Social Business Software: Solutions that Address Top Business Needs

In order to thrive, businesses must transform their relationships and connections with all their

communities, including customers, members, partners and employees. This is especially true for

businesses that: have a high percentage of knowledge workers, are heavily reliant on brand

recognition and loyalty, need to maintain a strong reputation to build credibility and customer

trust. Choosing the right social business software has become a critical step in successfully

managing the key business functions of marketing and sales, customer service and product

development.

Given the expanded role of social media in the lives of most individuals, customers have

heightened expectations when interacting with a company—in other words, they expect social

customer service. Enabling all your groups to communicate, share and collaborate easily in a

community where you control the user experience opens up powerful strategic advantages,

including the ability to:

engage with customers, employees and partners in a valuable way that makes information

and experts easy to find, at the same time as it builds and strengthens your communities;

use the power of gaming mechanics that incent improved productivity of your employees

and reward customers and partners for their positive contributions;

build your brand through interconnectedness, attracting stronger sales prospects at every

stage of interaction;

achieve efficiency through streamlined communication and enable quick response to end-

user feedback.

Moving your company into the arena with enterprises that fully implement social technologies

could achieve an increase in productivity by as much as 20 to 25 percent2. Integrating a social

business platform like HiveSocial offered by Enterprise Hive into your business workflows will

transform your relationships with employees, customers and partners. The result will be to drive

customer satisfaction to new levels as you reduce costs and increase sales.

HiveSocial is a SaaS platform that simplifies the management of complex relationships between

and among employees, customers and partners with collaboration spaces that include such

features as wikis, forums, document management, training tools with digital certificates to teach

and reward employee achievement, as well as sophisticated gaming mechanics that reward and

incent users for their contributions.

Interacting with customer communities through game mechanics gives a company more control

over its brand and user experience in the open arena of social business. Games or quests can lead

customers to help solve each other’s issues, create positive content and share best practices

through simple techniques like awarding points. Adding awards for achieving certain levels can

improve employee productivity, decrease support costs, build community and strengthen

customer loyalty. There are opportunities to layer in even more levels of interaction and create a

greater sense of community by recognizing top contributors through leaderboards as well as with

badges, certificates or coupons.

Transforming your organization into a social business will position a company to address three

key business needs:

knowledge sharing—encourage easy social collaboration among all connected

communities (customers, employees, partners);

customer engagement— empower customers through social customer service by

interacting with them and quickly responding to their needs;

expert discovery—maximize the knowledge base contained within communities, making

it easy to find the person with the needed expertise at just the right time.

Ultimately, the enterprise that adopts these approaches will improve employee productivity while

decreasing costs, increase customer satisfaction that builds brand loyalty and grow exponentially.

Bio: Enterprise Hive, based in Irvington, Virginia, creates social business software solutions

including its flagship community platform, HiveSocial. Using cloud-based technology,

HiveSocial delivers a secure, private online experience that empowers all employees, customers

and partners to connect and collaborate. HiveSocial offers a dynamic mix of social business

features including content management, game mechanics and advanced communication and

collaboration tools. Enterprise Hive proudly practices sustainability and resource conservation in

their product development methods, and supports many philanthropic and volunteer activities.

1. ”Social Business Software: Addressing Three Top Business Needs,” Enterprise Hive White Paper, by Vicki

Tambellini, Julian Andronic and Lauren Hart Piper.

2. “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies,” McKinsey Global

Institute Report , July 2012; by Michael Chui, James Manyika, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Charles

Roxburgh, Hugo Sarrazin, Geoffrey Sands and Magdalena Westergren.