It emerged on March 2nd that Rolls-Royce employees, along with employees of all six of BMW’s British companies, received a letter from the boss warning that EU exit could raise costs and jeopardise trade. As you can imagine, this has caused quite a stir. Whether or not you agree with the content itself, though, the question is, what is the impact of sending out such a message through a closed communication channel?

Anxiety rising

Receiving a letter stating that the employment base of the organisation you work for could be affected is naturally going to cause concern for some and outright panic for others. People are going to have questions which, if they can’t voice them there and then, are going to make them panic even more. With no one to ask, they are likely to gossip amongst themselves, which can be detrimental to morale.

Employees will have an opinion too

Along with their concerns and questions, employees will have an opinion on the matter too. Sending out a letter doesn’t give them a platform, and what does that say about how much their opinion is valued? Alongside their view, they could also share knowledge and ideas that can help to extend the reach of the message.

The result of not giving employees a voice is dwindling employee engagement. This ultimately leads to a decrease in productivity and retention issues, to name but a few.

So what could they have done?

By letting employees communicate openly, it is quick and easy to see how people are feeling and respond accordingly, nipping any concerns in the bud before they become unmanageable. It’s also visible to everyone, promoting an open and transparent culture, breeding trust (and reducing panic). Encouraging bottom up communication should be the priority of any executive. When employees give their opinions, not only does it promote a positive and healthy culture, it leads to knowledge sharing and collaboration, empowering everyone to excel at their jobs.

Social collaboration tools do just that; build a collaborative culture by encouraging discussion and engagement. A great way for this particular piece of comms to be delivered would have been through a blog. CEO blogs published over companies’ intranets are a popular tool known for driving employee engagement. This instantly takes the formality out of the delivery and would’ve provided a space where employees would feel comfortable saying what’s on their mind.

The post The Rolls Royce gaffe: lessons in executive comms appeared first on Interact software.

With today’s tech-savvy generation revealing the lowest levels of trust (only 19% of Millennials say most people can be trusted compared with 40% of Baby Boomers, which is the lowest ever on record) and the highest expectations in terms of social tools available in the workplace, tackling this crisis may seem daunting.

Yet there are quick wins out there which will help you drive a culture shift to increased collaboration and more trusting employees.

So let us take you on a journey of the simple tools you can make available through your intranet that will support you in getting there.

Today’s topic: an effective and effortless rewards program.

How does a rewards program on your intranet work?

In simple terms, Rewards is a tool that allows employees to recognise their peers when they help them in their role by giving points. It’s completely up to you how this is managed, who can award points to who, whether they equate to a prize over time, how many points employees have to give; it’s all designed with complete flexibility to suit different corporate cultures and budgets.

So what?

Now you may be wondering how much of a difference this will make. When the Rewards Widget appears on your intranet homepage, it’s there for everyone to see, and naturally gives you a boost – who doesn’t feel a warm glow from getting publically recognised for doing a good job?

You can see where this is going:

• Rewarding one another instantly builds relationships and creates a more collaborative culture, regardless of department, location or seniority
• Those recognized want to continue to do a good job to build their points and get acknowledgment of a job well done
• Others want a piece of the reward pie too, for their name to appear on the homepage, breeding collaboration and a more productive workforce

The stats speak for themselves:

How are other organisations using Rewards?

Well the best place to start is at home. At Interact we award colleagues donuts on our intranet, which we call Homer. You build up your donuts and exchange them for prizes. Each employee receives 10 donuts per month to give out.
Once you’ve built up a bank of donuts you can choose to spend them how you wish, from the smallest prizes which are reasonably achievable (15 donuts for a box of chocolates) to the more challenging targets such as 410 for an iPod Nano. At the end of the year there is an additional prize for the person who has received the most donuts over the course of the year.

Business Environment built Rewards into their HR framework

A customer who inspires us with their use of Rewards is Business Environment. Their innovation saw them included in the industry-leading Nielsen Norman Group’s Enterprise 2.0 2013 report.

Business Environment initially offered Amazon vouchers for a set level of points. However they then chose to rebrand their Rewards to ‘Smarties’. Anyone can still reward anyone else with Smarties but passing a vocational qualification also gains you points.

When Business Environment conduct annual reviews of employees, their manager is given an export of each reward their employee has received. The review process now includes an employee’s view, a manager’s view and a record of peer-to-peer impact – cheerio to the long pause when you get asked “what did you do eleven months ago?”

Still not convinced?

