Maximize Your Database for Profit
You can build the best system in the world, but if no one uses it, you’ve wasted time and money. Your organization won’t see the productivity gains. Your institutional knowledge will not be saved in a database. Managers will not have metrics at their fingertips. Your company will be more vulnerable to the effects of a departing employee. For all these reasons, full usage of a system translates directly to the bottom line. So what deters people from fully using a database?
Reasons Users Don’t Use a Database
The reasons users don’t use a database can be grouped as follows:
Training: Often users just need to be taken on a tour of the database. A one on one training session can go a long way to getting them over the hump and typing away. Managing your users is just as important as maintaining your data garden.
Overloaded: It’s easy to fall into the trap of adding too many fields to a database. When there is too much data to fill out, it can turn off the users so much that they end of avoiding the system entirely. A client once told me that at her last job, her CRM was so cumbersome that she and her team just stopped using it entirely. (Wow!)
Too Many Steps: Have you noticed that some systems make you click a lot of buttons to complete a task? My personal pet peeve on this topic is at the grocery checkout. The credit card machine makes me click ok at least 5 times to complete the transaction. It makes me want to use cash. Users respond similarly and avoid that part of the system if they can.
Buggy: System errors are a real problem. If a screen fails people can’t use it! If a report comes out incorrectly, they won’t trust the numbers and will not use. Both scenarios drive Users to create workarounds.
How to Improve Database Usage
If you want want to get the most out of your system, these are the things you can do to improve usage.
Tracking: Monitoring the system usage. Look at who logs in every day and which pages they are visiting. Pay attention to the pages they are not visiting and ask yourself why that might be. This could be a training issue or that the page itself is irrelevant and should be removed.
Attack Bugs Quickly: When you are alerted to a bug in the system, you should fully address the problem so that it doesn’t happen again. If you merely fix one person’s problem, you’re just waiting for it to happen again. Eventually users could completely lose faith in the system and stop using it.
Review Feedback and Support Requests: When we have a problem with a database (and this extends to organizations) we are asked to fill out a ticket to get help or simply make suggestions on how to improve the system. When a user goes to the trouble of filling out one of these things, you should pay attention and realize what a goldmine it really is. If your goal is for people to use your database fully, these tickets can tell you a lot about the roadblocks standing in your way. This feedback will also help you talk to your IT department about changes to the system.
If you need some assistance with one your systems, maybe we can help. Reach out for a free consultation.