23 Feb Collaborative Work Management
A recently published Forrester report, noted not surprisingly, that collaboration among customer facing employees is increasing by leaps and bounds as enterprises strive to provide more responsive and personalized service to differentiate their solutions.
Here is a snip from Forrester’s “Why Read this Article”:
When the customer is the central focus of a company’s strategy, its employees must work together more efficiently. Every day, employees focus their activities on helping their companies win, serve, and retain customers, even if the employees aren’t engaging face-to-face. Cross-functional and cross-organizational initiatives are becoming the norm, and sharing information is essential; unfortunately, employees require a multitude of applications to do this.
Later in the article, Forrester notes:
Enterprise Architect professionals and information workers of all types routinely work with globally distributed teams, partner ecosystems, and customers themselves to create products and services.
They work at offices, at client sites, from home, and while traveling, requiring access to a number of different data sources or applications to perform effectively. While firms continue to believe in collaboration, the technology available to them lags in pragmatic application. Collaboration is central to customer obsession.
- Workers collaborate frequently on product and service information with coworkers. Employees’ work networks continue to expand. As part of their day-to-day jobs, 27% of employees collaborate with six to 10 other employees, the size of an average team, while 19% collaborate with 26 or more coworkers
- They increasingly access information while on the go. People are working more frequently away from their desks because they are telecommuting or traveling. More than half of the respondents replied that they routinely use smartphones or tablets to perform activities related to their job.
Does this sound like your work environment? Distributed employees; sales, service, professional services, marketing, training and business development all interacting across time zones, states, provinces, and countries? Smartphones and tablets galore? Collaboration among employees and customers?
How do your employees effectively collaborate in that environment? How much time do they waste trying to find information in a crowded email Inbox or searching through complicated file and folder structures that they didn’t create? In a separate study, Forrester notes that their research has identified that employees focused on the customer experience spend between half a day and a full day EVERY WEEK looking for information. Ten to twenty percent of a work week of is a lot of wasted productivity! Can your company afford that?
In a recent webinar, 451 Research found that 46% of the corporations on the call used email to collaborate. Almost all employees today receive between 50 and 100 emails per day and some even exceed those thresholds. How does an employee find the most current information in an overcrowded email Inbox? Most employees normally sort on the name of the person who sent the original document, but what if someone else provided the latest version in the serial email review process. How does the employee find it? In most cases, they don’t and they wind up using an out of date version of the document and provide incorrect information to the customer. What is the business risk associated with that action?
Clearly, as identified by Forrester, enterprises today have significant opportunities to improve productivity and timeliness while reducing risk by implementing improved collaboration tools.
SavvyDox, a cloud based SaaS solution, ensures that the right people get the right document on the right device (Tablet, Smartphone, PC, or Mac). The recipients can file the document wherever they wish so that it can be found in 3 taps on all devices. The recipients always have the current copy of the document on their device thanks to a parallel review process that provides benefits similar to a face to face meeting. SavvyDox syncs the distributed copies on the devices to the cloud server master copy regardless of where they are stored so that they can be accessed on line or offline. Changes since the last version that the recipient read are clearly identified by page thumbnails to eliminate having to re-read the entire document to locate changes. Recipients can even see which changes are approved by the author and which changes are merely suggested changes from other reviewers.
If you want to improve productivity & timeliness and reduce business risk at your company while addressing the opportunities identified by Forrester and 451 Research , give SavvyDox a test drive. Sign up for a free trial of collaboration among a group of employees at www.savvydox.com at the “Downloads” tab.