Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer (and the rise of Jive and NewsGator) has escalated what was before then a sleepy awareness of social collaboration within the enterprise. Sure companies have gotten in on the use of social for outward and in most cases isolated interactions over the past three years or so, but the idea of using social principles internally is still in its relative infancy. Social business or social enterprise is not just social technology in the enterprise. It is primarily social empowerment of the employee. It’s all about letting them use the tools like real time information acquisition, crowdsourced, contextual intelligence, and knowledge sharing that they use in their personal and social lives, in ways that creates deeper customer engagement. And it is about deep unification the enterprise and its assets to a company’s customers.
But Yammer hype aside, there are more issues and research coming forward that is aptly making the case for social enterprise software. Richard Snow from Ventana Research in his piece, The Collaborative Enterprise to Support Customer Interactions, made some great observations on the issues facing the customer enterprise today. He noted that most companies have a huge amount of customer-related data in a variety of physical and digital mediums. In fact, 26% of those companies have that data in twenty or more locations. This means there are serious challenges to having a single view of a customer’s history and profile. This of course has been caused by the multiple ways customers connect with companies. From chat to email to SMS to IM to Twitter and so on, the interactions and more important the timely response to the interactions is becoming a serious challenge.
Part of the problem, and it’s a big part, is that organizations today are not structured in a way to be able to go toe-to-toe with the way their customers want to engage them. A lot of this has to do with agent and employee inefficiency, specifically related to information management. A report by McKinsey Global Institute found that the average agent or employee tasked with customer interaction uses around 28% of their time managing email and almost 20% trying to identify and locate subject matter experts of information that can help them with a customer engagement.
Here is where social enterprise comes in. The study found that a searchable, collaborative knowledge platform can reduce the time employees spend searching for data by nearly 35%. That efficiency can be improved when that platform is fully integrated across the enterprise.
Today’s consumers, accustomed to multi-channel interaction at the social level are now expecting the same channel access – Social, IM, SMS, email, voice – with the business they deal with. This means Learning from every interaction. Knowledge is everywhere and the ability to synthesize the intelligence about your customers, your resources and your processes from your interaction systems are the metrics that can help you continually find better ways to bring people and information together to improve the customer experience in the face of those consumers demanding expanded choice in how they interact with your company.
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