Enterprise social how to WLAN

Bringing Social to the Enterprise: How Microsoft Can Help Your Organization Work Like a Network

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Bringing Social to the Enterprise:How Microsoft Can Help Your Organization Work Like a Network

Published: September 2014

Visit www.enterprisesocial.com for the latest information

Estimated reading time:25 minutes

Work like a network.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Listen to the conversations that matter 2

Connect your employees 2

Inform and align everyone in your organization 3

Engage your employees 3

Customer success: Red Robin listens to employees 4

Adapt and respond more quickly 5

Work better together internally 5

Collaborate outside your business 6

Improve access to knowledge 7

Customer success: Esquel Group weaves in social to improve productivity 8

Grow your business 9

Zero in on what matters most 9

Win sales faster 10

Sell more by going social 11

Are you ready to work like a network? 12

Sources 13


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IntroductionThanks to the rapid growth of mobile and social technologies that have made the world a giant network, people today are more connected than ever before. The widespread use of mobile devices and social networks makes it easier for people to communicate, share information, and work together on projects of mutual interest. As a result, the value of bringing social technologies to the enterprise is becoming increasingly clear.

The next question is how, exactly, can enterprise social technologies add value to your company? What tools will enable you to connect employees to information and to each other, and enable your organization to address critical business challenges such as:

• Employee engagement – According to the Gallup organization, companies whose employees are engaged have higher productivity, profitability, and customer ratings, plus lower turnover, less absenteeism, and fewer safety incidents. Yet only 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged at work, while employees who are “actively disengaged” cost U.S. companies $450 billion to $550 billion annually.1

• Cross-team collaboration – Collaboration is essential to the success of every company, but changing work styles and disparate communication preferences, plus geographic, functional, and information silos, create barriers that make it difficult for teams to work together and get things done. Meanwhile, collaborating with partners and suppliers poses many of the same challenges.

• Business growth – Sustaining business growth today is made more difficult by competition from new players who are disrupting traditional markets, and new trends and technologies that are changing the way customers do business. To overcome these challenges, companies must be able to respond more quickly, make decisions faster, and collaborate more nimbly than their competitors. And to do that, they need the right tools.

This whitepaper will explain how you can work like a network using enterprise social solutions from Microsoft—including Yammer, Office 365, Lync, SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM—to listen to the internal and external conversations that matter to your organization, adapt quickly to changing customer needs and market trends, and grow your business in an increasingly competitive environment. For a more comprehensive look at why business leaders should incorporate enterprise social technologies in their organizations, see “Why Today’s Businesses Need Enterprise Social.”

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/enterprise-social/Why-Todays-Businesses-Need-Enterprise-Social.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/enterprise-social/Why-Todays-Businesses-Need-Enterprise-Social.aspx


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Listen to the conversations that matterEnterprise social technologies let you connect, inform, and engage your workers—your greatest resource—more effectively than ever before. Executives, managers, and individual contributors—everyone from the CEO to the newest hire—all have a place to ask questions, inform others, and share insights and opinions across departments and cross-functional teams. This allows for a more transparent company culture. Workers who feel connected to each other, and who get the information they need and the recognition they deserve, also feel more invested in their jobs.

What it comes down to is this: enterprise social enables your employees to connect through conversations; stay informed so they can make smarter and faster decisions; and feel more engaged in their work and the company culture.

Connect your employees

Enterprise social technologies will let your employees experience a closer and more connected work environment, regardless of their location, their position in the company, or the hierarchical structure of your organization. According to a 2013 Yammer survey, 83 percent of workers who use Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies feel better connected to their teams.2

One way to connect employees is through an enterprise social network (ESN). Yammer is the ESN within the Microsoft Office 365 product suite that gives your employees, managers, and executives a social networking platform for easy, open, and secure communication. They can listen to and participate in two-way conversations or group discussions, improve their understanding of teams or departments outside their day-to-day sphere, and discover content that is relevant to what they are working on.

Some organizations even use Yammer to conduct “town halls” or “all hands” company meetings as a way to improve internal communications. This gives all employees a voice and encourages companywide discussions about important news and updates. Company leadership also learns from the questions and opinions posed by employees and the insights they reveal. The end result is an organization in which everyone enjoys greater visibility and feels more connected.

83% of workers who use Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies feel better connected to their teams.