We’d be happy to discuss our Rewards tool and other customer examples with you. In the meantime check out this Interact careers video, where our employees talk about what’s important to them in the workplace:

The post Reaching the 87% of employees who are disengaged, with an effortless rewards program appeared first on Interact software.

Facebook celebrated its 10th birthday not so long ago. It, along with other social networks like Twitter, have transformed our personal lives, most dramatically in the last five years. This has been accelerated by the anytime access mobile technology offers, which allows us to instantly and effortlessly connect and collaborate with friends.

Why aren’t businesses reaping the same benefits?

The adoption of social tools in business has been much slower.

But the advent of bring your own device (BYOD) and a hyper connected workforce, with intelligent enterprise social networks like Interact Intranet, is now producing impressive business benefits: improved employee engagement, faster decision making and problem solving, reduced reliance on email and greater productivity.

To realise the true benefits of this new way of interacting with employees through collaborative technology, high performing companies will adopt six key changes in the very near future (if they haven’t already):

Change 1: Business leaders will adopt a new mindset

Leadership teams will understand and embrace the business benefits of collaborative technologies in order for them to be implemented successfully. When dealing with our customers who are looking to include social and collaborative tools on their intranet, we often hear senior management teams talk about how they must monitor usage to ensure employees aren’t wasting time.

Business leaders can’t say in one breath that they want employees to be more efficient and share information on their intranet but in the next dismiss blogs and forums as “time-wasting.” They are effectively damning the use of collaborative tools on their intranet to failure, by branding them as a “waste of time.” It can be frustrating to witness, especially when we see and hear so many companies having unprecedented success by trusting employees to work together productively.

Salary.com’s report on Wasting Time at Work revealed that the real culprits for time wasting haven’t changed: 47 percent of respondents felt that attending too many meetings was the biggest waste of their time and 37 percent said fixing others’ mistakes. Collaborative technologies used in the right way have the ability to bring solutions to these time wasting activities and maximise the time employees have to get work done effectively.

The concept of wasting time online will turn to a mindset of wasting time offline in the future. If you can find an answer to a problem or shape an idea in minutes online and everyone is of the same mind set, why would you waste time doing this less effectively offline?

As we see a broader behavioral shift in the much maligned middle management, this group will evolve into middle leadership, facilitating effective work practices rather than micro-managing employees.

Change 2: Companies will embrace the demand for working anytime, anywhere

With the boundaries between work and non-work time blurring, organisations must address BYOD and bring your own app demands from employees and management.

By supporting an IT environment that mirrors the more social, mobile and participatory experience people have outside of work, companies will be increase employee engagement and enhance their ability to make positive contributions anytime they want. The challenges of Citrix and VPN access will disappear over time as private cloud hosting will encourage the access anywhere, anytime ethos.

This 24 hour access to work means that companies will need to place further emphasis on employee input, rather than hours in the office. A vital part of this is having a way to see when an employee is online or track how they are contributing.

Rather than the traditional emphasis on where you work, in the future the focus will be on presence, in other words if someone is or isn’t available online, not where they may be. This new work behavior will bring new management challenges, but significant benefits to employee productivity and motivation in return. Businesses will begin to measure employee’s work time by the amount of hours available, or how many questions have been answered and ideas built upon.

Change 3: People will value face-to-face meetings more

While the increase in online collaboration is inevitable, face-to-face meetings will still take place. The millennial generation is interestingly demanding more face-to-face collaboration, not less.

Yahoo’s U-turn on remote working was a clear sign that they believe physical meetings still have a critical role to play. What we will see in the future is people being more selective about what justifies the additional time required to travel to and/or attend face-to-face meetings, which will hopefully reduce the ranks of the 47 percent who reported these meetings as the biggest time wasters in business.

There is no reason why offline and online can’t effectively blend together. Social tasks, team spaces and document collaboration are an important part of face-to-face meetings and work can continue on iPads and other devices.

Change 4: New employees will be part of your business before their first day

An online work platform with collaborative tools is critical to onboarding and can help new employees become familiar with the company’s way of working and help them perform their role faster.

Giving new employees full access to your intranet in advance means not only that they will quickly access company information and complete all admin tasks required, but they can start to connect with colleagues and teams, joining conversations relevant to their work tasks. In the online environment the “human” aspect of the situation is reduced, there is less reason to feel shy or inhibited; they can read the discussions and information provided, without the stigma of being new. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been there if you know the answer to a question.

Change 5: Collaborative tools will just become tools for work

It is unrealistic to assume that just because you implement social and collaborative technologies that employees will instantly realise when and how to best use them. Like any other business tool, they will have to meet a distinct business need in order to be adopted.

