The proverbial saying, “there’s no I in team”, couldn’t be more true. As companies expand into new areas and geographies, employee acquisition and retention remain paramount to an enterprise’s human capital strategy. Chief among the factors that lead to success is collaboration. While this sounds great in theory, practical application and implementation is a formidable challenge. For instance, ensuring your employees are effectively working together in person can be difficult enough, but adding multiple offices around the globe, an ever-expanding and diverse workforce and trying to contextualise disparate streams of data flowing from various sources, one begins to ask the question: how can I juggle all over these balls without dropping several along the way?
Well, don’t panic yet! We have you covered. Thanks to a rich array of tools and studies available, organisations now have resources and insights to foster collaborative working and maintain employee satisfaction.
In the July 2016 commissioned study, The Total Economic Impact of SAP Jam, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of SAP, Forrester Consulting explored the potential return on investment your business can experience with the aid of social collaboration tools. These three offered the most crucial benefits:
1 Reduce the costs of on-boarding new employees by 13%
By allowing new hires to work together and easily share information during their first few weeks, you can empower them to get answers to questions quickly. Being able to engage with their peers and experts in other departments allows your staff to build upon their training and become proficient in their new roles faster.
Using topic-based communities and organising crucial information in an easy-to-find manner provides employees with the resources they need to feel completely prepared to be productive on their own.
Reducing a new hire’s on-boarding time, and time to productivity, is incredibly beneficial to any organisation, but an added bonus is the overall reduction in turnover. Existing employees feel more valued and engaged when being touted as expert resources that can help guide and educate new co-workers. Creating an internal company culture of collaboration can significantly boost employee morale.
2 Resolve customer service issues 10% more quickly
Not only does employee collaboration affect how smoothly internal processes run, it can also positively impact your interactions with customers. Streamlining the steps necessary to find information greatly reduces the number of hours an employee spends tracking down the correct contact, emailing, and awaiting a response.
Giving a customer service agent the full picture from the get-go is crucial. Whether it’s being able to find a specific order right away or figuring out who the point of contact they’ll be working with is, having important information at their fingertips will greatly help your employees figure out the necessary next steps in a timely manner.
A faster answer to a customer’s inquiry not only means an employee can help more customers per day, it also means that a customer feels taken care of in a prompt and courteous fashion. Any interaction with your customer base will affect how they view your organisation, meaning that a positive experience can turn a one-time buyer into a lifelong customer.
3 Improve win rates and reduce time to close
Sales professionals need to track an enormous amount of information to facilitate a deal, and often need to connect with experts in other areas of the company outside of the sales organisation. This process can often be incredibly time-consuming. So much so that an entire transaction could fall apart due to a delayed response.
Thankfully, providing a consistent collaborative environment has been proven to help win business by shaving off an entire week from the close rates of sales cycles. Instead of pulling sales-related data from a CRM system and having to locate an expert from across the organisation to help provide information to close the deal, a collaborative team can work together to streamline sales operations and keep one another in the loop every step of the way.
More sales mean more revenue, of course, but ensuring that fewer deals fall apart is sure to be a confidence booster for any team in your organisation.
Continue exploring the benefits of social collaboration
The benefits of integrating social collaboration into your business are truly countless. Employees at every level will appreciate how easily they can communicate with colleagues from anywhere in the organisation, and you’ll see how that impacts your bottom line almost immediately.
Steve Hamrick is VP of project management at SAP
This advertisement feature is paid for by SAP, which supports the Guardian Media & Tech Network’s Digital business hub.
.jpg?w=600)
