Overflow to Workflow: Business Problems Solved through Social Collaboration

Encore Capital Group, a debt-management and recovery solutions firm based in San Diego, California, needed to take information scattered among multiple IT products' chat and group-discussion platforms and aggregate it into a common, internal resource for employees. Most of the company's content resided in SharePoint, but nothing native to SharePoint offered the functionality they were looking for, particularly ensuring the publishing of individual conversations, used appropriately and accessible to the people who needed the information.

Encore wanted every department-Finance, Human Resources, Marketing, Customer Service, IT, and more-to have document repositories. The department sites would provide internal collaboration and promote employee engagement at an organizational level. At the same time, they wanted to provide employees access to certain information company-wide. This information would need to be protected by well-defined user roles and governance. To meet these needs, the customer began looking for a solution that would accomplish more than a conventional intranet site and could be accessed anywhere, anytime.

________

The Problem

· Information overflow, excessive use of emails within the organization.

· Lack of knowledge management, governance and user roles.

· Collaboration with mobile and remotely located workforce

The Solution

· SocialXtend leveraged their existing SharePoint 2010, integrated their existing sites and sub-sites with SocialXtend and giving Encore's 4,000 employees a common platform to have conversations, blog, share ideas, etc.

· It offered a single platform for collaborating, sharing and managing information across the organization with governance and rules in place.

The Result

· Increased employee engagement, over 2500+ active users collaborate from various offices. They could join communities based on the area of interest.

· Talent identification across departments: Because of active collaboration, it was easy to identify the users as experts, problem solvers, thought leaders who could be leveraged.

________

Encore implemented SharePoint 2010 on-premises to create their organization intranet. However, the intranet ended up being used as a document management solution. The user had to navigate through various libraries for accessing static information. This made the process very cumbersome and time-consuming, which ultimately led to a poor user experience and lower user engagement.

Getting employees engaged

To help them develop and implement a solution that would meet all of these needs, Encore engaged AgreeYa Solutions, a global provider of software, solutions and services to deploy SocialXtend -an enterprise social-collaboration tool leveraging their SharePoint 2010 infrastructure.

SocialXtend offers a centralized activity stream for disseminating information across Encore's entire organization. It also allows creation of dynamic workspaces called communities, groups and projects, based on the user-defined aggregation rules and access scopes. There is a single-access user console for every user to customize a workspace. Employees can team up in workspaces based on their interests, projects, expertise, corporate initiatives and so on. Dynamic workspaces allow for dialogue, networking, knowledge-sharing or project work appropriate to the content and purpose. SocialXtend facilitates rule-based sharing of content between Encore departments and users with a strong governance in place.

"SocialXtend allows companies to feel the pulse of the organization in real time. It helps create interactive employees, partners and customer communities that easily enable collaboration, communication and engagement. It's designed to empower employees, customers and partners anywhere, any time and with any mobile device." -- Ajay Kaul, Managing Partner of AgreeYa Solutions.

Preparing for more social collaboration

In order to launch the program successfully, they first identified the core problem areas and how to mitigate them. The next step was to replace the existing SharePoint portal with SocialXtend, based on on-premises installation. The team facilitated sessions for end users and administrators, which would enhance adoption. Throughout the process, AgreeYa developed customized features, including custom web components like "Top Stories," badges, polls, tags, blogs, wiki, and notifications. The team created requirement-specific XML driven, universal navigation. They helped Encore adjust their governance structure to prepare for a well adopted social collaboration.

More corporate intelligence, more employee participation

After implementation, Encore is enjoying increased employee engagement, clear identification of employees who contribute information, the ability to track employee participation. They are also capturing more knowledge, providing real-time communication enabling quick responses to questions from within the organization. Utilizing the SocialXtend's analytics features, Encore takes more fact based, timely decisions and measures to maintain the health of social network within the organization. Encore is also experiencing more efficient file sharing and document management with versioning, which reduced multiple emails.

"SocialXtend is one of those things that you don't know you need until you have it. It's kind of like email-once you have it, you can't imagine not having it," --Carl Eberling, CIO and SVP-IT, Encore Capital Group.