Chapter 22
Ten Ways to Make Social Collaboration Pay Off
Every technology initiative is judged by its payoff. The gold standard is return on investment (ROI), which is solid proof of a financial return exceeding the money invested. Showing ROI for social collaboration can be challenging. For one thing, when social collaboration is one element of an organizational change process, should the technology be the factor that gets the credit for any positive financial results instead of the leadership or the people who executed the strategy?
I say give the people the credit but give the technology its due for helping produce a positive result. Have a story to tell about how social collaboration contributed, not only to ROI but by making your workplace a better place in which to work.
Starting with a Purpose
Social collaboration software has sometimes been a victim of its own marketing: the dynamic, intuitive technology that “will break down all internal divisions within a company and make everyone work together better.” In those ill-fated cases, the contract is signed, the software is deployed, and nothing very dramatic happens. These examples may be classified as failures although whether they truly failed is hard to tell, given that they never had very specific goals in the first place.
The difference between those examples and the most impressive success stories tends to be focus — or the lack thereof. While writing this book, I had a chance to ask about what made the biggest difference in the success of social collaboration when I moderated a panel discussion at the E2 Conference featuring Matt Tucker, co-founder and CTO of Jive Software; Alistair Rennie, general manager of collaboration solutions at IBM; and Sameer Patel, general manager of social and collaborative software at SAP, a business management software company. Interestingly enough, they didn’t deny some failures. Tucker even brought up a statistic from Gartner Inc. analysts that nearly 80 percent of social software implementations fail to reach their objectives (although he did say that he believes the odds are better for Jive customers). In one of his own presentations, Patel had cited a Forrester Research study saying that 77 percent of employees never log on to their enterprise social network, and only 3 percent use it once per day.
What makes the difference for the more successful users of social collaboration?
“It’s a really simple formula — it’s purposeful,” Rennie said. “The disasters are always, ‘We thought social would be fun, so we’ll throw something out there and see what happens.’” Usually, the success stories start with a specific business process, or a handful of processes, that the business believes would benefit from better collaboration and a work-centered social network. That could be found in the health and safety function, mergers and acquisitions, or customer care. What the purpose is matters less than the fact that there is one, he said.
“It doesn’t have to be big capital ‘T’ transformation,” he said. And often it’s not, but you should have a specific, measurable goal. When someone owns the business process that social collaboration is being applied to and has an interest in seeing it succeed, the tools get used a lot more seriously, and success is more likely. With success comes the opportunity to pursue the broader, company-wide benefits of social collaboration.
“When you say it like that, it sounds so obvious — you should have a purpose,” Tucker agreed. Yet when a Jive implementation team asks a customer organization what problems it wants to solve with social collaboration, sometimes that sparks a great conversation — but other times, it prompts a blank stare, he said. When customers aren’t certain at the outset, Jive consultants try to help them identify a “deep-use case” with measurable goals, knowing that makes success much more likely, he said. “It can’t just be the intergalactic ‘Let’s all work together better’ as the goal.”
Patel differed only to say, “The business context, beyond purpose, is actually more important.” His company, SAP, is best known for transactional business software, and its SAP Jam social software is intended as a complementary product. Patel said he would start with the point in a process where users might complain that their business software “limited me to ‘submit’ or ‘cancel’ when really what I wanted to do was discuss.”
Whether you start with a business problem or by analyzing the gaps in processes managed by transactional software, start with a purpose, and you will be more likely to achieve it. This doesn’t necessarily mean focusing on one thing only. The international consulting and systems integration company CSC, an early adopter of Jive for social collaboration, had about 200 use cases prior to launch. Each of those was an outline of a business scenario that CSC believed would be helped by better collaboration and information sharing. Claire Flanagan, who led that project as CSC’s director of knowledge management, social collaboration, and community strategy, said that broad focus worked because she had also lined up 100 advocates — people who worked directly with those business functions — who saw the potential of the technology and were willing to help make it work.
Flanagan now works at Jive, providing strategic advice to other firms implementing social collaboration.
Accelerating Sales
One good purpose to consider starting with is accelerating sales. Every company likes revenue. If you can figure out how to make the cash register ring, not only will you score points for your social collaboration strategy, but you will have accomplished something for the company.
But wait. How is an internal use of social technology going to drive sales? Isn’t that more the role of social media marketing or social CRM?
Social collaboration brings a different but significant value to the sales process. Maybe you will use other technologies and services to increase awareness and generate leads through social media marketing, or you mine LinkedIn for sales prospects. Those are all legitimate parts of a social business strategy and can complement what you do internally.
