Powering Your Organization with Flexible, Smart Collaboration
Given the fundamental shifts in the today's workforce, including the rise of mobile workers, millennials, and freelancers, the way companies engage with both their workforce and customers must change.
The recent KMWorld webcast featuring Ted Sapountzis, VP marketing, Simpplr Inc, and Jon Allen, VP & GM, Social Communities, Telligent, a Verint Company, looked at the smart collaboration tools and policies that can help make organizations more successful by enhancing knowledge sharing, fostering teamwork, and connecting people with information.
Today, the average number of locations for a 500-employee company is more than 12; the number of work-at-home telecommuters has increased by more than 115% since 2005; and the percentage of freelance workers is 34%, said Sapountzis. And, looking ahead, by 2020, 72% of the workforce will be mobile and working remotely at least part of the time; 75% of the workforce will be millennials; and 58% will be freelancers, contractors, and consultants.
The technology infrastructure is also changing, said Sapountzis. The average employee needs 11 systems to do their job; 20% of their time—or one day per week—is spent looking for information or colleagues; and it has been calculated that $1.3 trillion is lost annually due to the productivity gap.
The combination of all these trends makes it harder to connect, communicate, and engage the workforce across departments and locations, said Sapountzis, who described the key components and that are necessary to help companies to connect, engage, and empower their entire workforce. Among those key components are a directory to provide an easy way for people to find each other, good communication to foster collaboration, knowledge sharing that puts the user first and emphasizes self-service, and finally, employee advocacy.
Allen continued the conversation as he looked at changing customer requirements versus company goals and the role of flexible, easy, smart collaboration in succeeding with both.
Today, Allen said, customers want to do the least to solve the most on their own terms with frictionless self-service. Allen noted that today, customers increasingly also want to be recognized and understood; they want self-service in that context; and they want to save time, and to talk on the phone with a company representative only as a last resort.
In contrast, the business wants to improve the customer experience in order to differentiate itself from the competition, to increase agent efficiency, to expand capabilities to provide better experience, improve brand reputation because that translates into new revenue.
All of this starts with intelligence in terms of knowing the customer and how employees engage with customers, he said.
Citing Gartner data, Allen noted that by 2022, 85% of customer service interactions will involve self-service, of which 64% will be unassisted self-service and 21% will be agent-assisted self-service.
Knowledge management is one of the components to make this work, and another is leveraging online communities, he said, observing that companies need to streamline and modernize and share intelligence in order to drive customer experience and ROI consistently.
Allen covered how to leverage community in a platform to help customers engage. The combination of knowledge management and community integrated together can result in smarter collaboration that extends the value of knowledge management and provides high quality and consistent customer experience.
To access an on-demand replay of Powering Your Organization with Smart Collaboration featuring Ted Sapountzis, VP, marketing, Simpplr Inc., and Jon Allen, VP & GM, social communities, Telligent – A Verint Company, go to www.kmworld.com/Webinars/1146-Powering-Your-Organization-with-Smart-Collaboration.htm.