Adoption is important in order to see value from social business tools. Adoption should never be the end goal though; usage statistics are signposts along the way toward what should be your real goal of business value. It’s easy to rely on adoption or usage statistics as success criteria but if you stop there you are selling yourself short. Why did you choose to implement social business tools in your organization in the first place? Are you trying to improve communications, collaboration, and innovation? If so, what does that mean in your company? How does that affect your business? What sort of measurements can you put in place to measure success? Optimized production, increased revenues, decreased travel costs, improved customer satisfaction, decreased downtime – those are all end goals you can aim for depending on your industry and what’s important to your business.
Adoption isn’t a success measurement but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. If your end goal is to increase cross-selling in your sales organization thereby increasing revenues, well, you had better make sure there’s adoption on the sales team. If you are trying to reduce call escalations in the call center, a good part of your adoption efforts should focus on the call center. I’m not saying you should ignore the rest of the organization but success breeds success leading to viral adoption in other parts of the organization. Focus on some key successes and others will follow.
Recently I was on site with a customer
during their social business platform launch. We had been planning for a
while and this was when it all fell into place. End-users would
finally be accessing the new tools in production. This particular
customer followed the recommendation of identifying a few key areas of the
business where they knew social could have high business impact for them and
then we gave those groups the white glove treatment*. The white glove
treatment means:
- We spent time with key stakeholders from the groups ahead of time understanding their business and their goals.
- We ran use case discovery workshops with representatives from the groups to understand how they currently communicate and collaborate, what their pain points are, how they’d like to be able to work, and what the potential obstacles might be.
- Post workshop we mapped out the right tools and processes to match the problems (and didn’t fix anything that wasn’t broken just to make it social)
- We spent extra time with the community managers of each group to migrate any existing content and to configure their communities to meet their needs. We also trained the community managers in engagement techniques, specifically to the needs and potential obstacles we heard during the workshops.
- We ran in-person launch “tours” to small groups of end-users, by specific group so we could focus on their use cases so that the stories resonated with the individuals.
I was extremely happy with how well these sessions went last week. One of the potential obstacles that we ran into during the use case development workshops (these are oil & gas engineers by the way) was that some of them felt that social tools would be a waste of time. Many of the engineers don’t use social tools in their personal lives and couldn’t picture using them at work. They were fine with picking up the phone, leaving a voice mail, and waiting on an answer. During the launch tours last week the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Engineers are a smart bunch and when they see a better way of handling a process they get it. At the end of two days the level of Q&A and knowledge sharing happening within the engineering communities surprised me in a positive way. I knew it would happen but it happened even faster than I expected. Without the white glove treatment (which includes good community managers and sponsors) the community would still have taken off but not at this rate and with this level of quality conversation and problem solving.
I’m the first one to admit that the white glove treatment isn’t scalable and frankly isn’t necessary for every single group in your organization. However, for those groups upon which you are relying to take your company forward and make a difference in the way that you do business, the white glove treatment is essential in ramping up the “what’s in it for me” to the end-user, which amps up adoption, which in turn delivers that business value to your organization.
*Thank you, Cristina, for the term “white glove treatment”.
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