As collaborative elements become the staple of business tools, having a good platform won’t be the only requirement for good collaboration. You will also need to manage and give guidance on how to use it and explain the benefits to this new way of working. We sometimes see customers thinking “a team site or forum will solve everything,” which it then fails to do. Yet it often isn’t the method of use that’s failing, it’s the behavior of those in the process that is the stumbling block.

To overcome this, the employee will be at the heart of everything, messaging will inform them:

• Briefly how the tool works so they can quickly “pick up and play.” Choose easy and familiarity over “complex,” so they instinctively know how to use the technology based on their experiences with other social platforms used outside of work.
• How the tool solves certain business challenges, whether that is adding ideas to improve company efficiency or how an updated profile makes it easier to identify experts.
• Why is it a more effective way to work than their current methods and what pain it will solve – give them real life examples.

Change 6: The impact of collaborative technologies will be measured

Measuring the success of implementing collaborative technology will go a long way in ensuring everyone in your company recognises its importance. To do this we need to reexamine how we measure success and what the indicators of success look like.

Having good analytics will make this much easier and play a major role in providing feedback on how your company is embracing collaboration and the benefits it is bringing. For example, you should be able to show how an ideas forum thread saved time for a sales team or how much time HR has saved by having an online forum to answer key questions.

The use of collaboration analytics is critical to continually improving the way people work together.

The future of collaboration is now

The most exciting part of this future is it is happening today in the most effective business. We expect to see the fear of time wasting being overtaken by the fear of being left behind by not working collaboratively.

The post The 6 changes needed to overcome collaboration skepticism appeared first on Interact software.

This is already happening in companies adopting intelligent social intranets, which McKinsey estimates increases efficiency by 25 per cent. Imagine how powerful that is if that company is a competitor of yours. They may not be more cutting edge or have a better product than you, but they trust their employees to connect, collaborate and work together to become more efficient, therefore giving them the competitive advantage.

UK serviced office firm, Business Environment uses Interact Intranet and they surpassed McKinsey’s 25 per cent estimate to 98 per cent employee participation and vastly increased productivity, which is discussed in March’s Nielsen Norman Groups Enterprise 2.0 report.

They and a number of Interact Intranet customers followed these four steps to engage and empower their employees:

1) Implement the right blend

Use the best tools available to meet a business challenge and utilise the right blend of traditional and social tools. Facilities management company, Romec saved GBP2m per year by using electronic forms on their intranet to carry out essential business processes. Waterstones and American Golf use their intranets for critical communication between head office and stores.

In all three cases, collaborative tools such as team areas and forums are effectively used for two-way communication that supplement business processes.

2) Make it easy

Putting a tool out there doesn’t guarantee successful adoption. Tools need to be easy to use and resemble the social media actions employees make in their daily lives including; liking, sharing or hashtagging. All these are one-click steps to catalyse knowledge sharing and collaboration.

These tools are critical in connecting relevant content to people regardless of department. Interact Intranet customer, Bauer Media has seen 69 per cent of all questions asked across their global intranet answered by different departments. Remember, the expert for your question is rarely sat in the same office as you.

3) Let content find people

In an effective collaborative environment a lot of conversations will be irrelevant to certain people. By using intelligent social intranet software, like Interact Intranet the noise will be filtered to bring the appropriate content to the user, just like Amazon recommends products to you based on your behaviours and interests.

Major retailer Superdrug have utilised this so effectively that they were shortlisted for the Technology Initiative of the Year at the Oracle Retail Awards.

4) Trust your employees

Europe’s largest housing association, Glasgow Housing Association, trusted their employees to be a large part of their success during their change programme.

One blog by a frontline worker attracted 1,330 employees from a possible 1,360 to read, learn and engage with their change programme. This influenced a whole organisation’s attitude far more than cascaded communication could ever achieve.

The biggest commitment to establishing this success is not cost but trust. Enable your employees to maximise productivity by trusting and enabling them to create and maximise their networks, all based on need, not location or department.

Employees also need to feel that their contributions, questions, and challenges are valued though, so it is critical to create a culture of psychological safety at work.

Download the free report on how to successfully implement enterprise collaboration>>

The post Empowered Employees Increase Productivity appeared first on Interact software.

It is evident that over the last decade, intranets have dramatically changed and adapted, according to business requirements. The biggest development of intranet evolution is that it’s easier for anyone to upload content, which is great but has left the modern day intranet flooded with content.

