Ross Mayfield, co-founder SocialText pointed me to a case study of Hayes Knight, an ST customer that in my view ‘gets’ the connections between socializing tools and CRM as applied to professional services firms. Progress at last. I’ve only been saying that firms need to grasp this way of working for the last five years. Frustrating at times.. (sic)
As background, Hayes Knight is a group of independent accounting firms in Australia bound under the same name operating out of nine Australian states with 42 directors and more than 300 staff. From the case study:
Hayes Knight’s knowledge management company, Knowledge Shop, provides a web-based member service subscribed to by 500 accounting firms and the thousands of accountants who work for them. It serves as a place for members to ask questions about accounting issues and get access to all kinds of tax and accounting information that experts at Knowledge Shop deal with everyday. The questions range from general accounting questions, to more complex tax advice issues.
The customer service representatives for Knowledge Shop use Salesforce.com to manage membership information, seminar registrations, and to assign and track questions for Knowledge Shop advisers. When a rep enters a question into Salesforce.com from a Knowledge Shop member, the service rep can push that question into Socialtext Signals with the click of a button. Even though the question is addressed to a specific tax adviser, Hayes Knight finds value in letting others see the questions being asked.
Then the Knowledge Shop adviser documents answers in Socialtext Workspaces, for current and future use. Once they’re completed, using a customized button inside Socialtext, they can send the proper answer back to Salesforce.com for processing.
SocialSignals is an ‘internal to the business’ variation of the instant messaging and group notification ideas behind Twitter. As to benefits:
“Signals allows us to respond faster,” Jack [Pedzikiewicz] told me recently in a video chat. “The speed with which we’re answering questions has been cut in half, and is a full 7?8 minutes faster on average. The wonderful thing is, as we capture these great answers inside of Socialtext workspaces, we also cut back on repetition where questions cover the same issue and build best of breed responses and knowledge on key issues of importance. It allows us to serve our customers faster and more consistently.”
The technical ins and outs matter less than the outcomes. In this case you can see they are getting faster response times. Equally important, knowledge is captured in SocialText for later re-use. In this sense, SocialText becomes the knowledge repository for the business. It can be updated as circumstances change so that content is always fresh and relevant. That trumps most knowledge management systems that are inherently document based. Documents are far harder to corral and keep up to date than digital assets.
Hayes Knight’s achievement should not be understated. This is a transformational change that is only possible because both SocialText and Salesforce.com are SaaS solutions. You simply could not get the same result from on-premise systems, even with sophisticated (and expensive) VPN technology.
