Good customer service starts with the person standing in front of the customer. In this episode of Frontline Innovators, Dan Cefaratti, North American Dynamics Lead at Velrada, joined host Justin Lake to explain why that person is your real service ambassador, and why technology adoption in the field is too often treated as an afterthought that quietly puts big investments at risk.
The Frontline Worker Is Your Service Ambassador
Dan opened with a simple idea that reframes the entire adoption conversation. The frontline worker meeting the customer is the one who holds the relationship, and that is where good service either begins or breaks down. If that person is having a bad day, or fighting clumsy technology, a competitor suddenly has an opening. Poor adoption has a ripple effect that starts the moment the field worker loses confidence in the tools they have been handed.
That is why a polished back end is never enough. As Dan put it, you can replace very expensive software and get everything right behind the scenes, but if the mobile experience in the field is poor, none of that matters. The investment is judged on what happens at the front end, in the hands of the people doing the work.
Adoption Is the Forgotten Child of Most Projects
Justin pressed Dan on how many customers actually plan for adoption during system design. Dan estimated that only about half to sixty percent are thinking about it at all, and Velrada works hard to push that number up by raising change management early, before a customer even asks. The problem, he explained, is structural. On a typical six to eighteen month timeline, go-live and user acceptance show up as a small block at the very end, even though what happens in that window can be as impactful as everything that came before it.
The deeper issue is ownership. Justin made the point that when everyone owns end-user adoption, no one really owns it. In large organizations, responsibility gets passed around until it happens in a corner somewhere, which means it is not really happening anywhere. His advocacy is clear: a specific team or individual, ideally on the business side, should be explicitly accountable for adoption, because those stakeholders will still be there long after the implementation team has scaled down.
You Learn the Truth in the Field, Not the Conference Room
Both men built their careers on ride-alongs, and the stories made the case. Justin described an elevator technician who spent the first 30 to 40 minutes of his day in the parking lot, documenting the previous day's work on his handheld because there was no time to do it on site. The standard operating procedure said one thing; the reality of the job said another. That insight never surfaces in a conference room. It only shows up when you ride along and watch the work happen.
Dan added the human layer. Field workers are real people who care deeply about doing the job right, and many are quietly fearful of speaking up about broken processes in case it costs them. The job of a good partner is to listen, understand the daily struggle, and then make their lives easier rather than simply demanding compliance.
Muscle Memory Is the Real Barrier to Change
One of the sharpest moments came when Justin shared a customer's observation that the hardest part of change is not learning the new process. It is unwinding the muscle memory of the old one. Frontline workers are task-driven, closing a set number of tickets or deliveries each day, and they have done the work a certain way for years. Hitting the emergency brake on a Monday and asking them to do it all differently is genuinely difficult. Dan compared it to teaching a batter to change their swing. Change takes energy and creates stress, and respecting that reality is what separates a successful rollout from a stalled one.
The Ride-Along Is Disappearing at Exactly the Wrong Time
The conversation closed on a trend both have watched with concern. Since the pandemic, on-site time and ride-alongs have become harder to arrange. Teams are dispersed across time zones, calendars are stacked with back-to-back meetings, and spending a day in the field can feel like an inconvenience rather than a priority. Yet adoption matters more than ever, with technology being pushed to the edge of the workforce faster than at any point before. As Justin argued, the curve should be going up, not down. If you want to understand what the people in the field actually need, you cannot figure it out from a conference room at headquarters.
Dan Cefaratti is the North American Dynamics Lead at Velrada, where he designs and delivers Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions that help organizations streamline operations and empower frontline and field-based teams.
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Listen to Episode #141 - You Can't Fix the Frontline From a Conference Room
Dan Cefaratti and Justin Lake on why frontline adoption is the forgotten child of enterprise rollouts, and why you can't understand the field from a conference room.
Episode Transcript
Justin Lake: Welcome to the Frontline Innovators podcast. I'm your host Justin Lake, and today's guest is the North American Dynamics Lead at Velrada, where he designs and delivers Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions that help organizations streamline operations and empower their teams. With deep expertise in enterprise technology architecture, Dan brings a practitioner's perspective on how thoughtful technology design can transform the way frontline and field-based workforces operate. Please welcome to the show Dan Cefaratti. Hello, Dan.
Dan Cefaratti: Hey Justin, good to see you.
Justin Lake: I'm so excited to have you on the show. You and I met at a conference. I feel like I've known you for a long time, but good grief, it's only been since April. We're recording this in May. We have a lot of things in common about the way that we view the market, so I'm super excited to have you on the show today. I'm going to ask you the same question that I ask many people who sit on the enterprise side, but from the perspective of a systems integrator: what do you see as the biggest operational consequence of poor frontline technology adoption?
