Orientation

Amidst the whole project of onboarding all of the systems and users of a new client, it’s easy to be so focused on the technical needs that you forget about the people using them. But if you don’t acclimate your new users to your way of doing things, they’re just going to keep doing what they were used to, and eventually that’s going to cause confusion. Maybe you changed the permissions or password policies, maybe your support request procedures differ… whatever it is, you need a chance to explain the changes. So an orientation of some sort is a great way of giving them a chance to learn your way of doing things and ask questions and a great chance for you to realize their needs and limitations.

In a small office you can probably just have a group meeting, in a large office a Microsoft Teams meeting where you can show a few PowerPoint slides and share your screen to show a few procedures might work best. You can also send out an introductory email if the office doesn’t really have meetings, just so they’ll feel welcome to ask questions. Remember that users have varying degrees of technical understanding and they can get very frustrated and insecure about asking questions, especially because they can’t even explain what’s happening. So if you can let them know what changes are coming, how to deal with them, and how to contact you if they have trouble, you can ease their anxiety.

Whatever you do, your goal is to orient your customers to your procedures so they don’t have the rug pulled out from them and so your policies accomplish their purposes.