A recent IBM report has highlighted how internal company organisation and culture can drive customer satisfaction and business benefit.
The report, “Social Business: Patterns in achieving social business success by leading and pioneering organizations”, defines a social business as “an organization whose culture and systems encourage networks of people to create business value.”
Customer Service departments which are socially connected have reduced customer defection rates by as much as five percent and increased profits by up to 68%. Other potential successes of network-driven processes include the reduction of Product Development by as much as two-thirds, a reduction of as much as two days' induction time by HR newly hired employees and marketing departments doubling their market exposure.
The report found that organisations which use Social Business Patterns improve their processes.
The Patterns are:
• Finding Expertise
• Gaining External Customer Insights
• Increasing Knowledge Sharing
• Improving Recruiting and On-Boarding
• Managing Mergers and Acquisitions
• Enabling and Improving Workplace Sanity
Rather than waiting for employees to volunteer their expertise, it can automatically be discovered by using analytics on social interactions. This reduces the risk of employees' knowledge leaving the company with them when they leave.
Social techniques include employee profiles, blogs, permission-based emails, content repositories and search tools. IBM claimed that this Social Business Pattern can result in a 30% improvement in the speed of accessing experts and a 55% increase in the visibility of a company’s subject matter experts on its public website.
The report recommends that knowledge-sharing should be undertaken through integrating social media outreach with internal collaboration platforms which use social monitoring, analytical, communication and collaborative tools.