Ten years ago, IT managers had sole responsibility for adding content to the intranet, limiting the frequency of content being added – if you had a busy IT team you can bet your intranet was not updated that often. Communication was top down – “management knows best.”

Over the past few years, the adding of content has become increasingly de-centralised as ‘Intranet Champions’ have been introduced in various departments in the workplace, such as marketing, finance and HR. Adding content became less of a technical nightmare.

As the ‘social‘ intranet continues to evolve, it is not uncommon to have hundreds, if not thousands, of people contributing to intranet content on a daily basis. Staff actively write blogs, comment on documents, ‘Like’, ‘Share’ and post status updates – which is fantastic but this has resulted in a huge volume of content on our intranets that is not always relevant to everybody.

In a world where time is critical and even one extra click can deter users from continuing with a process, the demand for accurate and relevant content is crucial. It’s imperative that users find the information they are looking for on the intranet quickly and that what they do find is helping them to ‘get work done’.

You don’t know what you don’t know!

We are intelligent beings – we can filter out noise that takes place in the workplace and focus on content that is relevant. As you sit at your desk you hear conversations subconsciously and then focus in on the things you hear that are relevant to you. How many times have you heard someone mention something in your office that is relevant to a project you’re working on and has a direct effect on your work? That “I wish I’d have known that yesterday!” moment.

For example, there maybe three conversations taking place close to you. One, a general conversation about football results last night, another is a general discussion in the marketing department about new brand guidelines and another discussing how a product launch date is being changed. You have a meeting with a customer tomorrow to discuss the product launch, you now need to inform the customer of this change in date.

However, how do you do this when these conversations are happening in many different office locations around the world? Wouldn’t it be great if you had the ability to hone in on the conversations that matter to you, no matter where you are?

“Personalisation” of your intranet could help with this. For example, setting up your intranet homepage so that it is relevant for specific user groups depending on their job role, interests etc. is a step in the right direction and might reduce the level of content noise but ultimately this personalisation is likely to fail because to personalise, you have to constantly make manual changes to keep things relevant. It’s another on-going project that people have to keep up to date.

The reality is, in a large organisations there are just too many people who have different needs:

• Different job roles
• Different skills
• Different ways of accessing the intranet
• Different interests
• Different knowledge gaps
• Different languages

These needs can’t be controlled with personalisation! Who has the time to constantly update their preferences? How many people can honestly say they personalise their Google homepage? And if you do – how often do you update it to reflect your current interests and circumstances?

Wouldn’t it be better if an intranet understood what you were interested in and automatically delivered this content to you? Just like Google intelligently gives you content it knows is most relevant to you, rather than relying on you to update your preferences -which let’s face it will never happen!

For a modern day intranet to become essential to an organisation’s success and to help staff get work done, it must be able to look at your connections, interactions, intranet behaviour and profile data and from this information, construct a Profile DNA that is unique to each intranet user.

From looking at your Profile DNA, an intranet should be able to intelligently push relevant content to the user.

For example – Rob is pushed relevant information based on his profile DNA. Each bit of content he is pushed has a weight to it, which matches his Profile DNA to the Content DNA.

John, who sits next to Rob gets completely different content pushed to him based on his profile DNA. They are pushed this information in a number of different ways including emails and Interact Suggests.

What I am saying is nothing new in terms of what we are seeing elsewhere in our lives. This intelligence is already occurring on the web every day – Google pushes information to you based on the location you are in and your past searches, Facebook suggests people you may know and displays tailored adverts to you. Amazon shows you things you may be interested in buying, based on your search history and past purchases.

Even supermarkets monitor your shopping habits and send you discount vouchers – pulling you into the store. People won’t specifically go to find out that there’s 25p off coffee but if they get a voucher in the post, it may encourage them to go!

We should expect this intelligence within our intranet. As the social intranet is becoming a more critical requirement of companies across the world, then why can’t we expect it to tailor content to our behaviours and requirements? We need to get answers to our questions quickly and find out about documents or conversations that are essential to do our job more effectively.

If LinkedIn or Twitter can tell us about people, documents or conversations that might be helpful to our jobs, then why can’t intranets do the same?

The post Content Should Find People: An Essential Requirement for Any Social Intranet appeared first on Interact software.

The conference opened with Ben Fried from Google. He talked about the rise of the internet savvy workforce. In a typical keynote full of product plugs one interesting nugget came out.

At Google they have self-service stationary – scan your badge and take what you need to get your job done. This same concept was repeated across the business and each ‘Googler’ had an IT footprint that was shared with them. They choose everything from technology (inc. MS office!) to pens. By allowing them to see this, they can choose what to keep and this massively reduce the IT cost across the business. This element of trust is a very important part of social intranets and collaboration – trust in your workforce and the rewards can be massive.

