🏗️Best Practices and phases of onboarding for amberSearch

A big part of the success of a new software launch is making success experiences visible. This is no different with amberSearch. So here we give you some best practices to help your team succeed with the support of amberSearch.

What is the advantage of an internal community?

• Questions, some of which are specific to your company's use cases, can be answered by you and other colleagues.
• Employees have the opportunity to find questions that have already been asked so that they do not have to be asked again.
• Employees can exchange information in a familiar environment and do not have to overcome the "hurdle" of contacting someone external or unknown.
• Best practices and positive experiences become visible and motivate other colleagues to integrate the software more into their daily work.

➡️This leads to your team becoming even more successful with amberSearch and also to the project amberSearch becoming a success and achieving the corresponding usage.

What are the critical success factors for amberSearch?

From our experience, we can say that there are some measures that can significantly contribute to the success of amberSearch. Your task as the project manager or multiplier is to enable the normal user to make the most of amberSearch. These are our learnings:

• Make amberSearch visible in the daily work routine and integrate it into existing systems to ease the transition of the daily work routine. (see below: Phase 1 - technical set up)
• Actively engage users with the solution and discover use cases (see Phase 2 - Onboarding below).
• Talk openly about amberSearch and make successes and learnings visible. (see phase 3 - first experiences below)

How can I build an internal community?

In our projects we usually have the following groups of people:

• IT administrators: Responsible for the technical set-up and integration into existing systems.
• Project managers: Responsible for all organizational aspects and are the first point of contact for questions regarding amberSearch, especially in the beginning.
• Multipliers: Managers and digital affine persons who act as opinion leaders and enable the rest of the team to get the most out of amberSearch.
• Power users: Colleagues who use amberSearch a lot in their daily work and thus know all facets of the software and mutate into internal experts.
• Normal users: Users who use the software to an average extent in their daily work.

In order to successfully build the community, it is important to understand which phases there are in the onboarding process and which persona plays which role:

Phases during onboarding

Phase 1: Technical Set Up

After we have first set up amberSearch technically in consultation with the IT administrator and all the desired systems have been integrated into amberSearch, we check how we can integrate amberSearch into the existing IT landscape. This includes, for example, an integration via Iframe into SharePoint or other intranets as well as the activation of TeamsApp.

We have some integration measures that need to be done by the IT administrator as well as some measures that users can use on their own without support from the IT administrator to integrate amberSearch into their daily work.

It does not hurt to announce the software to the users before the actual onboarding and to get them a little "hot". This way, users can get some ideas in advance and familiarise themselves with use cases.

💡Our recommendation: Before onboarding, make employees aware of the IT systems they mostly use and place amberSearch where they spend a large part of the working day.

✅Checklist

amberSearch is integrated into the relevant IT systems

Pre-announcement of onboarding by the project manager, with support from managers if necessary.

Phase 2: Onboarding

In our onboarding, we briefly explain the functionality of amberSearch to our users or the multipliers and allow them to test amberSearch once and ask questions. Afterwards, all employees receive an onboarding email with the most essential information and further instructions. In this phase, it is important that the employees consciously deal with the software and understand the "search logic" of the software. This includes in particular:

1. Making software visible in their own everyday work and IT set-up
2. Understanding the different functions
3. Sharpening the search and applying filtering options

Of course, this will be easier for some people than others. It is important that there are exchange opportunities where experiences and learnings are made visible.

It has also proved beneficial to set up a regular jour fixe between the project manager and amberSearch's customer support team in the first few weeks so that any queries or customer-specific problems can be resolved directly.

💡Our recommendation: After onboarding, make a Teams channel available for questions about amberSearch. In addition, have colleagues report on their success stories in jour fixes in smaller teams in order to arouse further interest in initially skeptical users. This is especially the task of the multipliers.

✅Checklist

Opening the Teams channel and inviting the users

Summary of the onboarding and provision of the most important information by the project manager.

Agreeing on a  Jour Fixe between the project manager and the customer support of amberSearch

Let users talk about amberSearch in Jour Fixe (promoted by multipliers)

Phase 3: First experiences

Relatively quickly, in addition to the project manager, some power users will emerge who will quickly build up a deep know-how about amberSearch. The know-how of these power users can be used to answer questions of other users in the team channel quickly and efficiently.

Feedback on the software will also arise here, which can be passed on to us (support@ambersearch.de or by form) so that we can incorporate it into the further development of amberSearch.

💡Our recommendation: Encourage users to talk about challenges and successes in internal channels in order to make them visible to other users. In addition, promote the development of expertise among power users.

✅Checklist

Building expertise among power users

Encourage users to post questions in the Teams channel if this is not already used.

Phase 4: Establishing amberSearch in your daily work routine

What we have seen with our previous customers is that when amberSearch is well integrated into everyday working life, it is also talked about more often in everyday life and meetings. This contributes to further consolidation in everyday life and is a good indicator that amberSearch is successfully established.

If amberSearch is not completely rolled out from the beginning, it may well be that other departments become aware of amberSearch and express interest in using it.