Creating a Culture Where the Best Ideas Win

At Enterasys Networks Inc., a provider of wired and wireless network infrastructure company, in Andover, Massachusetts, chief marketing officer Vala Afshar says that allowing all employees access to social technologies creates a culture where it’s safe for anyone to ask questions and share opinions.

“Ultimately, communication improves culture, and we knew we needed to bring headquarters closer to the field, closer to our sales organization, closer to our service organization,” says Afshar.

The company’s strategic use of internal social networking tools such as Chatter creates the feel of a business that’s structurally flat, Afshar says. It’s turned Enterasys into a place where the best ideas win, not just the ideas from people with the highest titles.

In a conversation with MIT Sloan Management Review contributing editor Robert Berkman, Afshar talks about how the frontline employees are the brand of a business, how a Facebook/Twitter mash-up called Chatter is enhancing that role and how technology is helping Enterasys parse the messages from customers that come to it in chat form to create helpdesk tickets, streamlining the service process.

How do you define social in your business?

In our view, it all starts with culture.

I guess the simplest definition of culture is what happens when the manager leaves the room. That’s when you can feel and sense — in the absence of authority — whether you are aligned with the company’s core values and guiding principles.

Then there’s the people element. Right now, in the connected, knowledge-sharing, social era that we’re in, “you” — the frontline employees — are the brand. Any customer-facing employee has an opportunity to either serve the brand or tarnish the brand. And a social business, when it’s running on all cylinders, is really leveraging the voice of the employees to expand the voice of the brand and what the company stands for.

Structure and process also come into play prior to technology and how flat the organization is. We’re a thousand-employee company, so obviously there are VPs and directors and managers and single contributors and project leads. So I suppose on paper there could be five, six steps before a single contributor, on paper, is removed from the CEO or the CX level. But because we have social technologies and all of our employees have access to them and all of them feel like it’s a safe environment to ask questions and share opinions, ideas can reach from an intern to the CEO unfiltered. And that gives the perception that structurally we’re flat. That’s when the best ideas win, not the best titles .

So how do you use social technologies to make that happen?

In 2003, we decided to move to a SAS-based CRM solution. You can imagine the spirited discussions we had about the cloud, where we decided, “you know what, let’s take our most sensitive sales and services information and put it with this small up-and-coming company called Salesforce with a real cool CEO named Marc Benioff .”

So we were using Salesforce, and now we fast-forward to 2009 and they launch this Facebook/Twitter mash-up called Chatter for the enterprise.

We bring Chatter in, and I start chatting. I and our CIO and a handful of our executives decide that leadership is conversation, and we need to start the conversation at the top. We immediately had executive sponsorship of this tool.

I made a conscious decision that in order to build loyalty and trust, you have to have transparency. So I built proactive push methodology, leveraging CRM, to let sales know about open tickets. I pushed product quality, returning data to our engineering organization and product management.

Now, why Chatter? Ultimately, communication improves culture, and we knew we needed to bring headquarters closer to the field, closer to our sales organization, closer to our service organization. We started chatting sales wins and we started chatting meetings with customers and partners. When I hang up on this call, I’m going to chat to a thousand employees, “I just had a conversation with MIT Sloan Management Review about business and social transformation.” Everyone’s going to know about it, and I’ll start to see likes and comments. Really, what I believe has happened, is that Chatter has humanized our business.

Can you say more about the impact of social on your culture?

I started in this company as a co-op [editor’s note: similar to an internship]. Back then, if a CEO or an executive or a VP walked by that I didn’t know, I kept my head down, and there was no chance they would know my name or that we would have a conversation.

Today, I walk the halls and co-ops and anybody in the company is perfectly comfortable saying, “Hi, Vala,” and we have a conversation.

In 2012, the Boston Business Journal named us among the best places to work in Boston. The Boston Globe , out of nearly 1600 companies, named us the fourth-best place to work in the large-company category.

I’m more proud of “the best place to work” recognition versus any other technology innovation recognition, because in essence, that’s the benefit of a social business. You can look for these hard ROIs, but we have a Net Promoter score of 80 at our company. A Net Promoter score is the single question that you ask as to whether you’re willing to refer a company to a colleague or a friend, based on their quality of products and services; and it’s on a scale of a zero to a 100.

And it’s very rare have a Net Promoter score that we have. I mean, some of the companies that are known in the world for their quality service, like Amazon and Apple have Net Promoter scores in the low 70s, which is wonderful. But a reason for our score is that my call center attrition over the last five years is one and a half percent. Out of about 100 resources we have that deliver service and support in our business, on an annual basis, I lose one to two resources.