Internal social collaboration proves most valuable to complex business-to-business sales processes, where your goal is to provide a better total solution than your competitors.
Many businesses that sell consulting services, financial services, or sophisticated technical products report cutting the time required to produce a proposal, while increasing their deal-win rate. In a business where every proposal is different and must be tailored to the customer’s needs, you can get a real advantage from the ability to leverage relevant experts within the company and find people who have contacts within or specific knowledge of the target customer.
In that scenario, collaboration within the sales team is important but so are collaboration and discovery of experts and resources throughout the organization. The cast of characters is different each time because every customer presents a unique set of requirements. Social collaboration provides a better way of assembling a team while eliminating inefficiencies, such as missed e-mail messages and chaotic Reply to All message threads.
For example, CSC estimated that it shaved 20 percent to 30 percent off the time required to produce a proposal with social collaboration. KPMG, the global network of accounting and financial consulting partnerships, has a similar story of introducing social collaboration based on Tibco’s tibbr and seeing it translate into revenue. Early in the adoption by KPMG’s Australian member firm, the social software got credit for bringing together a lot of the right expertise quickly to win a large consulting arrangement. That got management’s attention and eventually led to a commitment to deploy the cloud service version of tibbr internationally, giving KPMG partners access to expertise from around the world.
“Bringing people together in such a large machine is not easy,” says Vishal Agnihotri, global leader for the project in KPMG’s knowledge management organization. Yet winning the business of a multinational corporation with many and varied needs is not a job for one person or even one team, she says. “It’s very rare that one service line can answer all the questions a client has.”
You don’t have to be running a global consulting firm to see the benefits, but the scenario I’m sketching would not be as applicable to selling a simple product defined purely by price and features. There, the role of collaboration might be more limited to defining sales strategy and sharing tips for how to convince customers your product is the better value even though it might be 2 percent more expensive than the competition. Or maybe what makes the difference is the social network of the salesperson who knows who to call internally to secure the best discount for a customer.
See Chapter 18 for more ideas about putting sales at the center of your social collaboration strategy.
Aligning Marketing and Sales
Marketing and sales are two interdependent business functions that never seem to be aligned quite as well as they could be. In addition to general brand-building activities, marketing generates leads for the sales team. The sales team converts the leads into closed deals. At least, that’s how the process is supposed to work — but doesn’t always.
Instead, marketing and sales sometimes wind up squabbling over whose fault it is when sales goals fall short. Sales complains that marketing didn’t deliver enough leads or delivered the wrong sort of leads, while marketing complains about lack of follow-through on the leads it successfully generated. None of that bickering has a place in a social business, where a great many of the leads ought to be coming in through digital channels that are supremely measurable and trackable. Still, the metrics and the reams of click-stream data are valuable only when there is agreement on strategy and goals.
Getting these two functions in better alignment is another path to topline revenue growth and a clear payoff.
No technology will magically break down cultural and organizational barriers. However, one step toward better coordination could be making the members of each group more aware of each other’s activities even though they may sit in different departments and get together only occasionally in person. The social collaboration mechanism of following people and groups is a way for salespeople to keep tabs on — and give earlier feedback on — marketing initiatives, helping tune them to target the right audience. Marketing teams developing new campaigns can get more insight into the successes and frustrations of their sales team counterparts, leading to better targeting of future campaigns. Sure, some of this information gathering and market analysis still needs to come from more formal processes, along with system-generated charts and graphs about sales processes. What social collaboration adds is the human dimension: the connection with the person behind the numbers who can say what he really means.
Backing Up Customer Service
Many customer service and support organizations are fielding their own social communities in which they interact directly with customers. This may be part of a broader social CRM strategy that also includes sales and marketing functions. The broad goal is to produce happier customers — and more of them.
Achieving these external goals also requires internal collaboration. When the call center or contact center gets a question it can’t answer, a collaboration network can be the key to locating the answer, whether it exists in a document or only in the head of a subject matter expert. Contact center agents can then log that information in a knowledge base so that it’s available to the next agent who gets that question. As the information is refined into an authoritative answer, it can also be published into a self-service knowledge base that customers can access directly.
Social collaboration can also be useful within the service and support team for exchanging tips on how to answer thorny questions or handle difficult situations, as well as pursuing operational efficiency. The bigger benefits require more pervasive use of social collaboration, across departments and functions, meaning that subject matter experts take the time to fill out their profiles and share meaningful information about their work, making their expertise searchable and discoverable.
Creating New Products
Another way of boosting revenue is to create new — preferably new hit — products.
