Creating a CRM habit
I was having lunch the other day with a commercial real estate company today discussing their adoption of CRM and it surprised me that the CIO and VP of Application Development were concerned with the lack of CRM usage. They felt that their users were just scratching the surface of CRM and many had actually fallen into their old bad habits of management by Excel. I have found that even within our organization, trying to get people to adopt CRM can be difficult as there are still account lists which circulate in Excel. As our CRM champion I do my best to wrangle these rogue Excel sheets and port them into CRM but they can sprout like wildfire if you don't control them. I think the issue is that many organizations underestimate the amount of time it takes for users to create the habit of using CRM on a daily/weekly basis. I ventured out of technology and into the psychology world to see what I could find on habit creation and found some interesting data. You can find the article which I reference by Dr. John Grohol at the bottom of my post.
Creating a new habit is a difficult thing and requires repetition. If you do a Google search, you'll find that creating a new habit takes around 21-28 days. The concept that you can create a new habit in 3 weeks was created in the 60s by a doctor named Dr. Maxwell Martz. He was a plastic surgeon who noticed that amputees took around 21 days to adapt to the loss of a limb and extrapolated this across all life changes in a book which he published. However, a recent study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology showed that it took people on average 66 days to create a new habit. This makes sense as the amputee is forced to deal with the change where many habits are made by personal choice rather than necessity.
The study also showed that new habits are not created equal, as it took on average less time for people to remember to drink more water each day as opposed to doing 50 sit-ups in the morning. Some might argue that remembering to update CRM each day is actually more grueling than a morning regiment of situps. A few technophobes might even happily add pushups and pullups before agreeing to key in their daily activites in CRM.
If this is the case, why do organizations throw CRM to the masses and assume they will use it? One training class alone will not change the habits of end users. Even if CRM is built around business processes end users will revert back to their old habits if they are easier. Therefore, to be successful you must recognize that adoption is a long process and it may take 2-3 months to see change within your user community. In one of my upcoming posts I'll discuss ways to reinforce the new CRM behaviors you'd like to see from your user community.
How Long to Form a Habit?
Creating a new habit is a difficult thing and requires repetition. If you do a Google search, you'll find that creating a new habit takes around 21-28 days. The concept that you can create a new habit in 3 weeks was created in the 60s by a doctor named Dr. Maxwell Martz. He was a plastic surgeon who noticed that amputees took around 21 days to adapt to the loss of a limb and extrapolated this across all life changes in a book which he published. However, a recent study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology showed that it took people on average 66 days to create a new habit. This makes sense as the amputee is forced to deal with the change where many habits are made by personal choice rather than necessity.
The study also showed that new habits are not created equal, as it took on average less time for people to remember to drink more water each day as opposed to doing 50 sit-ups in the morning. Some might argue that remembering to update CRM each day is actually more grueling than a morning regiment of situps. A few technophobes might even happily add pushups and pullups before agreeing to key in their daily activites in CRM.
If this is the case, why do organizations throw CRM to the masses and assume they will use it? One training class alone will not change the habits of end users. Even if CRM is built around business processes end users will revert back to their old habits if they are easier. Therefore, to be successful you must recognize that adoption is a long process and it may take 2-3 months to see change within your user community. In one of my upcoming posts I'll discuss ways to reinforce the new CRM behaviors you'd like to see from your user community.
How Long to Form a Habit?
posted by Matt Rosen at
3:37 PM
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