Dan Cefaratti: It does have a ripple effect, really starting from working with that customer. One of the things that I've always felt and believed is that the frontline worker, or the person who is meeting with the customer, is really their service ambassador. They're the ones who have the relationship, they're making that contact with the customer, and that's essentially where good customer service begins. So if they're having a bad day, that's a reflection, and if you've got a competitor looking to get in there, that could be the first excuse or reason to go look someplace else.
Justin Lake: I think you're spot on. And yet it seems that so many times adoption feels like an afterthought. Out of all the proposals you've worked on recently, what percentage of your customers and prospects are actually talking about the user adoption piece when they're in the system design phase?
Dan Cefaratti: It's something that we try to force upfront. A lot of times we have to bring it up: do you have a change management plan? What is your plan to get these folks up and running? A lot of times it's a different team, but what they need to realize is this is critical to the success. We've replaced very expensive software that takes millions to implement, but if they have a poor mobile experience out in the field, it doesn't matter what you've done on the back end. It's what happened on the front end. If you're not getting good user adoption from that tool, and not including those individuals in the decision making, you're set for a long road ahead or a good chance at failure of the investment.
Justin Lake: If you had to pick a number, what percentage of customers do you think actually focus adequate resources and time on the adoption part versus the discovery and implementation phase?
Dan Cefaratti: I would say traditionally it's been a very big problem. It has increased over time, but not as much as I thought it would. Technology changing and the smartphone coming around has helped a lot. But if your product isn't intuitive, someone's going to get turned off quickly. So to give you a percentage, I would say probably about 50 to 60 percent are thinking about it. We make that higher upfront because we're all about project success. Customer success is going to be our success. We want them to reach their North Star and achieve the ROI they're looking for.
Justin Lake: Not to turn this into a commercial for your firm, but I brought you here because I want to promote your perspective. So let's talk through it. Even if the customer is not asking you, you are asking the customer whether they've given thought to how they're going to handle this change. What would an ideal scenario look like? What types of services and approach would you take?
Dan Cefaratti: Everyone's got their own implementation process, but we have an upfront analysis and design where we talk about where you see yourselves as far as the business processes you want to change. When it comes to the techs out in the field, we like to insist on a ride-along: the opportunity to spend time with the tech, understand what they do daily and the struggles they have, and what's going to make their life easy. Because if their life's easy, it's going to reduce turnover, and we're facing a silver tsunami. We want to keep folks from leaving organizations with all that knowledge as they start to retire, and figure out how to perform that knowledge transfer.
Justin Lake: Are there any stories that come to mind when you think about doing ride-alongs? Is there anything you witnessed or learned about a client that you would never have been able to capture if you'd just been doing discovery in a conference room?
Dan Cefaratti: I think the biggest is they're real people. They're no different than you and I. But their struggle is also real. When they have to input over here and then input over there, multiple things just to do a simple task, they may have talked about that before, but no one's listened. Some of them are a little fearful about sharing their struggles because it could potentially cost them a job. So there's a bit of a fear factor. It's about learning and understanding what they do, then being able to relay that and say, we're going to help you. The goal is to make your lives easier.
Justin Lake: I can't tell you the number of times I've been out in the field and the standard operating procedure was for the field employee to document everything they do during the job, and yet they were not compliant with that SOP. They weren't being lazy or intentionally non-compliant, they were focused on the work. One guy worked for an elevator company. We grabbed coffee, went to the truck, I strapped my seatbelt on thinking we were ready to go, and we spent the next 30 or 40 minutes in the parking lot while he documented all of yesterday's work in his handheld. I asked why, and he said he didn't have time to do it while he was out doing the job. When I brought that back to the conference room, it made me really question how many people are not as compliant as we think.
Dan Cefaratti: Yeah, I've seen a lot. When they're traveling, going back to their hotel rooms, finishing the job, copying something from a spreadsheet or what they wrote down. The thing I also found is they really care about the job and doing it right. It's not checking boxes and moving on. They have a passion about what they're doing and making sure they're doing it correctly.
Justin Lake: That part about the men and women on the front lines caring about their job is such an important human element to bring back into the conversation. I think sometimes senior leaders just say, well, we have to make them do this thing. One of the biggest challenges I've seen is the time it takes to change and the time people are afforded to absorb that change. They've been doing something a particular way for a long time, and now you're asking them to change. Have you learned any secrets about how to afford them the change necessary so they can be successful with it?
Dan Cefaratti: When we first meet a potential customer, we talk about who we are, our focus and capabilities. One thing that comes up often, because we deal with a lot of asset-heavy industries, is educating the frontline worker not only about who we are but about how important the frontline worker is, and bringing that to the forefront early. Those folks are going to have the biggest impact on the success of any engagement. So it's early education: where are we going to incorporate change management, how do we perform train-the-trainer. Going back to when we first met, that's the forgotten child. How are we going to help make that successful, because sometimes people forget.