In a social business, innovation is everyone’s business, and product creation is part of that. See Chapter 8 for tips on organizing brainstorming on a company-wide scale and prioritizing the most promising ideas. Meanwhile, the people whose jobs are specifically tied to developing products and product ideas also have an intense need to collaborate with each other and with other parts of the organization.
The research and development organization at 3M embraced social collaboration partly to compensate for the globalization of its team. Once centralized in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Research and Development (R&D) now has members around the world partly because management believes that will aid in developing products for a global market. (Two-thirds of its revenues come from outside the United States.) Where once 3M personnel relied on informal networks and the maxim that “you’re five phone calls away from finding an expert” on any technical topic, now 3M sees the need for a continually updated digital directory of those experts.
Successful new products are never the work of one person. A hit consumer electronics product may start with one person’s inspired design, but to get it built, that person had to convince others of his brilliance. That team then needed to coordinate with manufacturing, supply chain, sales, and top management to bring the product to market at the right time, at the right price.
If social collaboration makes that process work better and faster, the payoff will be clear.
Boosting Productivity
One reason why social business strategists emphasize focusing on specific business processes is to identify specific goals that can be tracked with specific metrics. The more generalized promise of social collaboration to boost productivity across the organization is harder to pin down, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.
McKinsey Global Institute, a research arm of the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, estimates that social technologies could add $900 million to $1.3 trillion in annual value to the world’s economy. That’s a very big-picture number for social technologies, broadly considered, including the value realized every time a consumer saves a few dollars after redeeming a coupon obtained through Facebook. However, McKinsey projected that two-thirds of that value will come from better communication and collaboration within businesses, as opposed to the sales and marketing aspects of social media.
Within every business, there are “interaction workers” whose jobs consist of finding, creating, and communicating knowledge. McKinsey says they currently spend about 28 percent of their day on e-mail, 19 percent searching for and gathering information, and another 14 percent communicating and collaborating internally. Social collaboration can shave time off all those tasks, leading to a total productivity improvement of 20 percent to 25 percent, according to McKinsey.
Your challenge is to translate that potential into more specific results for your firm. Social collaboration has the potential to save time — but only if it’s used consistently. If 90 percent of the members of a team cling to using e-mail, even for collaborative work where the social tools clearly would be better, the payoff won’t materialize. If sales embraces social collaboration but marketing doesn’t, then coordination between the two will not happen.
Increases in productivity have to be earned.
Stopping Time-Wasting Activities
Because productivity is all about saving time, achieving it means not only starting more efficient habits but also stopping less productive ones.
Andrew Carusone of Lowe’s Home Improvement argues that having an “unadoption strategy” is just as important as having an adoption strategy for social collaboration. “The goal of social business is performance, not adoption,” says Carusone, the director of Lowe’s integrated workforce experience and community governance initiative.
If the goal is to make employees more efficient and effective, you ought to be looking at what work they can stop doing. If the actual result is that you’re making employees spend twice as much time on communication and coordination, now that they have twice as many ways to do it, what have you accomplished? For example, if you introduce social collaboration as an alternative to traditional e-mail mailing lists, but you leave the mailing lists in place, teams may wind up wasting more time navigating back and forth between the two modes of communication. The same is true of document sharing, project planning, and many other activities.
First, you must prove that the social collaboration environment you’re providing really is more productive. Sometimes it may not be. I know of software development teams that held on to their mailing lists because their e-mail software did a better job of preserving the formatting of code snippets, which the social tools provided for their use tended to garble. In a case like that, it’s far better to make a compromise than to force the use of a tool that will get in the way of people getting their jobs done.
On the other hand, where the old way of working clearly is not as productive, push hard to put a stop to it.
Improving Employee Engagement
Business research routinely shows that only 25 percent to 30 percent of employees in the average company are actively engaged in their work — meaning that they care about the organization and their contribution to its success and believe they can make a difference. The rest are either going through the motions or actively disengaged: that is, they’ve lost all faith in the organization and would gladly leave at the first opportunity.
The Gallup organization routinely provides updates on engagement statistics and their significance:
http://www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/en-us/employeeengagement.aspx
One recent Gallup report, “Engagement at Work: Its Effect on Performance Continues in Tough Economic Times,” showed that organizations with high engagement were 22 percent more profitable, 21 percent more productive, and scored 10 percent better on metrics of customer satisfaction. They also reported 41 percent fewer quality defects and 37 percent less absenteeism.