In another thought provoking keynote, Micheal Fauscetter from IDC talked about how historically businesses were built not to change but on rigorous processes. Knowledge was power.

Business now is about new behaviours – it’s flexible and adaptable. There is a shift of influence, trust and relevance and the power of connectivity. This lead to a statement that knowledge sharing is now power, something that would be great if believed by all generations of employees.

Micheal also said that knowledge workers now spend 80% of their time working outside the system/process. I believe that this is more reason for transactions and business process to be integrated into the social layer. This message of a blend of social and transactional tools to get work done is a message that has come out very strongly from by JBoye and E2Innovate.

Micheal went on to say that data should come to you when you need it. I can echo that view and it is the foundation of everything we do at Interact with intelligent social intranets.

Kevin Cavanaugh from IBM collaboration services spoke wisely about mobile solutions and said that we should be careful not to just focus on solutions for executives at airports but also create simple interfaces for workers in other roles that may include dangerous and hostile environments. I think this is really important – the mobile is just one of many interfaces to get work done on an intranet. We need to think about job functions and how to ensure the technology helps them and doesn’t become another task.

The conference then took a slight turn with Fritz Nelson from InformationWeek and David Berlind from UBM TechWeb talking about the new ‘walled gardens.’ They talked about the similarities between Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon and how they are all trying to create a wall garden of ‘big data’ so they have a powerful signal of what consumers want. A key driver of marketing is getting a message to somebody just before they take the decision. More about this later.

Probably one of the most fascinating presentations was KlickHealth’s Jay Goldman’s session on the Corporate Genome experiment.

Jay spoke about how we all leave digital footprints – take Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter (ambient data based on your behaviour). This drives a multi-billion dollar advertising industry. Jay took this concept to inside the corporate enterprise.

He spoke about some of the many ways KlickHealth monitor data in their company of 200+ consultants, including when they log in/out of computers, when they use the phone, how many times people email each other and who they email. Although to many of us this may sound a little too ‘Big Brother’, it is helping KlickHealth improve productivity and ultimately profit. It gives them measures, such as the sci-fi titled anxiety-boredom continuum and the compound weekly learning rate (they are committed to 1% increase per week across the business.)

As well as monitoring behaviour and intelligently pushing information based on this, they also looked at feedback loops and included innovative tools like their meeting promoter score, that encourages attendees to rate meetings and ultimately push feedback to organisers. This increases efficiency of meetings which is a major inefficiency in most organisations.

They have a positive feedback ratio (similar to Interact Rewards) that measures the ratio of positive/negative feedback at KlickHealth, giving them a real-time sense of how morale is in the company. Some of the social analytics we have built into 5.2 aim to provide a similar global view on company mood. Something that we will be developing further in future releases.

Jay also explained how they vary content, based on individual’s needs. They change a process based on the level of the person following that process or procedure. A newbie would be paired with a buddy, have online training session and more documents to read and online checks. But somebody coming back for the 2nd time would see less checks and the content would adapt. This saves time and improves efficiency. A great idea!

Another take away from Jay’s presentation was their HR team – which isn’t actually HR but a concierge service to help all employees as they would expect in a 5 star hotel. On their intranet they have click-space – which is video FAQs. The amazing thing is that, if somebody asks a question on the intranet and they don’t have a video answer, then a concierge will grab a camera, find an expert and post the video response in less than 2 hours. They now have several hundred videos in the system.

Jay has done amazing things at KlickHealth and engagement is created though positive reinforcement such as getting to drive the company Porsche for Klick Story (blogs of useful stories where people vote) and Klick it forward – rewarding people for earning more points based on helping others.

Day 2

The panel on day 2 titled ‘Tomorrow’s challenges for today’s CIO’ had a great line up of CIOs from some top companies including Michael Staff from LesConcierges, a company that provides a service similar to that deployed at KlickHealth. They echoed what I see in the shift in responsibility from CIO to line of business (such as HR and Internal Communications) for enterprise tools such as the social intranet. In fact Marina Levinson said it should be Chief Innovation Officer.

Shel Waggener spoke about the need create solutions that make people successful not organisations successful. That will just be the outcome.

