Every year Forrester’s Groundswell Awards recognize the most innovative social and mobile programs with a measurable business impact. Once again in the business-to-employee (B2E) category we received many outstanding examples of companies empowering their employees with these technologies to solve customer and business problems. This year’s entries highlight a growing sophistication in how companies are applying mobile and social to transform their operations. This year’s entries featured:
 
  • More complex mobile and social technology integrations. Both our Mobile winner and runner-up combined mobile forms and location data with a social application to more efficiently allocate resources in the field. We received multiple entries in the Collaboration category featuring companies applying gamification to communities and to CRM, and as well as integrations between real-time and asynchronous collaboration tools. These integrations multiply the power of the technologies and create new and interesting use cases. 
  • More targeted customer impacting applications. Customer-facing employees often represent a direct opportunity to show the business impact of social and mobile technologies. This year’s entries saw a number of applications to empower sales, field operations, and customer service roles with tools to increase customer engagement and improve satisfaction scores by speeding up delivery and equipping employees with the right information.
 
COLLABORATION PROGRAM
 
Winner: Enterasys Sales 2.0 by Enterasys
 
Enterasys credits a companywide revamp of its social business strategy in 2013 with improving transparency and collaboration in sales, increasing sales development by 30%. This multi-faceted program included deploying:
 
  1. insidesales.com to track call activity in Salesforce.com and using Hoopla with leaderboards on large screens to gamify the sales process. Hoopla integration with Chatter raised the visibility of individual sales activities, inviting more collaboration.
  2. Time Trade, a program to send short personal emails inviting prospects to self-schedule on salespeople’s calendars. This increased appointments by 10%.
  3. Influitive, an advocate marketing platform, to incent employees with status and rewards for helping to elevate the company’s public social profile. This led to a rise in employee activity representing Enterasys on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and other social sites. 
 
Enterasys credits these and other programs with helping it to maintain high NPS and customer satisfaction scores as well as low employee attrition.
 
 
Runner-up: T-Community by T-Mobile
 
T-Community is a resource for frontline representatives to collaborate with their peers and search for knowledge base articles so they can better answer customer questions. T-Mobile implemented Bunchball for gamification on top of Jive to motivate employees to sign up, explore the community, and post and answer questions. The platform has strong adoption among T-Mobile’s 30,000 frontline representatives. Resolution rates and customer satisfaction scores have improved every month since the program was implemented in May 2013.
 
 
MOBILE APPLICATION
 
Winner: Crawford CAT Connection by Crawford & Company
 
Crawford, a provider of claims management services used by major insurance providers, used the Appian BPM Suite to build a mobile app for adjusters to speed up claims management. In conjunction with a Crawford Community, an Appian-based social application, Crawford was able to centralize its disaster-related resource management. 
 
During the record-setting 2013 Canadian floods, 60 major Canadian and US insurers benefited from the CAT Connection app used to deploy 350 adjusters to specific sites in the affected region. The CAT Connection app handled 7,000 claims and helped providers begin processing those claims within 6 weeks.
 
Crawford uses device geo-location to pinpoint the closest and best adjuster for a given claim site. It then sends the assignment to the identified adjuster, who accepts it, gets to the location with Google Maps integration, and completes and uploads all forms (including images and voice notes) using the app.
 
 
 
 
DSNY deployed Field Force Manager, a mobile forms app powered by Xora, that was downloaded onto employees’ smartphones and tablets. During the Hurricane Sandy cleanup supervisors used the app to request special equipment to remove unusual debris. At headquarters, the location and other incoming information from the app allowed DSNY to visually monitor field operations and keep a detailed electronic record of cleanup activities.