In Case You Needed Reminding, Social Enterprise Software Is Going to Be Big
Just in case today’s launch of Chatter by Salesforce.com wasn’t enough, the fine folks at Jive Software would like to remind you again how important social enterprise software is going to be, and they have survey data to prove it.
The company asked 500 people at 300 companies, many of them large companies with 10,000 or more employees, about the benefits they were seeing from using social business software, which in this case is Jive, naturally, though an independent firm did the survey itself.
Some of the results were a little vague. For instance, respondents reported a 39 percent increase in “employee connectedness.” Others were more concrete: Jive users generated 32 percent more ideas, sent 27 percent less email and found answers to questions 32 percent faster
And there were benefits for customers. For one thing, employees spent 42 percent more time communicating with them, which in turn led to a better rate of customer retention, 31 percent, while the volume of support calls dropped by 28 percent and sales to new customers jumped by 27 percent.
The survey also found that 83 percent of companies in the survey are preparing to deploy some kind of social enterprise solution across the entire company this year. That finding is at least validated in part by a Gartner study that forecasts spending on enterprise social software will grow a little more than 15 percent this year to reach about $770 million.
Jive, you’ll remember, is the company that landed a $30 million venture capital investment from Kleiner Perkins last summer, and hired former Mercury Interactive head Tony Zingale as its CEO.
BoomTown’s Kara Swisher visited its offices last August, and her video interview with Zingale and Ted Schlein–Kleiner partner and Jive director–is below:
