A new study from IDC commissioned by SAP has shown companies may lose as much as US$30,000 per employee per year due to inefficiency, with everyday tasks such as reading and responding to email, and searching for and gathering information sucking valuable time.
The study, on the business value of social solutions, found that collaboration technology can overcome some of these losses by enabling workers to connect and share information in real time.
Qualitative research white papers were developed for several lines of business – sales, customer service, human resources and marketing – to summarise what is most important to each and how collaboration platforms like SAP Jam can help them meet their KPIs.
It found collaboration platforms can meet line-of-business challenges by:
- For human resources, speeding up employee onboarding by connecting new hires with recommendations for people, content and training, and delivering intelligent filtering of appropriate training and development information.
- For customer services, facilitating open and transparent dialogue with customers throughout their relationship with a company.
- For marketing, connecting marketing teams with data from business users, customers, partners or suppliers to help reduce marketing costs and increase response time.
- For sales, connecting internal teams from across the company, ensuring rapid resolution of issues to accelerate sales cycles and improve customer interaction while reducing costs.
“Organisations should look to provide seamless experiences to their users by deeply integrating collaborative applications within existing enterprise systems and processes,” said Vanessa Thompson, research director, Enterprise Social Networks and Collaborative Technologies, IDC Research. “The ability to link employees, partners, suppliers and customers together in order to deliver right time information and context to interactions is at the epicentre of competitive differentiation.”
The IDC InfoBrief can be downloaded here, and read specific reports for sales, customer service, human resources and marketing lines of business.