And we don’t outsource any of our service and support. We have a completely in-house strategy. But again, employee retention, Net Promoter score, best place to work — these are all benefits of working for a company where you matter. Ultimately, in a social business, employees have a voice.

So this listening and learning really took off with Chatter. But I can tell you, if we didn’t have the proper people and culture in place, that tool wouldn’t have made any difference.

You talked about the importance of having executive sponsorship of Chatter. How else did you get employees to adopt Chatter?

Yeah, with executive sponsorships we could fund lunch-and-learn sessions, and actually demonstrate by example that, hey, it’s okay for you to chat during business hours and talk about your customer meeting, or the latest article you read in Information World or IT Magazine.

But in addition to that, we invested in a company that could help with the user experience. When look at my home page, I have email, calendar, CRM, business analytics, file sharing, social networks. I’ve got all these icons. But I have a single sign-on. We knew the software had to be integrated in a tool that employees were already comfortable using every day in the business workflow — and that was CRM. You need to go where the conversation is. And these folks were already conversing in CRM.

We took tactical steps, too. I went to the IT team and I said, “I want you to create every employee’s bio on Chatter automatically, and I want you to preload their employee batch photo, on every account. And then they can go modify their bio.” So one day a thousand employees come in and they all have Chatter accounts, they all have their photos loaded. And if they wanted to change the photo, obviously they could. So we essentially created some of the paperwork, some of the back-office work, and removed that work and got it out of the way.

The other thing we did was identify change agents. I didn’t care what their title was, as long as these were folks that would default to yes in terms of a mindset, and had a can-do attitude. These people were what I would consider this Chatter deployment tiger team. We asked them to create Chatter groups. So for example, we had a services group, we had an engineering group, we had an IT group. Now, within the groups, we had subgroups. So, for instance, in the services organization, we created a technology expertise a wireless group, a switching group, a routing group. And the reason we did that is we knew that the members wanted to collaborate on topics of interest with like minded folks.

And so when a customer would call and ask a difficult wireless question, my agents would just send a question to that Chatter community — and that community had engineers and architects, not just services professionals, but anybody in the company who was considered a wireless expert. And that, by the way, could include field folks that we would normally not engage with in a call center scenario.

They would ask a question, and then in real time, they’d have subject matter experts throughout the organization providing their answers and their insights.

Have you found other surprising or indirect benefits from your use of social?

We manufacture machines, routers and switches and wireless technology, and these are running hospitals and enterprises around the globe. Shortly after using collaboration technologies, I recognized the power of receiving real-time information with the right content and the right context.

There’s network operation center and an army of IT personnel whose job is to monitor these machines. In late 2010 or early 2011, I gathered a group of engineers and I asked them to build software that would translate machine language to social language. I wanted our IT organization to use their smartphones and their tablets, their consumer devices, while they were on a Twitter, Facebook or a Chatter interface, and be able to receive machine diagnostic commands on that interface. I didn’t want them to leave Twitter or Facebook and have to VPN [Virtual Private Network] securely into the network to know whether the network is up and running.

So we commissioned a team, and they developed a social media translator that took complex machine language and converted it to tweets, Facebook messages and chats. We used a public cloud infrastructure off Twitter, Facebook and Chatter, and now today I have customers that manage their network — and by “manage,” I mean via visibility and control of their network — using consumer devices and social media.

Now, the benefit of all of this is not just user experience, but that they’re chatting and tweeting and Facebooking with machines in natural local language. Today, when you buy machines that are manufactured in the United States for you to manage and control, you have to use command line interface that’s in English, mostly. But I have customers today that can chat and Facebook and tweet to machines using German, Spanish or whatever language they use on social media. Our social media interpreter or translator takes those messages, converts them to simple network protocol, SNMP, and sys logging machine language.

We can now simply parse the message in the chat and create a helpdesk ticket. So, now I have half a dozen universities using our systems, where, when a fan or a power supply fails, or a discrete hardware component fails on premise, we receive a chat. We then parse the chat and from that create a helpdesk ticket. And then we process that ticket and send communications back to the CIO and his or her staff with a chat or email that says, “Dear customer, your fan in the second floor of building A failed. Here’s your UPS tracking for the new part that’s going to arrive tomorrow.”

That entire front-end lifecycle of the services interaction is automated, machine to machine, across a social network. And for me, that has been the biggest ancillary benefit of us becoming a social business; we started developing social machines.

That’s really interesting. Are there any other benefits you want to share?

One day I found that all of a sudden I had a Twitter account, but I did not sign up for it. Our CIO Dan Petlon came running to my office, because I suspect he thought that I was going to contact Twitter and complain about a fake account with my name, and he said, “Vala, let me show you why I created a Twitter account for you.” IT was maintaining a dashboard of all the Chatter activity in our business. Unbeknownst to me, I had half the company following me on Chatter.