Richard Hughes had some valid points on the benefits of structure of social adoption in the enterprise. He summed up the benefits of enterprise social networks into 3 areas:

1. Immediacy – quick access
2. Serendipity – stumble on things you didn’t know exist
3. Transparency – honest and ethical

He then talked about 3 ways that social tools can be adopted:

1. Unstructured – i.e. Has anyone got the answer to this? I have an idea
2. Semi-structured – i.e. Please review this document / provide feedback on X
3. Structured – i.e. Everyone sees and can comment on expenses, holidays, forms

Richard Hughes – Clearvale

Richard thinks the sweet spot of any collaborative or social tool is the semi-structured. In most part I agree but at Interact we have seen great results with the structured part of social intranets – the blend of traditional intranet tools such as forms and collaboration. Yammer is in the unstructured space – but will the alliance with SharePoint now see that shifting towards the structured space as people strive to have one place to get work done?

Richard also recommend a book which I would encourage people to read – Where social meets business – real work gets done

At Interact the retail sector is a very strong vertical sector for us with 5 customers in the sector and more than 10,000 employees. So the last session I attended at E2innovate by BrainYard’s Social Business Technology Leader of the year, Chris Laping of Red Robin restaurants, was of real interest. Chris had loads of great takeaways – something that is always missing from social enterprise presentations. But the best one was around their new ‘pig out burger.’

Red Robin rolled out this burger and expected to get loads of feedback on social channels like Facebook and Twitter but were shocked when nobody said anything. It turned out that they actually spoke to real people! They told the team members, who told the managers who then took to their social platform to share. This sharing, commenting and collaborating through online tools allowed them to improve the recipe for ‘pig-out’ burgers in 4 days. Something that would usually take months.

It is difficult to predict the exact direction of enterprise software but there are a few things emerging, that are really clear.

Social should be an embedded experience – not a place or ‘end goal’. If it is a ‘place/end goal’ it can be limiting. It is unnatural to switch between two things (i.e. process and social). Collaboration should be part of actually getting work done. Imagine if you were working on a task with 3 colleagues and every time you had to talk about something you had to move into another room. That would be inefficient. If your intranet is only half your digital workplace (which it often is) then you only ‘socialise’ on half of it. A common collaborative element must be carried through to all digital touch points such as documents, forms, processes, tasks and transactions.

Formal and informal communities are necessary on a social intranet. This is very different to consumer tools such as Facebook. There are no formal communities within Facebook where as there can be/is within the enterprise. Social within formal communities can sometimes be forced and artificial. However when within an intranet, this is valuable and meaningful collaboration around content (process/document/transaction). There does need to be a direct relation between a thriving virtual community and a healthily physical community, to support the more formal communities.

A lot was talked about ‘big data’ and this is another buzz word that is used incorrectly and far too often. Intranets don’t have big data but they have some of the problems associated with lots of data. How do you get relevant content to the correct person at the correct time? As mentioned by Fritz and David in their talk on walled gardens, a massive battle is being fought by organisations such as Google, Apple and Amazon to have the data that will allow them to get in front of people who are about to make a purchasing decision by intelligently analyzing the ‘big data’.

At Interact we have been doing exactly the same with intranets for the last 6 years and are passionate about the ability for content to find people. The only difference between commerce and business is that the currency isn’t dollars and pounds but knowledge and efficiency.

The post My notes and takeaways from E2innovate appeared first on Interact software.

We have created some unique tools to enable you to build more powerful relationships with your customers and drive value. As well as being able to create an extranet that is used for traditional content management such as an FAQ database, product documentation and training material, Interact allows you to build activity around this information and to create an on-line community.

💡 If you suddenly find yourself asking, “what is an extranet?” take a look at our primer on Intranet vs Extranet definitions 💡

A successful customer community will lead to increased customer retention, more customer self-serve, loyal customers and ultimately customers that are happy to spend more.

Here are 11 ways Interact’s extranet software can help you to engage with your customers more effectively.

1. Find advocates in your customer base

Some customers will shine out as advocates for your products but others can be difficult to find. Tools like Interact Answers will help you to uncover who the people are behind your best customers because they will regularly contribute to questions and come to the forefront of your extranet. These are the people who are invaluable to your organisation and who you should be building long term relationships with.

2. Create discussions around information

How do you keep a record in your organisation if the same people are asking the same things again and again? Or even more importantly, if they are asking for the same changes, improvements or products.

Two features in Interact’s extranet software allow you to find common areas of concern or improvement. Document Comments can be used for customers to ask further questions around topics such as product specs or training material. Allowing ‘Likes‘ on documents highlights information that is important to your customers such as product improvements or useful FAQs.

