The endless aisle. The outdoor gear and apparel retailer Moosejaw Mountaineer has 11 retail stores in the U.S., with 80% of sales (70% of in-store) coming from online and mobile commerce . Store associates use iPod touch and mini-iPads to check competitive prices and extend a price match. If a store does not carry what a shopper is looking for, store associates order the item online if it is in the warehouse and ship it to the customer for free.
To address obstacles to high performance, including a lack of collaboration and ability to share, you need the power of social business. Keep in mind, social doesn’t mean a stack of software tools. Instead, it is a way of doing business that offers a seamless flow of information, context and activity across different applications and business activities.
Via CMS Wire
“Leadership in networks does not come from above, as there is no top.”
Social businesses are designed to share expertise. But all too often requests for information go ignored. It seems people would rather say nothing than say they can’t help you.
Some tips for getting answers from Quentin Smeltzer on the Smarter Commerce blog:
And if you’re the one getting the request from a colleague, remember that external customers are the ultimate beneficiary of sharing:
A winning company is one that understands that everyone’s job is helping everyone, and acts accordingly.
“When I think about the successes in Silicon Valley, many of the most enduring were business model innovations.”
With its new European Data Center, IBM will help meet each customer’s unique deployment needs through flexible delivery models, including either public or private cloud or a mix of cloud and on premises.
Once live, companies can tap into IBM’s integrated social experience that includes one-click access to tools such as online meetings, email, calendaring, instant messaging and more. To further empower customers, IBM lets businesses invite external partners, clients, suppliers and more to take part in these interactions, all while meeting legal and regulatory requirements for data privacy.
For example, to improve the speed of marketing and sales execution, employees can build collaborative networks in real time, both internally and externally. With one click, employees can tap into the power of presence awareness capabilities to see if colleagues are online to chat about the plan, review the document, and engage in collaborative and concurrent real-time editing. When questions require outside input, the team can quickly invite partners, suppliers, clients and others into the community to review project work as well as other related items.
Boyd defines collaborative as top-down compared to more networked and social co-operative work environment.
(via Stowe Boyd, Social is the new production line, not the new water cooler — GigaOM Pro)
New IBM Customer Experience Lab focuses on CEO priorities
Yesterday IBM announced the creation of the IBM Customer Experience Lab, an exclusive Research and GBS capability aimed at the front-office agenda of clients in the world of Big Data. One hundred Research scientists worldwide will work with thousands of GBS business consultants to address the emerging C-Suite Front Office Digitization priorities.
Banorte-lxe, one of the leading banks in Latin America, and Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, are among clients already engaged with the Research and consulting experts of the new lab. During its start-up phase, the Lab will focus on six priority industries — Banking, Insurance, Retail, Consumer Products, Telco and Energy & Utilities — and we are going to select and manage the engagements coming into the Lab through GBS Global Industry Leaders and partners.
One of the most powerful things about enterprise collaboration platforms is their ability to make your company more agile and adaptable. This means that things are going to change and you need to be ok with that. What kind of change are we talking about? Everything has the potential to change ranging from the type of clothing your employees wear to work every day (moving from suits to a more casual style) to your corporate policies to your reporting structure to new roles and titles to how employees are compensated. I’m not saying all of things will change but they can. They key here isn’t to fight back against change but to become more nimble and agile. Don’t be scared to change and know that you are going to have to in order to become successful.
“Understand the social network not as your new water cooler, but as your new production line.”
