The benefits of
providing self-service, community-oriented support to customers and partners in
an externally-facing context are broadly recognised - helping to improve the
level and speed of service that people have access to, while reducing calls to
the helpdesk and lowering organisational costs as a result. However, it's not
just your customers and partners that can benefit from this type of approach;
there are major advantages to be had from applying the same thinking to your
internal support environment too, using social collaboration technologies.
One of the key
challenges that organisations have when implementing these types of tools - and
even before that, at the business case stage - is that it can be very difficult
to articulate where the real value can come from. The benefits are often promised
in very nebulous, intangible terms, around having a more "connected"
organisation, when really people want the specifics - how will it improve
things, and how can we measure that. I often talk about the value of identifying
key use cases where social collaboration can deliver tangible value to
specific groups of people or to support specific business goals, and it’s
something I seek to draw out in my case study discussions. One example that
pops up very regularly in successful social collaboration deployments is the
internal self-service support community, not least because the benefits it
brings are quickly apparent to both the employees using the service and the
teams providing the service, and better still, there are operational benefits
too.
Here are
a couple of great examples from my case study
library:
- Education company Pearson used its social
collaboration platform (based on Jive) to create self-service support
communities for two major new global technology deployment projects,
enabling it to support 40,000 employees with just a handful of resources;
- Research and manufacturing
firm Philips
has implemented several successful helpdesk communities on its
Socialcast-based platform, including the IT Service Desk, an Apple Service
Desk, and its Mobile Enterprise Services.
Fundamentally,
the support community provides a single, central place where people can look
for an answer to their questions, either by posing it directly to the community
as a whole, or searching through the knowledge base of previous questions,
discussions and shared information, FAQs etc. Because questions can be answered
not just by the support team but by other members of the community as well,
they can be answered more quickly, and the answer then becomes part of the
broader knowledge base, meaning it’s now available for subsequent people with
the same question to find.
This has
huge benefits for the support team, who are no longer trapped answering the
same question over and over, and frees them up to provide more time-critical
support, or to work on other priorities. For the organisation as a whole, it
means being able to do more with less, and - as in the case of Pearson - that
new initiatives are not necessarily cost prohibitive due to the associated
support requirements.
Of
course, as with any social collaboration deployment, it will take time to get
people to use your new community; you'll need to persistently redirect people
to the community in the early days, and make sure you answer questions promptly
to demonstrate that the community is not simply a black hole. Over time, as
community members start responding to questions, acknowledge their
participation to reinforce the behaviour and encourage others to do the same.
Some tools provide useful features that can help here, for example allowing you
to mark responses as "best answer", or award members badges for their
participation/contribution. Remember that the self-service element won't happen
overnight - you'll need plenty of community management in the ramp-up period to
ensure its success.
So if
you are wondering where to start with driving social collaboration adoption in
your own organisation, the support use case is a fantastic springboard, and one
which will help people to quickly get to grips with the technology and learn
how it can add value. What’s more, it can help you to win over an area of the
business that is often the most dismissive of social collaboration tools - the
IT department.
#socialcollaboration #Collaboration