Socialtext: Solutions: Professional Services & Client Relations

Overview HR & Corporate Communications Marketing & Sales Field Service Professional Services Partner Management

Whether you’re part of a management consulting firm, a marketing services firm, a law firm, or other professional services provider – you likely have multiple client teams, each made up of different people, perhaps spread across locations and time zones. Adding to this complexity, teams often involve outside specialists such as contractors or other firms, some of whom are working with your company for the first time. With each new client, you configure a new team. And each time you add a new team member, you need to onboard quickly, and also re-establish how the team will collaborate. Each team member has a tremendous amount of talent and experience; clients pay well for this talent and expect it to be fully utilized.

If your company is in the business of serving clients, you know the challenges of enabling distributed teams to work together efficiently and effectively:

How can you fully leverage the valuable experience and perspectives of colleagues within a team, as well as across teams?
How can you spur creative thinking to bring truly innovative ideas to a client or solve a particular challenge a client has posed?
How do you do this in a way that benefits other client teams, so you drive learning and innovation across the business?
How can you make sure every team fully leverages all the resources available from other teams – best practices, methodologies, thought leadership, what has worked, presentations, proposals and other materials that were successful in moving a client forward?
How do you present a unified front to clients – with all information and materials always up to date?
How do you get clients highly energized and engaged, and make the engagement collaborative?
How do you do all this while minimizing the amount of time your talented resources have to spend on communication overhead, or searching for information?

In order to deliver the most highly effective client services, you need a way to tap into and leverage colleagues, continuously and effortlessly. Everyone needs a way to leverage each others’ knowledge and expertise, follow each others’ best practices and methodologies, and re-use each others’ work. You also need a way to keep everyone on the team – team members and clients alike – equipped with the latest materials and status, and alerted to new information and changes. You need a way to instantly spur an active conversation that generates new ideas and solutions for clients, drawing on all the talent and perspectives in your diverse organization. And you need a way to engage clients and all team members in active, ongoing conversations on important topics.

With the Socialtext collaboration platform, services firms have the tools needed to drive the most effective client services and the highest client engagement. Each team can work transparently and openly in front of clients, which keeps everyone on the same page and alerted to new information and changes, without communication overhead. Everyone is aware of what you are working on, as a simple byproduct of doing your work. Colleagues can spend a larger percentage of time producing good work rather than keeping team members and clients up to date. New team members can quickly absorb the conversations that have transpired, and the work underway, bringing themselves up to speed quickly without taking any of your expensive people offline.

When a team needs special knowledge or expertise, anyone can quickly browse or search to discover the expertise in the organization that can inform the project or decision. When a team needs to spur new ideas that leverage the creativity and talent of the organization, you can instantly start a new conversation that not only makes it easy for everyone to pitch in but also captures the ideas and thinking into living, breathing corporate memory. With everything searchable and findable, you and your colleagues can collectively build a portfolio of best practices and material to be leveraged and re-used. Socialtext lets professional services organizations leverage the power of people, which is critical for a dispersed staff that carries a big responsibility to clients.

Your client teams can rapidly implement the Socialtext solution internally, as an intranet, to accelerate project cycles by 25% and spur innovation. As you get comfortable, you can create extranet workspaces for use with clients, for greater client intimacy, retention and co-creation of value.

Socialtext's solution for professional services combines our collaboration platform with a number of surrounding resources created for client services teams: our own customer success methodology tailored to best practices for client teams, and dozens of templates – for workspace pages and dashboards – designed specifically for client engagement teams.

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