Aberdeen Study: Embrace Social Software and Improve Business Performance

Social software can help a company improve their core business processes and performance across the enterprise — from sales and marketing to support and product management — and it’s something we strive to highlight through case study work and blog posts about our customers.

But, as is an age-old problem for proponents of collaborative technologies, it’s sometimes difficult to show these benefits quantitatively. So when Aberdeen Group sent us some hard data that proved companies that embraced social software as a strategic, enterprise wide-initiative saw improvements in business performance, we were very happy to sponsor it (click here for a free copy).

The report surveyed 300 enterprises, and broke them down into three categories based on the maturity and sophistication of their social software adoption (best-in-class, industry average and laggard). I encourage anyone considering the benefits of social software to read the entire report, but here’s a few highlights:

1. Companies that widely harnessed social software (best-in-class) took on average 11 hours to bring a response team together for a key business threat, while industry average companies took 105 hours and laggards 113.
2. Best in class companies took five months to complete key strategic projects, while industry average companies took 8 months and laggards a staggering 14 months.
3. Best-in-class companies saw a 36 percent decrease in time to enact key business changes based on customer feedback, while laggards experienced a 17 percent increase.

This data about social software improving business performance mirrored what the Deloitte Center for the Edge found in its research about Socialtext customer OSIsoft. During a webinar for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Deloitte reported that OSIsoft saw a 22 percent decrease in the time it took to resolve customer support issues due to its use of social software for handling exceptions to business process.

The Socialtext team has been thrilled with these findings, and we look forward to sharing more customer stories like this soon.

aberdeen group, business value, Enterprise 2.0, research

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