Measuring Influence with Employees

For this blog, I will select a company that uses social media to effectively communicate with their employees. The company I will use for this exercise will be T-Mobile (for the record I am a Verizon customer). I will provide my analysis in the form of responses to the following questions:

Question 1: What are they doing to communicate effectively with their employees?

After doing some research, I found that T-Mobile has recently implemented Social Business Software in its retail sales outlet. The particular type of media they are utilizing is Jive-powered community, which they call T-Community. Employees use this community on a daily basis to find information to do their jobs. By being able to deliver information faster to employees, T-Mobile is able to operate smarter and faster.

Take for example T-Mobile’s philosophy that there are two types of customers that visit their outlets:

1. Those with troubleshooting questions
2. Those that want to purchase a product or service 

The new T-Community allows employees to cater to both types of customers without having login to multiple systems to get answers. T-Mobile feels this new T-Community provides sales representatives with the following:

• The right information fast
• Improved support for a consultative sale
• Establish customer relationships (onboarding) without giving up customer service 

The corporate offices of T-Mobile use the T-community to answers questions employees might have regarding business issues and processes. Additionally, T-Community is being used for training employees on how to deal with customer related issues such as, the customer “walk-out” rate.

Question 2: What are your recommendations for how they should measure their influence?

T-Mobile can utilize employee surveys to gain information about how effective T-Community is to their jobs. The company should be able to determine the overall impression of their T-Community, at a relatively inexpensive price. T-Mobile could also utilize customer surveys to gauge how their overall shopping experience was. If the customers tend to feel that sales reps did not have the answers to their questions, then the T-Community is meeting expectations.

Additionally, T-Mobile could do a data comparison of their sales during busy periods versus the busy periods pre-T-Community. This would allow T-Mobile to evaluate the “walk-out” rate and whether there is any improvement. T-Mobile could also measure to see if there is a reduction in the amount of issues that require more than call to be resolved. If T-Community functioning properly, the sales reps would be more informed and would not have to make extra calls to the customers to solve issues.

Question 3: Do you have any suggestions for improvements they could make in their communications?

I do not have any recommendations at this time. In addition to the applications mention above, T-Mobile uses their community for the following:

• Gather employees feedback on new products prior to product launch
• As an active communication channel between corporate and store managers to relay merchandizing ideas
• To relay new policies
• To report store performance and track inventory 

It appears that T-Mobile is maximizing its use of their new T-Community. Based on my research, T-Mobile has reported that their sales reps have demonstrated a 30% increase in product knowledge because of this Jive powered community. Additionally, retail outlets have shown a 2% reduction in issues that require more than one call because of more product knowledge. T-Mobile equates this 2% percent improvement in customer service to millions of dollars in savings per year in operational costs.

References: http://www.jivesoftware.com/customers/case-studies/t-mobile.