And he said, “Vala, you have the most followers in the company, but everything that you share is limited to the thousand employees of our company. So for a month, I want you to take some of the chats that you have and put it out there on Twitter.” It was a logical statement, and I couldn’t really debate that. I felt that if any one of us who can improve our company’s brand, it’s a good thing.

So I started tweeting, 140-character tweets.

I now have over 10,000 followers on Twitter. I was voted as one of the top 50 technology executives on Twitter by Blue Focus Marketing [see http://bit.ly/ZuKwFP]. Information Week nominated me one of the top ten social business leaders about a month ago. The publisher of my book The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence [see http://bit.ly/UQcpnN] found me on Twitter and asked me to write a book with my co-author Brad Martin, our Vice President of Quality and Engineering Operations. But the relationship was built and came from Twitter.

But I tell you, the level of relationships that I’ve established over the last year, year and a half, with my customers as a result of social collaboration is more rich and deeper than ever before. Because I know more about them — not just work, but I know their interests, I know their hobbies. There’s a personalization that helps us develop more of a trusting relationship, and now I feel more comfortable collaborating with my customers in terms of shaping our roadmap.

How have measures like ROI influenced your use of social technology?

We capture services-related KPIs and ROI, but that’s because we have had a culture of measuring in services. It wasn’t a top-down, “the CEO says I want you to tell me how you’re reducing your talk time or your knowledge-based articles or your first contact closure” or any of the other traditional call center KPIs because of Chatter. We do this just as part of our DNA of measuring.

So the company’s maturing more and more to derive ROI, but it’s not forced. I think we are a social business at this point, and we just naturally gravitate towards the notion that communication improves culture, period.

And we now have a couple of CIOs that have cross-pollinated, meaning they’re in each other’s network, which is really fascinating. I mean, if I can fast-forward to 2013, I’m going to guess that the biggest benefit we have in our Chatter and our social collaboration with our customers, is that I have a customer in University A that has routing expertise and I have a customer in University B that has wireless expertise. Both of them have routing and wireless in their network.

Now that they’re in the same social ecosystem in our services cloud, their subject matter expertise is helping of them bolster their capabilities and knowledge of our portfolio. And I think that for a technology vendor, that’s a beautiful thing because we’re challenged with this notion of a consumption gap.

I love that we have a social collaboration ecosystem where the customers are helping each other adopt features and functions makes our solutions more sticky. It also automates and makes our customers’ networks more secure, more automated, more intelligent.

Do apps fit in with your social network?

Yes, yes, yes. We’re building apps internally. These apps are meant to bolster collaboration. We actually rolled out an app that helps improve project management fidelity, and it’s built on a whole social construct.

In fact, I’m going to the University of New Hampshire and hiring more co-ops to help us with app development. Yes, the trend is definitely application development and application usage throughout the business, and we’re not only seeing that, but we’re actively engaged in those endeavors.

What practical use are you kind of thinking about that you’d like to see this kind of machine/social communication do next for you?

The notion that someone is going to read a knowledge base to know what features and functions they should enable, I think it’s a bit archaic. So what I want to do is to take our knowledge base and embed it in the hardware.

So our social media interface that we call Isaac today looks at events in the network and then notifies you through any channel, including social channels.

Since we can look at network events and send information to you, all we need to do next is correlate those events to those features that are set to off. And then we can intelligently send you real-time notifications that say, “Dear customer, this feature you have off should be turned on because this event just took place in the network.” If I can deliver intelligence as a service to a mobile user, to a social network, and then have enough contextual information whereby the user can issue a command right from their smartphone or tablet, and securely enable that set feature, now I have the network intelligently guiding user adoption of features and functions.

And you can do that in real time, so you can generate weekly and monthly reports. Bottom line, we can improve the ROI of the investment by taking the human element out and having the infrastructure be smart enough to make recommendations.

I’ll tell you where that idea came from: I was driving to a conference in Rhode Island and I’m on I-95 south in my Audi S5 2013. And I’m driving for like 50 miles before I realize that I’m going 50 miles or about 60 miles an hour, and I forgot to turn on cruise control.

And so why doesn’t this this amazingly sophisticated 2013 car notice that I’ve been driving the same speed for ten minutes plus, and just automatically ask me, do you want the cruise control on? In my mind, our networks, our products and machinery, they’re all intelligent enough to do this. There’s enough sophistication built there to correlate events to needed future features and functions and automatically tell you when you need to do something. That’s what I hope to bring to market in the very near future.