On the other hand, pervasive disengagement can lead to high turnover, which is wasteful given the cost of hiring replacements. On average, surveys estimate the cost of hiring and training a replacement worker at about one-fifth the cost of salary. The Gallup study showed organizations with engaged workforces had 25 percent lower turnover, even in businesses with traditionally high turnover. In businesses where turnover is normally low, it went even lower — by 65 percent — in organizations with high employee engagement.
Improved engagement is one of the important “soft” benefits of social collaboration because it helps employees see how what they do fits into the greater whole of the organization. Even informal “water cooler” discussion on the social network about sports and kids can build stronger networks, making employees feel more connected with their co-workers, which is why some (albeit not all) employee social networks welcome a certain amount of non–work-related chitchat. The work-related content is even more important because it adds to the total knowledge base of the company, but it also pays off for individuals. Given the opportunity to share details about their work and monitor the activity of others, they build awareness of their successes and frustrations while gaining awareness of what others are thinking and doing, including others outside their immediate circle.
Achieving improved employee engagement is also one of the areas where executive leadership on social collaboration is most significant. When the CEO and other company leaders share posts on strategy, invite feedback, and prove that they actually welcome feedback, employees feel more connected to that strategy and perhaps even able to influence it.
Social collaboration can have a particularly big impact on the engagement of younger workers, who are often frustrated when the software they’re given to use for work is less effective than what they use in their personal lives.
By no means does implementing social software guarantee improved employee engagement, but the software can be a tool for achieving that goal. The more important prerequisites include having the right leadership, which truly welcomes employee feedback and independent thinking. A collaborative culture encourages people to speak up, rather than shouting down new ideas and reinforcing rigid hierarchies. Where the former exists, employees know that their thoughts and opinions matter.
Breaking Down Silos
In business, silos are organizational units that are isolated from the rest of the organization. IT silos are information systems that exist in isolation. The most harmful silos are not departmental and functional divisions that exist for good reason, but rather boundaries that exist for other reasons, like a history of acquisitions that creates a loosely aligned bundle of organizations, each with their own hierarchies, databases, and business practices.
Information within silos is shared up and down the organization, perhaps, but not horizontally. People within different silos may be developing similar products or wrestling with similar problems but never know about each other’s work. Salespeople separated by silos may be approaching the same customers but in an uncoordinated fashion. Organizational silos are often accompanied by fragmented technology, including different systems for managing customer, product, and personnel information.
Implementing a common social collaboration system that stretches across silos can be one way of breaking down those boundaries. For example, within the SuperValu grocery chain, brands brought in through acquisition didn’t even have a common e-mail system, but all employees could be offered an account on the Yammer social collaboration network.
Because integrating major enterprise systems can take years, a collaboration network can be a means of unifying the organization in the meantime. By sharing key enterprise data and adding context around it, social collaboration could even prove more powerful than integrating transactional systems alone.
Acting Like a Social Business
The high-concept notion of social business is about more than just social collaboration. It’s more than just social CRM or social media marketing. A social business puts all the pieces together in an intelligent manner to drive business results.
At a tactical level, this notion of coordinated response to all the possibilities of social media and social networks denies some common organizational realities. I know of a few executives, such as TD Bank’s Wendy Arnott, who have responsibility over both internal and external social media and social technologies. In most cases, internal collaboration and external marketing, sales, and support through social media are handled by different teams. Often, those teams establish their own silos of social technology, with minimal cross-functional collaboration.
What’s needed is leadership from the top that recognizes the importance of smooth handoffs from marketing to sales, to service and new product development. If a social media monitoring team picks up on a trend in social media discussions of your product that suggests a change in strategy or an opportunity to create a new product, you want to make it as easy as possible to share your insight with other employees who are in a position to do something about it.
The case for social business may or may not be a good argument for buying a whole stack of social technologies from one vendor. I often joke that technology players like IBM and Salesforce.com use “social business” as code for, “Buy all my products, and you’ll be successful.” On the other hand, I would argue for a coordinated approach to all the money you spend on social software and cloud services, thinking about both technical and business process integration as you go.
Outside of Silicon Valley, it’s unlikely that many company leaders go into work in the morning thinking, “I want to be a social business.” Instead, they want to run a better, more profitable business of whatever sort. The airline CEO doesn’t want to be social per se, unless social connections will help book more tickets, keep more flights on time, and lower operating costs in a cut-throat business. The manufacturing CEO doesn’t want to be social, unless doing so will head off problems on the shop floor, produce new efficiencies, and lead to new products. The point is corporate performance and not just “social for social’s sake.” Yet, acting like a social business could help them achieve the performance they seek.