C/RS Performance Support Solutions
for Application Users

Changing the Path of User Adoption

Most user-adoption strategies rely on coercing users, forcing them to change their established habits to conform to an unfamiliar application. Moreover, users have to stop doing productive work in order to attend extensive training courses.  

No wonder so many new adoptions never meet their goals. Users resist both the change and the training--and even if they do not, they are likely to forget up to 70% of the training they receive. Users return to their jobs still feeling threatened by the unfamiliar application and with no confidence they will be able to do what they are being asked to do. They try, they fail, they give up.

Meanwhile, the costs mount up, costs due to lost productive time, days of inefficient training, too many errors, and frequent failures to comply with company standards and requirements.

There has to be a better way.

Making Failure Difficult

A Christensen/Roberts Solutions Performance Support Systems (PSS) makes failure difficult. It enables you to equip users with exactly the task and job guidance they want at precisely the moment then need it. It synchronizes that support with the live application so that at no time are users more than a click or two away from having any of their questions answered. Like a GPS for a car, the PSS knows exactly where the user is in the application. He or she selects the current task, and the correct guidance for getting there is instantly displayed.

But it does more. The PSS helps you provide layers of user-centric assistance to give users confidence they can make the application work for them. Users can not only get directions for completing all of the tasks they'll want to do, you can also provide them with answers to the bigger questions as well, questions such as: Why is this task important? How does this task fit into my larger job workflows? What are the best practices and business rules to follow? You can put the answers right at their fingertips.

Your users' success becomes a lot easier to acheive.

Accelerating Performance/Slashing Costs/Saving Resources:

Providing precise just-in-time guidance and advice makes the application easy to use, gives users confidence that they can master the application, and speeds up users' acceptance, adoption, and productivity.

Your users can:

• » Be successful, self-reliant, and self-confident from Day One.
• » Focus on doing their jobs not on learning the application.
• » Accomplish their own goals while meeting those of the organization.
• » Be supported in their specific tasks within the organization's unique processes.

Your organizations can dramatically impact their bottom line by:

• » Cutting the non-productive time employees spend in end-user training events by up to 80%.
• » Eliminating unwanted travel expenses.
• » Avoiding common user errors and the cost of error-recovery efforts.
• » Speeding up rollouts, adoption cycles, and the time needed to ensure user competence.

You can significantly ease the strain on limited training and support resources by:

• » Spending far less time designing, preparing for, and delivering training courses.
• » Drastically cutting the need for refresher training and shortening training for replacement hires.
• » Ensuring that the exact knowledge users need to do their jobs is always just a click or two away.
• » Reducing the fear that users will forget what they have been taught.

Making Deployment Simple

A C/RS PSS is easy for your users to access and use and simple for you to deploy. Because the support tools never "touch" the application's code, there is minimal need for IT support. All the content can be created and the connections made external to the application being supported.

Carefully designed templates also make it easy for you and your staff to create and edit the supporting content. You'll be able to continually revise the content to keep current with your organization's processes, business goals, and best practices--independent of the application code itself.

Going Further

If the situation warrants even more powerful support, a C/RS PSS can be extended to proactively interact with the application to:

• » Streamline tasks to remove unnecessary and tedious steps, and
• » Monitor and manage the user's progress to ensure that the task is completed efficiently and effectively without error.

You can experience an example by following the link on the right.

Awards and Praises for the PSS model for Salesforce.com

C/RS has won several awards for the design concepts behind its PSS solutions and for the results they can achieve:

Recently, C/RS and its client, Realogy Corporation, were honored with a Training Magazine Technology-in-Action Award for their implementation of the Salesforce Coach. Designed for users of Salesforce, the popular hosted CRM system, the PSS changed the organization's approach to application training. The just-in-time guidance reduced the reliance on training courses (training time estimates were cut by 75%) and the number of calls for support to the help desk and colleagues when back on the job.

That award-winning project expanded the ground-breaking PSS design concept developed by C/RS (in partnership with Rocketools, Inc.). That model previously received a prestigious Performance-Centered Design Award for their QuickSuccess for Salesforce.

That program, an advanced-level PSS, has been reviewed in detail in Dr. Allison Rossett's recent book, Job Aids & Performance Support Systems.

See the links on the right for more information.

Making it Happen

Let us know your challenges. Christensen/Roberts Solutions offers free consultation to help you determine how adding a PSS to your next rollout can save you and your organization significant time and money. We offer the tools you need for development and delivery and the knowledge to help you design and create a highly successful PSS.  
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