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Inform and align everyone in your organization

Enterprise social technologies can help you create an informed and empowered workforce, an open company culture, and a transparent organization in which information flows freely and rapidly between people at all levels. Eighty percent of Microsoft Enterprise Social users report being more informed about what is happening inside their organization than they were before having the solution.3

In addition to enterprise social technologies such as Yammer, Microsoft also has developed a new app called Delve, to help organizations increase visibility into internal teams and departments companywide. Delve uses the machine learning capabilities of Office Graph, which maps and analyzes Office 365 interactions, content, and activity—including those in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Yammer—so that users can discover relevant information. When teams work together on a project anywhere in Office 365, conversations and file signals feed into the Office Graph, which enables Delve to deliver fresh insights to individual users.

As a result, employees can easily discover what other team members are working on, track information, and identify new opportunities. At the same time, Delve exposes relevant information from across the company, further enhancing discoverability. Delve presents all relevant information as content cards in different boards, which may be named “Trending around me” or “Shared with me” and so on. These boards are based on insights learned from each user through machine learning, and dynamically updated. You can also customize the names to suit your personal needs.

You can also use natural language to search the Office Graph, based on actions and connections. In the People view, you can gain insights about your colleagues and the content that is relevant to them. In addition,

you can see not only a hierarchical view of your colleagues but also the most relevant contacts generated automatically by the Office Graph, based on their interactions with people and content. With these tools, employees can develop a deeper understanding of how they fit into the greater network so that they can better work like one.

Engage your employees

Employees who are connected and aligned are also more productive and engaged. As noted earlier, a Gallup study found that employee engagement leads to innovation, greater productivity, and real profitability.

One simple way to foster a more engaged workforce is by openly praising employees and recognizing their work—and Yammer is the perfect tool. Imagine an employee named Nancy who has done a great job of closing an important deal. Walter notices Nancy’s success in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and shares a message with his team about her great work, right within the program. Walter’s praise is then pushed to his Yammer team group. All team members can see that Nancy has done a stellar job, and they too can provide feedback through comments or simply by “liking” the update. When applying this to your business, simple recognition goes a long way toward boosting employee morale and helping workers feel more engaged.

Another tool for engaging employees is Lync. Your employees, regardless of location, can engage in face-to-face conversations through video conferencing. In addition, Lync also lets workers do a traditional call or send an instant message, which allows them to be productive regardless of their communication style. By putting a face to a name, Lync helps coworkers get to know each other better and feel more connected, which is especially valuable for large enterprises with thousands of employees in multiple locations.

80% of Microsoft Enterprise Social users report being more informed about what is happening inside their organization than they were before having the solution.

Customer success:

Red Robin listens to employeesRed Robin Gourmet Burgers got its start in Seattle in 1969, when a local entrepreneur bought a tavern near the University of Washington campus and added burgers and fries to the menu. Today, Red Robin has hundreds of restaurants in 44 states and four time zones, with 1,500 managers coaching and developing 26,000 employees. Although Red Robin has always been successful, the company realized at one point that it was not growing as quickly as the competition.

“In this economy, it’s not the big companies eating the small, it’s the fast eating the slow,” says Chris Laping, senior vice president and chief information officer for Red Robin.

Red Robin adopted Yammer and other enterprise social technologies to give employees a voice, improve communication, and create greater transparency between company leadership and employees. By using Yammer to listen to employees, Red Robin was able to improve its business by gaining insights from restaurant staff and learning more about the feedback that servers and managers were receiving from customers.

“Yammer has been a very important tool for us to give everybody a voice,” says Red Robin CEO Steve Carley. “We deliver our promise with a server standing right here at the end of the table. So if you can talk to those people, in a non-threatening way, it is extraordinary what you can learn, and the engagement and excitement you can generate.”

“Yammer has been a very important tool for us to give everybody a voice. We deliver our promise with a server standing right here at the end of the table. So if you can talk to those people, in a non-threatening way, it is extraordinary what you can learn, and the engagement and excitement you can generate.”

—Steve Carley, CEO Red Robin


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Adapt and respond more quicklyWhile keeping your workforce connected, informed, and engaged is the foundation for increased productivity and innovation, this is only one piece of the puzzle. Collaboration is essential to the success and growth of any enterprise, yet many organizations still struggle to collaborate effectively and efficiently. The rise of a geographically diverse and increasingly mobile workforce has created new barriers to collaboration. Increasingly, knowledge workers today are collaborating with colleagues who work not just down the hall, but in different buildings, countries, and time zones. Functional and information silos, often created or reinforced by systems that are unconnected or not well-integrated, also present barriers to effective collaboration. Similar barriers also exist between companies and their external partners, suppliers, and customers, where reliance on telephone and email communication almost guarantees that important information eventually will become lost or locked away in individual inboxes or voicemail.

