Collaboration drives teamwork, innovation and increases productivity. That is our experience at Orange from using enterprise social networking (ESN) tools to empower workers and teams. We have established that in addition to the latest technologies and mobility solutions, enterprise social collaboration tools are also an important element of B2B transformation. In fact they have become enablers of our own digital transformation.
Internal ESN driving new benefits
Business leaders want a highly-engaged workforce that collaborates to achieve their business goals. ESN helps with that aim, and ESN technologies have been on the rise in the workplace since 2011.
As stated by Gartner research report “the rise of Enterprise Social Media Networks (ESNs) in the workplace” that with more 2.3 billion users online, 70% of companies are projected to adopt enterprise social media networks by the end of 2017.
At Orange we completely transformed the way we work by creating “Plazza”, which is a digital workplace based on Jive software. It is a platform-independent portal where we perform all kinds of content management and collaboration. We migrated all our presentations, newsletters and other resources onto it, so that Orange staff can access that huge knowledge base no matter where they are. But it is not just a corporate portal, we use it to gain champions and sponsors as well, and we emphasise the social side of it too. For this we include social events, challenges and more.
We also use Plazza to foster innovation and ideas. We assign a “leader” to each community who is responsible for coming up with new ideas and then biannually we hand out awards to top communities participants. We even have titles for them, Our “Plazza Lord or Plazza Queen”!
Taking internal benefits external
What works for us could be just as effective for our external customers. So we asked the question, “Dear customers, if you are ready to go digital with us, know all the updates at your fingerprint and never miss a thing, then it is the time to use our ESN and will make this happen for you! ”
Two years ago we introduced the ‘Orange International Customer Community’, an online community where we could keep our customers up to date with the latest updates, user guides, links to product offerings and more. We called it the Orange Hub and today, ESN allows us be much more interactive.
We built our new collaboration platform to keep in contact and collaborate with customers and other external parties. We have included a plug-in that integrates with Microsoft Office and allows people to use Outlook, Internet Explorer and other programs to receive updates and alerts.
We continue to build these ESN platforms for our customers and external partners. We are adding an innovation channel that focuses on ongoing Orange innovation initiatives, and adding Orange Start-up as well as Orange Fab where customers and partners can keep up to date with all that is going on in Orange Labs. We invite interactivity, with the ‘Create an Idea’ channel encouraging customers to submit their own ideas which are assessed, voted on and then potentially developed in Orange Labs.
Customers can log on and access all the latest Orange press releases and news and watch video interviews with Orange senior executives. All this and more is offered in a digital way that makes it accessible anytime, anywhere in the world! Because the biggest difference that our Orange Hub has these days is that thanks to ESN capabilities, all of this is a two-way channel and can take place in real time. It is not just a website or a portal – it is all now genuinely collaborative – it is a Community!
Bringing customers on board
What we want to achieve next is to continue raising awareness of these tools amongst customers. The collaborative nature of ESN makes us at Orange more productive, more flexible and better able to serve our customers. It is happening now. So if we are enjoying the benefits internally, why wouldn’t we tell our customers about it and encourage them to use these great technologies too?
Customers do not need to worry about platforms migration from old legacy products to the new digital communication platforms because Orange manages these activities from beginning -to-end. We have launched a dedicated community management expertise team that serves customers worldwide, solving any problems until the successful launch of the community. We also help customers increase the speed of adoption by giving them training and preparing digital user guides on how to use the community. We evaluate their old legacy products and their old adoption techniques, then propose a customized adoption methodology for how they can leverage ESN in their own day to day activities and, moreover, generate a solid ROI by decreasing escalation calls, increasing employees’ productivity, reducing their time to market, lowering knowledge management portal costs and maintenance efforts and much, much more!
Already four significant customer user groups have been launched using the new ESN technologies covering International and Europe regions and we are planning as well to launch one for Middle East and Africa region scheduled for H1 2017.
If this sounds exciting to you and your company, and you are ready to take the next step forward to digital transformation then now is the time for Orange to make it happen for you!
Come enjoy our journey as much as we do.
Read more about how Orange helps customers enjoy the many benefits of collaboration using ESN, and speak to Yasmina Fahmy out about our community management expertise, skills and capabilities.
