No one is holding a gun to your head, so why would any sane person want to switch over to Salesforce Lightning Experience if they don't need to? Indeed, Salesforce is not forcing people to move over, but for years they have been providing signposts along the way as to why the enterprise should make the switch. Understanding this simple fact is the key to making the decision to move to Salesforce 2.0, and a fair assessment of the reasons and benefits should be brought to light.
Since its inception, Salesforce has allowed the customer to be the sole custodian of their environment, not just with the management of their data, but with the environment itself. This means that as the years passed (2014+) they have encouraged the customer to want to make the move to Lightning by introducing a new splash of paint and incorporating new features not available in 'Classic'. This is vastly different from other SAAS firms who have instead taken the approach to force other users to assimilate or be left behind.
There are pro's and con's to this argument... too many to fit into this article, but the advantages to allowing you, the Salesforce leader to make this choice a self-governing one is as autonomous as you can get as if Salesforce made the decision to force everyone to make the move to Lightning, this would have left the door open to perhaps moving to a new CRM altogether and therefore introducing other challenges to content with.
It's a Toggle, Not An Upgrade
In speculating on the choice facing Salesforce years ago on the outset of providing Lightning Experience to their customers, Parker Harris and his team surely had circulated the idea of whether or not to put the brakes on Classic, or keep it, alongside the Lightning option. It's kind of like a Mobile or Operating System upgrade vs. having the option to choose between the old system as well as the new system. With an O/S upgrade, you would ensure to back-up everything in triplicate before clicking the 'upgrade' button, and even when the upgrade is done (or while the upgrade is in progress) this can cause anxiety due to the unknown factors so common with software upgrades.
In 2016 while presenting at Dreamforce on the reasons to migrate to Lightning, one question that dominated the conversation was "If I switch to Lightning do I lose all of the features of Classic"? This of course is an intelligent question because if there was no such option, we would all have many items to contend with. As such, if it was 'Lightning or Bust', then the questions would have come fast and furious as to the checklist of items that we would have to take into consideration.
The good news is that a move to lightning is nothing more than a touch of a (Switch to Lightning Experience) button, and another switch to revert back to 'Classic'. This means there is no change to: (i) Data or Metadata, (ii) Reports or Dashboards, (iii) Objects (Standard or Custom) or (iv) Migration of records from 'A' to 'B'.
On the latter point, this one reason alone is enough to give you the confidence you need in swiftly moving into Lightning in comparison to the prospect of wading through a complex migration exercise. This not being the case, the user has all of the power to move in-and-out of Lightning at their leisure, limiting the risk of data loss or trepidation of using the new version. If these roadblocks are removed, any remaining fears are mostly 'phantom' ones, and to soften the blow one need only try it out for themselves and will quickly realize there was nothing to be concerned about after all, and when this state of mind is realized, this leaves only mass, org-wide adoption.
The Zeigarnik Effect
Bluma Zeigarnik, a Soviet-era psychologist discovered that when tasks are interrupted for short periods of time while learning, a greater percentage of the material will be recalled. Applying this to the adoption of Lightning Experience, if new users are shown the benefits of the new UI in stages, they will be more likely to leave Classic behind in favor of Lightning Experience.
One option is to start with a particular custom object which is company-specific, and demonstrate how this works in Lightning Experience, and let them play with it. After a couple of weeks of introducing this to a few test users, schedule another session and ask them what they (i) Liked, (ii) Disliked and (iii) What they would like to see changed with this object.
During the follow-up session, utilizing the consultative approach will go a long way, as the alternative ‘all or nothing’ approach will most likely leave ‘Classic Hardliners’ holding on until the 11th hour when they have to switch. The issues surrounding this approach, although popular, will almost surely produce a flurry of users flooding your support department with questions which could have easily been overcome early on.
Either way, the roll-out of Lightning is going to take time, but if a dose of prevention is done by educating users (by department) early and addressing their questions, the post-deployment support should be minimal as many of the ‘top 10’ questions will have been long since overcome. By going through the weeks (or months if your org is a large concern) of on-boarding your users ahead of time, a large share of them will want to choose the new version as it just has a better design but if not given the chance until they have to, they will not have the option of self-reliance, which is the best method of adoption.
Tag... You're It
As Stevie Nicks said... it all comes down to you. You can either choose to let circumstance control the outcome of where your folks will terminate, or instead guide your Salesforce users to the new version by introducing ways and means of benefiting them. The reward for them will be increased usage, and better alignment with mobile. For you, the Salesforce professional, you get the satisfaction of knowing ahead of time that you followed the right path by investing first and seeing the benefits second, which include less support calls and a clear path to introduce components and services which Salesforce is developing exclusively for Lightning.
Change is not easy, but change is inevitable, especially with online applications and while Salesforce has adopted the Lightning platform for years, it's never too late to breath life into your users who have not yet been given the chance to experience all that Lightning Experience has to offer.
It's a choice that you must make, but with the 'safety net' of having classic lurking in the background as opposed to turning everything off in one go, the options are many in how you choose to roll it out and once your users begin to realize the value for themselves, odds are you will want to move with intensity to provide it to everyone in your organization.
