 "Anmol Nautiyal")
Social analytics is the way ahead for any enterprise that is consumer facing and aiming to tap the potential target customers and retain them. According to a recent EY study, 90 per cent of the surveyed companies spend up to 15 per cent of their marketing budgets exclusively on social media - up from 78 per cent in 2013. Around 69 per cent companies said social media helped them understand the perception of the brand better while 53.9 per cent said social media led to better insights about their audience. Rings a bell?
We have experienced a new age where we are undergoing a digital transformation that has never been seen before. Today people have access to unlimited amount of information and they can instantly share that information with anyone around the world. Additionally, they have more choice of companies that they can do business with. This digital reality is both liberating and empowering. Today when people choose a company, they expect that company to know them, listen to them and serve them flawlessly. And if one company cannot do that, they will find another one to do that as simply as clicking on their smartphones or tapping their tablets. Is your organisation ready to adopt this digital transformation?
The challenge: In every industry, business leaders recognise that this new set of customers is putting tremendous pressure on them, on their strategy and the values that they provide to their customers. Our global CEO insight study shows how fast and how far companies can go through digital.
Transforming the business
In our report, CEOs ranked technology as the prime tool to reinvent engagement. Believing the impact of emerging technologies on their organisations will be profound, CEOs anticipate three areas for action: 1) embrace disruption; 2) build shared values; 3) dare to be open.
Embrace disruptions: The dynamics of working in an organisation have changed. First, employees used to bring mobile devices to work; next, they brought social networks inside. This led to entirely new ways of working - the social business. Most recently, sharing economy - where individuals trade with each other for everything from places to stay overnight to business services - has created a new construct for commerce. That's a competitive threat unimaginable just a few years ago. Innovation and leveraging technology not only for external audience but for internal employees is what many industries have started implying. For instance, Polaris FT, a global leader in financial technology for banking, insurance and other financial services adopted social business and transformed how its 12,500 employees connect, communicate and collaborate to drive greater workforce productivity. Deploying a secure and highly customisable enterprise social platform allowed Polaris to create a flexible environment that is able to capture valuable insights and more easily engage all key stakeholders - employees, customers, partners and suppliers - to accelerate innovation and deliver results.
Converging technologies push the envelope on digital innovations. But the biggest disruption most often occurs at the intersection of the physical and digital. As social, mobile, analytics and cloud technologies intersect and amplify each other, entirely new possibilities take shape. Any strategy to capitalise on them will have to favour continuous iteration, make room for widespread experimentation and a workforce that can adapt to this transformation.
Build shared values: While it is important to know and adapt, sharing the values and wisdom can make the entire working system agile. To create a consumer-first strategy, a company has to know its customers better and deliver personalised experiences. While many organisations are facing disruption from new competitors, a growing number are inviting their customers to disrupt them first. This might mean a miss to the opportunity created by mobile and social to understand your consumers and serve them better than competition, or losing them forever before you could even serve. Social collaboration and digital experience are the keys to enable real-time knowledge sharing, increased productivity and faster innovation via introduction of an integrated set of tools.
Dare to open: The benefits of collaboration have long been apparent. While we are seeing traction, it will not be wrong to say that the 'science' of collaboration is just emerging. We are beginning to better understand how collaboration works - how to foster human connections across complex networks, create new models of engagement and cultures of transparency. In many respects, trust and data are the two facets of a social business. To facilitate both fact-based consensus and data-driven innovation discoveries, data must be democratised. We have seen in our studies that the most analytically sophisticated organisations share data more freely. Once they do so, it alters the power structure, effectively flattening the organisation and creating a culture of openness and transparency.
CEOs in just about every industry have learnt that customers, partners and employees that collaborate can go further, faster in an era of runaway innovation. Many are pushing the boundaries on their organisations as a result - opening up to empower collaboration among individuals, and moving away from command-and-control hierarchies. As per IBM C-suite study, in just one year the number of CEOs determined to open up their organisations has increased an astounding 27 per cent.
To sum up, expanding partnerships to deepen innovation capabilities will speed the discovery of new technologies and business models. Organisations that understand the benefits of collaboration and identify new ways to serve customers holistically will define new business ecosystems and generate maximum benefit. Leaders must recognise that emerging technologies are what make them stand out and get a hold of their consumers in long run.
Anmol Nautiyal
Director, IBM Social Business & IBM Smarter Workforce