Increasingly, forward-thinking organizations are taking collaboration to a whole new level by bringing social to the enterprise. With the right set of social technologies to support open communication and seamless collaboration—no matter where people work—companies can adapt and respond more quickly to changing market conditions.

Work better together internally

Some difficulties of team collaboration include keeping up with all of the moving parts of a project, plugging into what other people are working on, and making sure everyone is working on the right piece. With Microsoft Enterprise Social solutions, teams can work better together internally. Organizations that use enterprise social technologies see a 37 percent improvement in project collaboration,4 and almost 70 percent of users agree that Microsoft Enterprise Social improves collaboration across remote locations.5

Organizations that use enterprise social technologies see a 37% improvement in project collaboration.


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Microsoft Enterprise Social enables teams to self-organize, focus, and collaborate more efficiently. For example, Yammer Groups provide team workspaces that bring together people, conversations, and content in a single location. With Groups, conversations are available to every team member in the Group feed so that other team members have the latest information and updates. Groups can be set up around anything—an office location or subsidiary, a department such as Marketing or Operations, a cross-functional project team, or simply an idea—to enable open conversations and collaboration, no matter where people work or what department they belong to.

For instance, meet Jane. She leads a large cross-functional team that is responsible for launching a new product line at a leading clothing company. Jane travels frequently for work, manages several projects simultaneously, and has team members located in Paris and New York as well as her home base of Los Angeles. She doesn’t have time to communicate directly with each team member on every issue or to monitor all of the day-to-day developments on her projects. Instead, Jane creates a Group in Yammer that aligns all of the members of her global team, and brings together all relevant people, conversations, and content in a shared, unified workspace. Her team members share progress on their work and engage in discussions about key updates and project roadblocks in the Group, which helps Jane and everyone else stay up to speed. Groups are open by default to enhance discoverability and sharing, but they can be made private as necessary to ensure that you have the privacy and access control you need.

In addition to Groups, Document Conversations also can help teams accelerate collaboration. Designed to help companies engage and tap into their

entire network, Document Conversations enable team members to work together in real time on a Microsoft PowerPoint deck, Word document, or Excel spreadsheet, no matter which application they are in. At the same time, they can interact and discuss a file through side-by-side Yammer feeds. This way, individual team members can make updates, easily get their colleagues’ feedback in context, and take steps to make faster progress.

Even when your employees are on the go, they can still collaborate and stay productive using the Yammer mobile app, which enables team members to keep up with important conversations and to access content, even when they’re not in the office. And because the Yammer mobile app is available on Windows, iOS, and Android devices, employees can be productive using the device of their choice.

Collaborate outside your business

Along with helping your employees collaborate better internally, Microsoft Enterprise Social solutions can help them work more effectively with external partners, suppliers, and even customers. According to a Yammer study, companies that use Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies experience a 20 percent improvement in supplier and partner satisfaction.6

When working with partners and suppliers, teams typically exchange numerous emails and phone calls, making it easy for important messages and attachments to get buried or lost in a team member ’s email inbox or voicemail. With Yammer external networks, teams can create a dedicated online workspace for collaborating with people outside of their organization, allowing the teams to quickly get feedback from partners, suppliers, and customers in


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real time. With a single workspace in which to easily communicate and collaborate with people outside of your company, teams are better equipped to quickly respond and adapt to change.

Yet no external collaboration project would be complete without the exchange of files and source materials. When working with a research firm or creative agency, for example, project teams typically need to share reference materials to help onboard their vendors. Meanwhile, vendors need an easy way to share drafts and works in progress, many of which can be large files. OneDrive for Business enables team members to share online files securely with other people—both inside and outside their organization. They can also easily manage access and editing permissions to help protect shared information.

Along with Yammer external networks, teams can use Lync to shorten the feedback loop from partners and suppliers. With Lync, team members can call, use instant messaging, or set up a video conference in one click to meet with external collaborators and discuss the latest updates, without incurring the travel costs of meeting in person.

