Jeff Koski, Senior Director of IT, API Healthcare comments on Social Business...

********************************
http://www.constellationrg.com/protostar-profile-jeff-koski-api-healthcare/
 

Jeff launched Client Connections, a social platform, to reduce call center volume and serve as a two-way communication portal between clients and all lines of business.

"We promised our customers that API Healthcare would provide a platform - an online social community - that enabled them to network with industry peers and associates within our company, and benefit from:

• Self-Service Support: Search content to solve problems independently, prior to engaging us with a ticket.
• Support Delivered via Community: Submit forum threads with support questions and/or answer threads within the community. Even if we as the vendor answer a support thread, it still saves a support call and a potential ticket.
• Project Collaboration: An area has been created in each client's group to manage our implementation projects, which enables us to store and share project materials and collaborate on specifics of a project with the client.
• Innovation: Committee groups allow our clients and Product Managers to collaborate on product improvements, upcoming releases, and other topics related to our vision and roadmap for our solutions.

We see a great deal of value and opportunity for the original stakeholders of this project and a growing contingency of other areas in the company. Benefits include:

• Improved Client Relationships: Project materials and collaboration for client service and software implementations are now managed in the community, which gives clients a central location to manage their team and to align with the API Healthcare team.
• Collaborative R&D and Innovation: Our Product Management and Engineering teams are establishing product groups in the community that they are inviting Client Advisory Groups to contribute to via discussions and to share product materials.

Platform for Influential Messaging: Marketing has used the platform as the primary communication channel to our client base for company-wide announcements."

Q. Client Connections was successfully launched during the keynote at API's Annual User Conference. What was the message conveyed, and how did it entice people to join the network?

A. In August of 2009 our CEO announced at our Annual User Conference in Milwaukee to all of our client attendees that API Healthcare would provide a platform that enabled them to network with their industry peers as well as the associates within our company.

We provide solutions to over 1,000 hospitals, health care systems and staffing agencies primarily throughout the United States, so our customers were eager to build on the relationships that we already established. The value proposition of communication with peers and our employees was significant to our customers who desire an easy, social way of connecting to and collaborating with one another. They latched onto the idea because we offered them online support, a robust search tool to find useful information and a way to easily connect with stakeholders across our organization.

Q. What did you hope to accomplish with implementation of this network, and has the network helped you achieve those goals?

A.  The key business objectives that we looked to accomplish were:

* Replace our existing web-based client support portal

* Provide a robust search tool for our support content

* Leverage the collaborative nature of social networking to work towards a self-supporting community to facilitate a reduction in call center support volume

* Establish an active client community that could serve as a communication channel between our company and our clients that would be valuable to all lines of business

As a result of our launch efforts, we had immediate activity on the site and have sustained a consistent level of usage. Much of the usage is focused around the client's support tickets, which are part of just about every client's normal activity with us as a vendor.

We are seeing a great deal of value and opportunity for the original stakeholders of this project and a growing contingency of other areas in the company. To name a few benefits:

* Improved Client Relationships

* Collaborative R&D and Innovation

* Platform for Influential Messaging

Q. Client Connections is built on Telligent -why did you choose this particular platform?

A. We chose Telligent for the key reasons listed below; our selection process encompassed a cross-functional business team from our company that consisted of employees from IT, Engineering, Support, Marketing and Operations. After researching the overall social networking landscape we narrowed the search down to three vendors. The key factors to us selecting Telligent as our vendor were:

* Platform: Telligent's community-based platform fit well with the initial client solution we looked to rollout.

* Social Tools: The social elements of the platform were cleanly and consistently integrated.

* Integration: The ability to integrate Telligent with Outlook and SharePoint out of the box.

* Customer References: Many of Telligent's clients were service and support vendors.

* Technology: The .NET development platform was important as we wanted the ability to extend the product and work with their platform APIs to both customize the site and integrate it with our internal applications.

* Analytics: The social analytics available was a key differentiator from the other finalists.

Q. Given API Healthcare's specific goals, how does your team measure the efficacy of Client Connections?

A. The metrics prior to the launch of the site centered on the number of support calls/e-mails received and the number of support tickets created. Our goal was to build a community that would move towards a self-supported model.

Once we launched the site, some of the metrics that we began to track were:

* Unique users

* Searches

* Impact on ticketing support volume

* User counts, types of user activity

* Page views

* Forum posts and views

* Wiki views

These metrics helped us to quickly gauge how many clients were using the sites, what types of social users they were, where they were going and ultimately how they were using it to manage their support issues and tickets with us.

In addition, we are also evaluating the value of project collaboration for client accounts as well as new ideas, product enhancement suggestions and input for upcoming releases to improve our solution roadmap.

Q. What are some positive unintended results of Client Connections?

A. An online community enables us to move beyond customer support and create stronger relationships with our customers while supporting project collaboration and group-wide innovation. Some of the areas that we are actively promoting and working on are:

* Self-Service Support: Searching the content to solve problems independently, prior to engaging us with a ticket

* Support Delivered via Community: Submitting forum threads with support questions and/or answering threads within the community. Even if we as the vendor answer a support thread, it still saves a support call and a potential ticket.

* Project Collaboration: An area has been created in each client's group to manage our implementation projects. This enables us to store and share project materials and collaborate on specifics of a project with the client.

* Innovation: Committee groups have been created to allow our clients and Product Managers to collaborate on product improvements, upcoming releases, and other topics related to our vision and roadmap for the solutions we provide.

Q. What advice can you give to another company looking to launch a program similar to what API Healthcare has built?

A.  * Know your users/community members. Get as many of them in the community during beta as you can and be prepared to adjust based on their feedback.

* Layout and organization of content is key. Incorporate stakeholders from across key teams to ensure that you foster engagement and provide valuable resources so your customers and employees can easily communicate and collaborate for support, find helpful information and share ideas.

* Don't undervalue initial and ongoing training. Everyone is busy. Clients or our employees will not go to the site unless they feel it is going to help them accomplish their tasks and improve their working environment. It is our job to educate and lead them to this conclusion.