A Manufacturer of School Buses
Getting Users On Board With a New CRM Solution
Our client is the leading independent designer and manufacturer of school buses, with more than 550,000 buses sold since its formation in 1927 and approximately 180,000 buses in operation today.
New Platform Required Change Management
Our client had various siloed sources of information that depended on expert individuals to manage and input critical sales data. This manual process inhibited productivity and took valuable time away from the business of selling buses.
Company leadership and stakeholders had previously engaged us to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to serve as the ‘single record of truth’ for sales data, support and improve the sales process, and also serve as a catalyst for future digital transformation.
Our client recognized the need to guide stakeholders through the many changes involved with both adopting a newly standardized process, and helping them understand how a new technology will optimize their work. The company asked our organizational change management (OCM) team to help prepare its internal sales team to serve as the pilot group for this new technology before launching the solution to external bus dealers nationwide within the company.
A Curriculum for Change
Our OCM team executed a quick-start solution to assess the impact the CRM implementation would have on the business,while gathering key stakeholder insights to design appropriate end-user communication and training plans.
We provided monthly email newsletters, project announcements, and instructional messages to enhance communication efforts throughout the transition to the new CRM platform. CRM user training guides were also developed and distributed to provide post go-live support to our client and its dealer network users.
During the change, we conducted tailored user acceptance training and provided instructor-led training to ensure that users were fully prepared at go-live.
We chose to partner with Perficient because of their dedicated change management practice.
Results
Graduating to a Better Way of Working
By leveraging our change management expertise, our client was able to meet its objectives for a successful platform implementation, including:
- Provided a strategy and methodology to ensure CRM tool adoption by the external dealer network
- Increased stakeholder engagement and buy-in to accurately design a standardized, company-wide sales process
- User acceptance training sessions tested the OCM approach and empowered leadership and end-users to leverage the single, real-time view of customer and sales data
