, take steps to ensure the software has been properly implemented and adopted. If you avoid these common software adoption mistakes, we are confident your business is well on its way to success.