3. Create a thriving customer community

The collaboration and social intranet tools in our software are integrated with the more traditional tools to create a mass audience appeal – something that is difficult to achieve in any social software. This is crucial in an extranet environment as this blending of technology can be used to ensure effective customer engagement. These existing tools are essential to creating a thriving customer community:

• Comments on documents
• Likes on documents
• Search on all types of content
• Ability to link to content easily in forums, comments and status updates

4. Improve support efficiency

Engaged communities will lead to more self-help and happy customers. Customers shouldn’t have to go through lengthy processes to get support and a community can lead to your customers to becoming the best support team in your business. Intelligent forums make building this on-line community easy and tools such as @tagging and ‘Like’ ensure the best answers rise to the top.

5. Engage your customers in feedback

In a rapidly changing economy it is important to be in touch with your customers views and opinions around your product or products. Interact’s intranet and extranet software has many tools that allow you to get rapid feedback from your customers.

Tools like voting on content are simple ways for your customers to start leaving feedback on your extranet and this can give an insight into what information they are interested in and find useful. It’s easy to create a quick poll on your extranet to gather feedback and opinions on your products from your customers. This is a really simple way to gain an insight into your customers views, which could influence key business making decisions in your company.

6. Create more efficient customer processes

To create a community you must initially have a pull to the extranet. The best way to do this is by moving some business processes to the extranet. The Workflow and Forms tool allows non-technical people to build e-forms easily. So whether you work in marketing, sales or product development, you will be able to create forms like customer surveys, new product sign up and ideas forms.

7. Create teams of common interests

Every business filters customers by a number of different criteria such as vertical sector, product use, and geographical location. Interact Teams allows you to build sub-communities around these groups and engage with people in a more focused way.

8. Suggest relevant content

People like to talk about and follow information that is relevant to them. At Interact we have a saying – “content should find people.” A customer will visit an extranet to complete a task and they need to be pushed relevant information. Think of Amazon – it pushes you books and DVD’s that are relevant to your purchases and viewing habits. Interact Suggests does the same and intelligently suggests information relevant to the user.

9. Gain valuable customer intelligence

Find out what your customers are searching for and where the information black holes are using Statistics and Search Analytics.

The Statistics & Search Analytics tool identifies what users are looking for and provides an insight into how customers are searching your extranet, which can in turn be used to enhance your extranet content to directly support customers in their day-to-day work and their interactions with your business. You can identify if your customers are searching for a specific product issue or maybe there are a high percentage of searches being carried out on a new feature or product you are not stocking yet.

You can also find out which customers contribute the most to your extranet and who doesn’t contribute anything and assess if they are using the extranet to its maximum potential.

10. Focused customer communication

Blogs are an effective way to share skills and knowledge between customers and also for you to find out how customers are using your products day to day.

For example, a Product Manager can keep an eye on what features of the product may be working for or against customers to help with future improvements. Or your customer support team can make sure customers are kept happy and informed on key matters such as process enhancements and improved service delivery strategies.

11. Quick and easy to set-up with no technical skills

One of the big challenges when rolling out software products is coordinating IT, Marketing, Sales and HR. We make it easy to set-up your customer environment without any technical skills.

We partner with Rackspace (the world’s No1 hosting provider). This combined with Interact Intranet software that has been penetration tested by many of the world’s leading security organisations means that your data is safe, easy to access and more importantly easy to set up.

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If people can clearly see how the intranet helps them do their jobs and get their work done they’ll use the tools provided. A tool without a purpose is not going to become popular or deliver any value; people are busy and want tools that help get things done with the minimum of fuss or learning.

Intranet managers, and IT departments, are under pressure to continually improve the intranet or suffer the criticisms that it’s ‘slow, difficult and irrelevant’. But adding whistles and bells is not the answer. Crowding the intranet with ‘everything’ just in case someone fancies having a go at managing, say, a Wiki, isn’t the way to deploy new features. Learning what departments and people do in their day-to-day work is vital in order to understand how to integrate new tools into the intranet.

“Collaborative features are part of a mature, essential, intranet – along with content, knowledge management and business processes”

Improvements can be made without upgrading the entire intranet and ‘starting again’, although if you’re considering a fresh start, focus on the needs of your people and not just what the system can do. Incremental improvements can be made to the menus and structure, and modern functionality can be bolted on with a new module and any accompanying widgets. So there’s lots of scope for making improvements and delivering new functionality, and it doesn’t have to be a major project – just a well-managed one.

