Wikiportal : How Customer Centricity drives Change

Magic Happens !! – How  Customer Centricity drives Change, The Wikiportal Story ..

I had never heard about Social Computing , Sales Collaboration when I took over this assignment.  The only brief I had for my job was “to make sales & knowledge processes useful for the sales team so that there is significant business impact created” . Coming from a program management background  I had no idea about Developing Portals , marketing , branding , Building a unique customer Experience. The team assigned to work with me had developers , designers , communication experts each with independent and strong view on how we should create a change .

Within 2 weeks of taking over all of this became overwhelming .  A team with no clear idea of what to do , “I was a manager with no idea of how to align individual aspirations with organizations expectations” .  

It thus became evident that to get this team has to work together there has to be a broader purpose to succeed beyond the “just employment” . While the team constitution was based on individual specialization .  To succeed together they needed a common motivation .

To build this motivation,  I got them together for a workshop and white boarded all the ideas . Keeping the session open , I encouraged team members that we capture all the ideas without any prejudice.  Idea list soon,  went into pages . Once everyone was exhausted ,  I converted their ideas into a simple survey and decided to put it to our internal customers (Sales team) for validation .  As the responses started pouring I could see a direction emerging . Sales team had responded to us with the clear list of benefits they were looking to derive from the “Sales Collaboration Portal” . Each of the team member had now realized the value of their ideas .  “The joy of getting their ideas reinforced by customers was a much needed acknowledgement of their individual thought”. This was all that was needed to bring the team together”.

With all the requirements available to us we prioritized the responses  on a simple 2X2 Cost Vs Benefit matrix and prepared a development plan . There was a new spark in the team who now wanted to see their ideas come to life. The energy was infectious . We decided to call the sales collaboration portal as WikiPortal , Since Wiki was a synonym of Building knowledge by collaboration .  While the development team was busy in testing and bug proofing the product , The marketing team had started the work on launch campaign .

Though WikiPortal  had multiple benefits to reduce time in sales lifecycle and had unique features such as

–          “Solve my sales bottleneck” , An online sales helpdesk to assist them in complex sales cycle

–          “Gallery”  of best sales proposals , Win themes and secrets

–          “Collaterals” – Live and updated sales collaterals for all the service offerings

We kept the launch based on single proposition which was “Find the right collateral first time every time” .  None of us was sure about what the sales manager could search , There could be thousands of  keywords combinations . However we all took a risk and decided to take on ourselves , to find the right collateral and send it to sales team by email in case the search failed to deliver the right result .  This was the highest degree of commitment which one could expect from the team . By now All of them wanted to succeed   .

The product launch went flawless , The planning , perseverance and passion all had come together to build a world class Sales Enablement platform .  Wikiportal had received 95% Customer satisfaction score within 1 month of launch , The highest adoption for any IT application ever in HCL . As the volume of users grew on the site , We brought in controls and governance policies to ensure we continue to deliver a great experience  to every single user .

Wiki portal Succeeded because  a group of individuals worked as a team, all for a single commitment, to achieve customer centricity .  For all of us in the team it is one identity which will always pride us in our life.