Improve access to knowledge

With the collaboration and communication tools available in Microsoft Enterprise Social solutions, teams and individuals are primed to make smarter and faster decisions as a result of this improved access to knowledge. It’s easier than ever to stay plugged in to projects and discussions that are taking place

throughout their company. According to a study by McKinsey, 71 percent of business leaders report that enterprise social tools increase the speed of access to knowledge.7

Yammer enables employees to follow people, conversations, and content all across the organization. This helps them build relationships with subject matter experts in other groups or departments, participate in or keep abreast of discussions that are relevant to their work, and build on the work of others to improve or advance their own. And because Yammer conversations are open by default, employees are able to see and act on information that would otherwise be hidden in information silos.

Delve also comes in to play here, enabling better collaboration and knowledge with its enhanced search and discovery tool that helps you find relevant information across your Office 365 applications. Let’s return to Jane: she is working with her cross-functional team on the budget proposal for a new product launch. Throughout the project, conversations and file signals feed into Office Graph, which then delivers fresh insights to Jane in Delve. This helps her discover what the project team is working on and ensure that they are on track with the proposal. At the same time, Delve shows Jane relevant information from across the company, so she notices a conversation in the Finance team about a new requirement for budget proposals. She quickly shares the new information with the product launch group, so that the rest of her team can incorporate it into the proposal.

According to a study by McKinsey, 71% of business leaders report that enterprise social tools increase the speed of access to knowledge.

Customer success:

Esquel Group weaves in social to improve productivityEsquel Group is a major textile manufacturer with over 59,000 employees in nine countries. Producing more than 100 million shirts every year—about seven or eight shirts per second—for clients such as Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Nike, Esquel Group needed a technology solution that would help it manage its complex and fast-paced business.

“We’re trying to encourage a collaboration of people across our supply chain, so that they don’t work in silos,” says Wilkie Wong, chief financial officer, Hong Kong and Overseas, for Esquel Group. “By working like a network, you sort of break that silo.”

Yammer and Office 365 give Esquel Group the tools it needs to enhance productivity and collaboration, enabling the company to communicate more effectively, capture knowledge and make it accessible to prevent it from being lost, and engage employees across its global organization.

“It’s actually helping us a lot, because we truly believe that a lot of the great ideas are coming from the bottom up,” says Edgar Tung, managing director of Group Human Resources for Esquel Group.

“We’re trying to encourage a collaboration of people across our supply chain, so that they don’t work in silos. By working like a network, you sort of break that silo.”

—Wilkie Wong, CFOHong Kong and Overseas,

Esquel Group.


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Grow your business Salespeople already know which sales technique doesn’t work today: cold calling. Calling on prospects without knowing exactly what they need is far too likely to fail. Most customers have identified their needs and are actively seeking the best product or solution before ever engaging with vendors. To gather information, they are researching vendor websites, questioning peers, and initiating and following conversations on social media. Technology has turned the sales process upside down.

In addition to improving employee engagement and fostering internal and external collaboration, Microsoft enables companies to modernize their sales strategies to match this new reality and transform the way they sell. Microsoft Enterprise Social solutions give sales teams the ability to zero in on targets ahead of the competition, win faster by working as a team to create compelling and differentiated customer interactions, and ultimately sell more products and services.

Zero in on what matters most

Salespeople today face multiple challenges, one of which is that customers do not want to be sold anything. If they are already making up their minds about your company before you’re in contact with them, and progressing through their decision-making process ahead of you, then you can’t jump into the sales process at the beginning. You have to be able to quickly assess where they are in the process and meet them there. You need a system that allows you to get up to speed immediately, and quickly develop the insights required for you to engage in a relevant way.

If your customers are using social networks to learn about you and your products, shouldn’t you use them to gain insights about your customers? You may learn that a prospect is dissatisfied with a competitor ’s product, or you may find out that they’re dissatisfied with yours. You may even discover that your customer has recommended your services to a contact, so you can get a new lead. Your sales team can now have real-time insight into the social activity of your contacts and accounts, and they can engage with customers on LinkedIn and Twitter as well as with their team members on Yammer—without ever leaving Microsoft Dynamics CRM.