Justin Lake: Where do you think that process breaks down? Is it timelines, or not being able to free the guys up in the field? When change doesn't happen successfully, what's the root cause?
Dan Cefaratti: A lot of times we hear, that's a different group, that's our training team. Okay, well how do we get your training team involved, because at some point that's going to be important. It's also a bit of a double-edged sword, because we're trying to sell our services and promote Microsoft technology, so we still have to win the business and fit within their overall budget. We don't want to blow the budget. That's where bringing in a partner like Skyllful early and often matters: get the training team in, help them understand there are options that are going to be important to make the overall project successful. Customers say they need an ROI, but to do that we need to understand what everyone is going to do to make it successful.
Justin Lake: I don't want to gloss over your suggestion that Skyllful should be brought in more often, so yes, I'll support that. But I want to go back to the bigger piece. Throughout my career working with large companies, I've found it helpful to break down what needs to get done on a project, very matter of fact, and then ask the customer which of these things they're prepared to take on. That often surfaces a whole bunch of things everyone agrees need to get done that were not in the RFP, with no one on the customer side to take responsibility. User adoption is one of those categories where everyone points at each other saying it's not my job. If everyone owns end-user adoption, then no one really owns it, because it happens in a corner somewhere, which means it's really not happening anywhere. So I advocate for a team or individual being explicitly responsible, ideally the business stakeholders, because they're going to be there after your team scales down. Do you see business stakeholders taking that responsibility, or does it become a Teflon thing?
Dan Cefaratti: It does become a bit of a tough thing. You have the business sponsor for these engagements. When you lay out the timeline, you've got your phases, and in that six to 18 month timeline there's always this little piece at the end called UAT and then a little section called go-live. What's happening in that go-live could be as impactful as everything that occurred over the whole timeline to get to that point. That's the critical part. There's a lot that has to happen behind the scenes, particularly if you're rolling out to thousands of technicians across America or globally.
Justin Lake: I had a customer recently and we were discussing the idea of muscle memory. The customer made the point that the biggest challenge in change is helping people unwind the muscle memory they have from the old process. It sounds so obvious when I say it out loud, but it really had an impact on me. The biggest problem in change is not what we're going to, it's holding on to where we were because that's comfortable and requires less energy and stress. The men and women on the front lines are very task driven. They're given X tickets or deliveries a day, they've been driving that truck for years, and then all of a sudden we hit the emergency brake on Monday and say from this point forward you're going to do it differently. That's a difficult thing to overcome.
Dan Cefaratti: Sure. It's like teaching a batter to change their swing or their stance, or a quarterback how to throw. There's a lot to go through, particularly when they're thinking, I just need to get this job done and do it correctly, with all the other things spinning through their mind. What was the knowledge base I need to look for to get the answer? So it's how do you make it simple to get through that process.
Justin Lake: I want to surface something you and I talked about offline. We've both spent our careers around large enterprises where we believe it's important to spend a day in the life of the men and women in the field. We've talked recently about how it seems we've been having a harder time getting customers to say yes to that. Not completely shutting it down, but it does seem like after COVID, that's the dividing line. Things went back to normal in most ways, but the one thing that doesn't seem to have come back is the frequency of ride-alongs. Are you seeing the same thing?
Dan Cefaratti: You're spot on. COVID has helped in some ways, not requiring everybody to be on site, but it's also been a detriment because there are so many things that are missed just walking the hallways, taking a break, getting coffee, or going out to dinner after a long day. What's critical is being in a room for those early analysis and design meetings. When you go build something, fine, everyone does their thing and comes back. But the ride-along is critical. People are dispersed now, across multiple time zones, with no real reason to get to an office. And finding somebody available to do the ride-along is almost like an inconvenience, where it almost should be a priority. Pre-COVID it wasn't like that. It's just hard to get the time now.
Justin Lake: I want to give credit to an old buddy of mine, Mike Lasky. When I came on board at Symbol Technologies back in the early 2000s, I had so much to learn, and I asked him how I was going to catch up. He said, just go out and ask your customers to give you a tour through the facility or do a ride-along, and you'll learn a lot. So I did, and he was exactly right. Every customer said come on out, we'll spend the day with you, we want to show you what we're doing and what we'd love to see you improve. They loved that the vendor was asking. It became such an important part of how I work. It does seem like over the last few years it's getting fewer and further between. At a time when adoption is more critical than ever, when we're pushing more technology to the edge of the workforce than ever, those observations in the field are more critical than ever. The curve should be going up, not down. You can't figure out what the guys in the field need from a conference room at headquarters.
