The term “collaboration” in its simplest form refers to two or more people working together to achieve a goal through enhanced communication, knowledge sharing, and learning. People collaborate every day with friends, family, coworkers, vendors, etc. At Perficient, we are focused on collaboration for the business enterprise and we focus specifically on driving productivity, efficiency, and sales through improved collaboration with four key constituent groups: employees; business partners; customers; and prospects.
Each of these constituent groups are vital to the success of the modern business. Through optimal collaboration, businesses maximize the value they receive from each constituent group and maximize the value they provide to each constituent group. Collaboration to achieve shared goals results in a positive gain for all participants. In this blog posting I will touch on how Perficient helps businesses improve performance through better collaboration with each of the four key constituent groups.
Collaboration with Employees
One of the most effective ways for businesses to drive improved productivity and efficiency is to nurture collaboration and information management within the enterprise. As businesses grow headcount and geographic locations, they tend to form silos of knowledge and expertise that lead to inconsistent business decisions. Additionally, as employees depart the company, they often exit with unique operational knowledge that hasn’t been persisted or institutionalized in any formal way. Over time, these organizational patterns create wide-scale inefficiency that bloat expenses and drag revenue.
Perficient helps enterprises improve internal collaboration through (or “intranet portals”). We think of the enterprise portal as the hub of information management and decision making within the modern organization. We help clients understand the types of information and expertise that exist within the enterprise and how to best surface and organize that information and expertise. We design and develop enterprise portals that provide a myriad of capabilities including document management, enterprise communication, performance reporting and dashboards, knowledge networking, enterprise social networking, process management, project management, business applications, and enterprise search.
When the modern enterprise leverages an effective enterprise portal, it quickly sees benefits in decision making, employee efficiency and productivity, organizational scalability, and enterprise stability. The silos are removed, information is organized, expertise is better leveraged, processes are institutionalized, and ultimately the top line and bottom line show enduring improvement.
Collaboration with Business Partners
Over the past couple of decades, businesses have increasingly specialized on core competencies while leveraging strategic partners at various stages of the supply chain or back-office operation. Many companies today have dozens of highly-strategic business partners that are critical to the delivery of quality goods and services to customers. Given this increased focus on specialization and subsequent leverage of partners, it is vital that enterprises are able to collaborate with partners in much the same way that they collaborate with employees. The modern enterprise should think of partners as “extended employees” and not simply as distant vendors.
Perficient helps our clients design and develop partner extranet portals that enable synergistic relationships with business partners. We develop portals that are highly secure and that allow the enterprise to specify which information to share and with whom to share the information. An effective partner extranet portal provides the partner with easy access to pertinent information, data, reports, invoices, analytics, and so forth. Many of the same functional capabilities that are applicable to the corporate intranet will have a similar purpose within the extranet. In addition, the extranet should allow the partner to easily communicate with specific personnel inside of the enterprise to reduce the time required at key stages of the decision chain.
Collaboration with Customers
In every business it is critical to collaborate with customers in order to understand the needs of customers and how effectively the business is satisfying those needs. In addition, it is important to provide key information and functionality to customers to promote high customer satisfaction. While customers obviously want competitive pricing and quality goods and services, they also want to be informed, heard, and empowered. Businesses that obsessively view the customer as the center of their universe methodically evolve into market leaders over time.
Perficient assists our clients in deploying highly-effective customer portals. The functional capabilities of customer portals vary widely based on the type of business. For example, a large law firm would require a portal with robust document management while a toy manufacturer might need a portal that provides online games for kids. Whereas intranet solutions typically have common horizontal functional components, customer extranet solutions are often quite unique to the specific industry. Perficient creates portal user experiences that are optimized for the user demographic and that contain the key functionality relevant to the customer relationship.
Collaboration with Prospects
With the explosion of social media and mobile technologies, it is now easier than ever to connect and collaborate with prospects and help educate them on products and services. One of the fundamental ways to earn the business of a prospect in any industry is to clearly articulate the value proposition of the products or services being offered and then effectively answer questions about those products and services. By leveraging the web, social media, and mobile applications, companies are able to communicate and collaborate with prospects in ways that weren’t imaginable just a decade ago. This collaboration enables industry-leaders to better connect with the marketplace, educate the marketplace, and position its products and services ahead of the competition.
Perficient helps clients engage with prospects and ultimately convert those prospects into paying customers. We design and build collaborative websites with tight social media integration and mobile sites and applications that are location-aware. We have the marketing experts, user experience designers, and collaboration technologists that work together to create compelling web and mobile solutions that drive customer acquisition.
Conclusion
The entire concept of collaboration for the enterprise is in the middle of a massive transformational shift. Forward-thinking businesses now view collaboration as a strategic initiative with meaningful implications to both revenue and profitability. Perficient is laser-focused on driving measurable performance gain for our clients by enabling rich collaboration between our clients and their key constituent groups.
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