Your ferry reservations system touches every aspect of your business, so fear of changing is understandable. Effective change management is the decisive factor to ensure a smooth changeover and high adoption rates both internally and externally.
You need to have a change management plan that encompasses all aspects of the transition, including timelines, responsibilities, risk mitigation strategies, and contingency plans at the commencement of your project.
Key areas of this change management plan that are often over-looked are the following:
- Involve end-users early (planning and testing) and comprehensively including a small pilot group for testing. This will allow you to identify and address any issues or challenges before the system goes live for everyone. Their insights and feedback can help identify potential issues and involving them allows them to champion the product and be part of the change.
- Communication is key. Ensure the communication plan informs all stakeholders, including employees, customers, and vendors about the upcoming changes.
- Data migration needs to be at the forefront of any planned reservation system change from the beginning. All information needs to be tested several times to ensure that the data is completely accurate. Migration issues upon go live can often undermine the trust and confidence in any new system. Develop an extensive plan for migrating data from the old system to the new one. In ferry operations, there is no room for error or downtime.
- Provide extensive training to employees who will be using the new system prior to go live. Ensure they understand the system’s features, functionalities, and processes and are confident from day 1 and can practice in a beta site. Ensure that your provider will be with you on site when your system goes live so that your staff and customers feel supported.
- Identify and empower change champions (or power users) within the organisation who can advocate for the new system and support their colleagues during the transition period.
- Plan for the unexpected. It is essential to have rollback opportunities at crucial points in migration to ensure no risk of data loss or system downtime during the transition.
- Establish a support system for both internal and external users to address their questions, concerns, and issues. Encourage feedback. For external customers this can be done via a live chat supported by AI so that it can provide customers with short videos showing them how to use the feature they are struggling with.
Addressing these points will facilitate a smoother transition, minimize disruptions, and increase user adoption of your new ferry ticketing system.