“Enterprise social networks will become the primary communication channels for noticing, deciding or acting on information relevant to carrying out work.”
– Research firm Gartner
Social collaboration tools are helping all kinds of organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to early stage startups, move from two-way conversations toward collaborative communication.
Social tools are also starting to bring the information silos, created by different business systems and various communication channels, together. CRM-systems, intranets and other corporate digital tools used to be separate islands, rarely talking to each other. With social collaboration tools this is beginning to change.
Social collaboration tools are not only a networking space; they make companies quicker to react to changes in the external environment and more effective in using their most powerful assets.
Social Collaboration Boosts Productivity
McKinsey found that the average worker spends as much as 28% of their time managing email and 20% looking for internal information – which could be reduced by up to 35% with social collaboration tools.
When companies use social media internally, messages become searchable content, which allows internal expertise to be indexed and shared company-wide. Faster access to expertise brings real productivity gains as workers spend less time looking for information, and more time acting on it.
Social Collaboration Increases Your Top-line
The key to client retention is client satisfaction, which often requires crossing team and departmental boundaries. However, each internal team uses different software, creating information silos that act as a barrier for collaboration.
With social collaboration tools, each individual system can be linked together to create a summary of what is happening in the different systems. This allows each of your teams to have a complete view of customer records and activities, so you can keep customers happy.
Social Collaboration Helps You Innovate
Companies that fail to look for future opportunities are in danger of suffering the fate of Kodak and Nokia. Innovation is what keeps your company relevant, and overlooking it can be a fatal mistake.
Social tools help you get ideas from unexpected sources, including frontline staff, customers, or even someone from your finance department. Empowering your entire team to share and develop ideas can give you a fresh perspective to help your business innovate so you can beat the competition.
Social Collaboration Helps You Improve Employee Engagement
When employees are not able to make meaningful contributions to their organizations, they disengage. This is a costly situation: the Bureau of National Affairs in the US estimates American businesses lose $11 billion annually due to employee turnover. Engaged employees, on the other hand, drive profit.
Social collaboration makes people more engaged because it keeps employees up-to-date on company information, builds trust, and enables discussions. When employees feel more connected to their company, they’re happier and tend to stay longer.
Social Collaboration Helps Lower Training Costs
In traditional two-way communication, knowledge transfer happens one-to-one. The same questions are asked again and again and, when an employee leaves, their valuable knowledge is gone as well.
Social collaboration allows you to collect the knowhow and expertise that employees accumulate over the years. As discussions happen within the tool, searchable content is created that is instrumental in new employee onboarding and training.
What benefits have you seen with social collaboration?