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As part of the Microsoft Enterprise Social solutions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a holistic 360-degree view of your customers that lets your salespeople get to know the person behind the contact card. This includes profile information and important relationships as well as account, lead, and contact updates from more than 30,000 business and social sources delivered directly to your system. Having this information gives your salespeople valuable insights that make it easier for them to engage with customers, build relationships, personalize every customer interaction, and earn customers’ trust. CSO Insights reports that companies experience 8 percent higher win rates when sales reps are provided both internal and external data.8

With social network data from LinkedIn and Twitter integrated right into the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system, social insight becomes a natural part of the sales process. Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers the latest market buzz and news along with corporate data, so that you are always up to date on your customer’s activities. Getting this information in real time can make the difference between being ahead of or behind your competition. According to Aberdeen Research, social sellers are 51 percent more likely to reach their quotas than non-social sellers.9

In addition, Microsoft Social Listening lets you measure sentiment and analyze and act on market intelligence derived from social conversations across many channels, which can help salespeople gain early insight into issues that customers are facing, and connect with the most influential voices in the community. It also provides social buying signals. When people send a signal that they’re looking for something, are dissatisfied with their current solution, or need more information on a topic, that’s an opportunity for a seller to engage.

Win sales faster

Replace cold calls with warm introductions by having your salespeople use an enterprise social solution to review the business and social data delivered there to see how they are connected to their prospects. They can use that information to either reach out for a referral, which will make a response more likely, or engage the customer directly in a more meaningful way.

Ideally salespeople would have easy-to-use tools that provide content relevant to where they are in the sales cycle. A well-defined process can help. Process flows drive best practices and consistency across the organization, while allowing salespeople to remain agile and to deliver a great customer experience.

However, traditional customer relations management (CRM) business processes, such as opportunity management, often used workflows that were cumbersome and difficult to understand. Therefore, they required a lot of user training and were often not widely adopted.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides intuitive, visual process guidance, using an outcome-driven user interface to help ensure rapid, widespread adoption by sales professionals. Because the solution tells you what to do next, the ramp-up time is fast and training costs are low.

Additionally, Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes business process templates with industry-specific best practices. These process flows can then be customized, or new processes can be created using a simple point-and-click process. This allows sales organizations to be agile and responsive. If a trend is identified and the organization wants to react quickly, the business process can be changed almost


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instantly to reflect the newly desired steps or outcomes. Capabilities like this are what enable an organization to take an entire sales team and make every member an all-star player.

Sell more by going social

In this new world of sales, salespeople can no longer live in a silo. The ability to work together in a much more open and collaborative way is key to driving more sales and achieving greater success. Sales organizations need the right collaboration and communication tools to stay connected with the rest of the business, especially marketing, operations, and services teams. These tools must be mobile and must provide seamless social experiences. Microsoft has integrated essential capabilities into Microsoft Dynamics CRM, including Lync, Skype, Yammer, and SharePoint, to enable sales professionals to easily work with team members from within one CRM environment.

Lync and Skype provide a powerful and simple way to interact with colleagues, partners, and contacts. Salespeople can quickly find subject matter experts or decision makers and bring them into meetings to answer questions and get deals closed. Users see presence icons within Microsoft Dynamics CRM and can initiate an interaction in a single click.

Team members can also use Yammer to stay connected from within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Yammer enables salespeople to tap into the organizational knowledge of the entire company from any location. Conversations can occur within contact, account, lead, or opportunity records, giving you the ability to get the information you need from the right people at the right time. This makes it easy to find the people and resources you need to make decisions, get work done, and keep moving. It allows you to tap into the combined social intellect of your company to get answers fast.

Managing documents and information is a big part of selling, so rather than forcing teams to use a different document management solution, Microsoft SharePoint also works directly within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, ensuring that any team member working on a sales document, such as a presentation, proposal, or RFP, will be able to use the powerful co-authoring and version control capabilities.

Are you ready to work like a network? At Microsoft, we believe that enterprise social technologies have the power to transform the way companies do business and to deliver real value by making it easy for employees to connect, share information rapidly, and discover what they need to accomplish.

Put simply, our vision for Microsoft Enterprise Social is to empower companies to work like a network by delivering seamless social experiences across the familiar applications that people already use. Are you ready to work like a network?

Learn more about how Microsoft can help your company work like a network at www.enterprisesocial.com.

http://www.enterprisesocial.com


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Sources1 The State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders

Worldwide, Gallup, 2013

2 Yammer, 2013: https://about.yammer.com/yammer-blog/yammers-2013-business-value-survey-results-are-in/


4 Inside Communication, 2012


6 Yammer Business Trends Customer Survey, 2013

7 McKinsey & Company, 2013

8 CSO Insights

9 Aberdeen Research

The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.

This white paper is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this document.

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