“The world is shifting from a more traditional printed world to a more digital world, be it on the web or mobile or even possibly other technologies,” said Andre Boisvert, Chief Architect at Yellow Pages Group. “Now, not only does that mean we need to change the products that we sell to customers, but also it has a profound impact on the organization and the way we have to work internally and with our customers.”
Andre joined us for a webinar, hosted by Principal Analyst Angela Ashenden from MWD Advisors, to talk about how enterprise social networking is transforming business at Yellow Pages Group.
“In a digital world it’s more of a continuous sales cycle and customers will upgrade or cancel their products in a much more continuous and unpredictable cycle,” Andre said. “Our sales and marketing organization and our fulfillment organization needed to adapt to it. That’s really a profound transformation from our perspective, and that drove the need for a collaboration platform.”
Andre explained several benefits Yellow Pages receives from the tibbr social platform:
- Mobility – “Our team is highly mobile,” Andre said, with reps meeting with customers across the country. “We need to make sure that we enabled our mobile sales force and that we had very open communication both from a content perspective, but also from a flow of communication between the various departments. We wanted to make sure people could refer back to all of the conversations that took place.”
- One Central Place – Part of the reason Yellow Pages went with tibbr is because they wanted one place to centralize knowledge and interact with various tools they use: Box.com, Taleo, Liferay portal and so forth. Yellow Pages also deployed single sign on, so employees would only login once. “The solution is a composition of both software as a service as well as an in-house solution,” Andre said. “I think over time, this becomes the de facto way of doing things in enterprise deployment. … The solution is available for our employees whether they’re in the intranet or outside of the organization, whether they’re at Starbucks or from home.”
- Expertise Location – Rather than asking your colleague down the hall, “With a collaboration platform you broadcast your message and people are more easy to reach,” Andre said. To further leverage expertise, Yellow Pages also implemented a global search feature. “So with use of a simple keyword, people could find information from a different angle, from a different perspective, which makes those answers far richer than looking at one specific area.”
- Faster Onboarding – “There’s a history of conversations,” Andre said. “There is formal documentation and then there is informal knowledge, where you meet the people and discuss… Now people with access have a faster ramp up.”
- Interdepartmental Conversations – “We need to make sure the interactions between various departments were a lot tighter,” Andre said. With tibbr, “We have interdepartmental conversations that I think with other platforms would not have occurred.”
Along with the benefits mentioned, Andre added that they chose tibbr for it’s ease of use, multilingual functionality, advanced mobile apps, integration capabilities and security.
Just after a month of deploying tibbr, Yellow pages has had 25,000 posts. Plus, over 80% of users added their profile picture – a good sign of engagement. “The level of adoption has been very good,” Andre said. “The people in sales appreciate it a lot.”
Next week we’ll dive into the key steps Yellow Pages’ used to drive adoption. So stay tuned.