Dan Cefaratti: No, it's true. It's really a two-way process. It's an opportunity for us as the service provider to learn, and an opportunity for the customer to fully explain their needs. We view implementations as a partnership, a two-way street. I'm old school: people buy from people they like. It's about how you build that relationship. Some folks are afraid to build that relationship with a vendor, but if you can, it benefits the customer too, because the vendor learns more about you and has a vested interest in making you successful.
Justin Lake: What advice would you give to customers looking for a field service partner? What should they be asking?
Dan Cefaratti: Somebody who understands the business and has examples of things they've done. A lot of times customers ask for references, and it's important to get them. We can provide references and it's not a big deal for us. Find a partner who understands your business and has maybe built some IP around it, because software is very moldable. Not every vendor has a solution for everything, but somebody who built capabilities to fill that white space understands your business. We refer to those as accelerators. Asking about that is one of the things customers should do with the vendors they're dealing with.
Justin Lake: You head up the Dynamics practice for Velrada. What's something about Microsoft that maybe most people don't understand, specifically as it relates to Dynamics for field service?
Dan Cefaratti: It's crazy, I'll go to events and still run into folks who say, I didn't realize Microsoft had a CRM solution, or an ERP platform. It's all about the productivity apps: Teams, Office, Outlook, Azure, copilots everywhere. What's different about Microsoft is it takes all those platforms and brings them together with the business applications. To have everything working coherently, to get an email in Outlook and automatically generate a work order, or capture a Teams chat with an external vendor that has an impact on a work order, and then do a quick copilot query that pulls everything together. That's probably the biggest differentiator Microsoft has over some of the other traditional vendors.
Justin Lake: I don't want to take a shot at Microsoft, but we've had a few of their frontline product folks on the podcast, and it feels like they haven't quite gotten the traction they hoped for on their frontline focus. Is there truth to that, or have they achieved what they hoped?
Dan Cefaratti: I think they have. Their mobile application has come a long way. With the PowerApp capabilities, you can create a mobile app that may not even talk to one of their core business applications, building something from scratch with offline capability that also incorporates copilot and AI capabilities. We've built many custom apps for someone who doesn't need a full field service system, maybe they just need to capture a survey or an inspection report. Simple things where you can be offline in the middle of the field, capture what's going on with a piece of equipment or an inspection checklist, and then sync it back. That's one of the biggest things they've done. It just isn't known too much out there with the public, but we're getting there.
Justin Lake: Well, man, I appreciate you coming on today. It was great to meet you. We were at Field Service Next, the WBR conference out in San Diego, and we'll probably be there again next year. What other events are you guys doing this year?
Dan Cefaratti: We've got the Power Platform Conference coming up. It's grown tremendously, it's going to be in Vegas in the October timeframe this year. That's a big one for us, so looking forward to seeing many folks there.
Justin Lake: Is that horizontal or specific to the field service vertical?
Dan Cefaratti: It's across the board. You'll see folks from every industry there. We attend because we've got a very large, successful Power Platform practice. It extends into healthcare, not-for-profit, and of course the field service world. A lot of what we do is around frontline workers. That's where you and I hit it off instantly. We've got a customer in healthcare with mobile nurses going out using forms that can be 60-plus pages long. How do you get them trained on it? That's a big deal.
Justin Lake: The problem of adoption in the front lines persists across the board. Actually, it persists far beyond frontline, but there are a lot of solutions that address technology adoption for knowledge workers. The gap you and I are talking about is that we need to put the same emphasis on frontline, which represents somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of the global workforce. They've been really underserved in this area. I think that's why you and I found such a match here, and hopefully in the future we'll be able to talk about some great successes together.
Dan Cefaratti: For sure, absolutely.
Justin Lake: Well, Dan, thank you so very much for your time today. Where can folks find you if they want to sit down and have another conversation with you?
Dan Cefaratti: You can reach me on LinkedIn, Dan Cefaratti, or at Velrada.
Justin Lake: We'll have that linked in the show notes and we'll be sure to share it with everybody. Dan, thanks for your time today.
Dan Cefaratti: Thanks for having me, Justin. Really appreciate it.
Frequently Asked Questions with Dan Cefaratti
How much of a project budget should go toward adoption?
There is no single percentage, but Dan Cefaratti recommends building change management into the plan from the start rather than treating it as a small block at the end. Velrada raises adoption and training early, often before a customer asks, because what happens at go-live can be as impactful as the entire build that preceded it.
Why do ride-alongs matter for frontline technology rollouts?
Ride-alongs reveal how work actually happens, not how a process is documented. Watching a technician in the field surfaces gaps, workarounds, and friction that never come up in a conference room, which makes the resulting technology far more likely to be adopted.
What makes change so hard for frontline workers?
The hardest part is not learning the new process but unwinding the muscle memory of the old one. Frontline workers are task-driven and have done the job a certain way for years, so change takes real energy and creates stress. Respecting that reality is essential to a successful rollout.