Major reasons to support collaboration within the digital workplace

Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) identifies three major benefits of digital collaboration methods, which I’ve gone on to summarise:

1. People can find information and colleagues they need faster with social tools. Finding people and info is consistently raised as an important daily chore. Social tools make information more visible, findable and shareable.
2. Reduced use and overhead costs of older (inflexible) communication tools and platforms. Asking questions (and getting answers from various colleagues) and working on content and documents online means that reliance on email goes down – surely this is a good thing in and of itself! Online collaboration is ‘live’ interaction rather than ‘dead’ email writing. Few of us are paid to write emails, yet sometimes it feels like responding to emails is our job!
3. Correlation between increased marketshare and socially networked organisations. McKinsey’s “Web 2.0 in business” survey results statistically show that “Market share gains reported by respondents were significantly correlated with fully networked and externally networked organisations. This, we believe, is statistically significant evidence that technology-enabled collaboration with external stakeholders helps organisations gain market share from the competition.”

The importance and impact of finding stuff when you need it shouldn’t be dismissed as just something about poor document storage on the shared area / network. When you know you need something but you can’t find it, everything grinds to a halt. Emails create dead information – yes the individual might mine their inbox for rare pieces of gold, but email will hold multiple versions of the same document and records of long-since rescinded decisions. Online collaboration tools keep everything available to the involved parties, and really help new team members get up to speed on what’s been going on.

IBM goes further, and says that social collaboration empowers an effective workforce and accelerates innovation (for your customers and employees).

Fostering collaboration can help people work more effectively and draws out their expertise and discretionary effort, which can create a competitive advantage to your company. This is all about employee engagement – and that’s a real concern these days isn’t it? Distributed team and ad hoc team members, whether in different towns, departments or just on different floors in your office building, can work together on projects and documentation without having to sit next to each other all the time, or wait for emails.

Wherever there is a high staff turnover, or a high level of recruitment and training (which may be seen in customer service departments) a robust Knowledge Management system is often relied upon; an intranet with some collaborative features can help make sure that information is kept up-to-date faster than the usual ‘annual reviews’ of content.

Some people, in certain departments, won’t have any need to participate in collaborative work; 100% up-take of collaborative functionality isn’t necessary to reap rewards. People can passively benefit from improved collaborative features, like faster access to more up-to-date information. Access to better quality information should decrease mistakes and help people make better decisions, faster. Qualifying decisions and processes with expert colleagues has got to be the way forward, and intranet collaborative tools can support these social aspects of work.

Collaboration can be as simple as talking to someone with more or different experience than you; but how will you find them if you only know the people you know? A People Finder or staff directory that can be searched for skills and interests (rather than just surnames) can be a fantastic tool to get the right people together.

The network effect means that the more people who use a tool or system, the more people in turn will end up using it. A telephone, by itself, is of little use; the more people who have a phone service the more necessary it becomes to everyone.

Commenting on news articles or reference intranet articles is an easy way to help validate the contents and provide extra context. Often, you’ll see comments that provide links to pages and documents that support the article, pages and documents the original author might not have known about. When social collaborative features are embedded in the intranet, and the culture, self-serving staff members and helpful colleagues mean that support calls to the IT and HR department go down over time.

Don’t let the word ‘collaboration’ be dropped into planning meetings without meaning; let’s make sure that we all mean the same thing when we’re looking at the benefits. Collaboration is really an approach to working. There are various tools and online functions that can support collaborative working practices and not all of them are as radical as some people might fear. If we define the business challenge and only then consider the technology and governance to meet it, we can craft intranets that are useful and usable.

For further thoughts, read ten ways to encourage collaboration.

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Worldwide Intranet

Enterprise-level Interact was designed just for those large companies who want to deploy an intranet that can cross geographic and language boundaries. Your company can benefit from this model of intranet architecture if you have over 5,000 users located in different countries that need to be able to interact with each other and share information on an as-needed basis.

Large Business? No Problem!

In fact, the Enterprise Architecture was specifically designed for multi-language intranet needs and advanced communication between people located around the globe. If this describes your company then the chances are you need exactly what Interact has to offer.

• Increasing collaboration between staff members located in multiple countries which promotes a sense of shared vision and commitment to company success.
• Improved sharing of ideas so that the company benefits from the creativity and knowledge of all workers no matter where they are located
• Efficient click through communication that reduces email traffic
• Ability to communicate better even when there are bandwidth issues because Interact is an intelligent system that is responsive to external communication needs
• Simple deployment of new country intranet communication access using a single platform
• Ability to handle multiple languages with ease

If you are a big multi-country or multi-language business, or both, then Enterprise Interact is the answer to your intranet needs.

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