Title:
Director Customer Success Marketing, Mitel
Year:
2014
Category:
Next Generation Customer Experience
Result:
Finalist
The Company:
Our globally connected world has forced businesses to rethink how they communicate. Mobile lifestyles, a flood of technology, economic pressures and an “always on” mentality have created both opportunity and challenges for organizations of all sizes.
Mitel® (NASDAQ: MITL) (TSX: MNW) is a global leader in business communications that easily connect employees, partners and customers -- anywhere, anytime and over any device, for the smallest business to the largest enterprise. Mitel offers customers maximum choice with one of the industry’s broadest portfolios and the best path to the cloud. With more than US$1 billion in combined annual revenue, 60 million customers worldwide, and #1 market share in Western Europe, Mitel is a clear market leader in business communications.
The Problem:
Every marketing organization has challenges but most of them are similar including getting more qualified leads, increasing company brand awareness, growing social presence and so forth. When I joined Mitel in November of 2013 I identified three areas I would focus on which included grow company perception, increase sales revenue and engaging employees to share customer success. I started Friday emails to all employees where I shared a new customer success and gave tweets for them to share on social media. I was able to engage more employees this way but not what I wanted. Mitel is a 40 year old company and getting the culture to change to embrace social media and other ways of marketing was a bit of a challenge. We have 3400 employees worldwide so I had to consider geography and timing too if I wanted to leverage them to help with social selling initiatives.
The Solution:
The solution was finding something that enabled me to leverage our advocates to help with all my initiatives! I researched products and found Influitive, advocate marketing software, that would help me with all my initiatives! Now we leverage the power of gamification software to engage with our customers, employees and partners. We invite our customer advocates to join the Hub where we engage with them to share our marketing messages on Twitter, LinkedIn and Twitter. We also leverage them for online reviews, reference requests, referrals, and so much more. Advocates can earn points for completing challenges, earn badges. move up levels, and redeem for rewards like gift cards. We even throw in fun challenges to make sure it's not all work and no play. One of the favorites is the community where they can interact with each other. We can also engage with them to get their feedback on ideas or enhancement requests. This has been a huge hit at Mitel for our customers!
The Results:
The Mitel Champions Hub has transformed Mitel. First of all, we are engaging with our customers like never before. We provide a fun way to motivate them to help with various projects and interact with them on a daily basis. They really and comment how
impressed they are with Mitel Champions.
Second, we have expanded our marketing team by involving all employees in our marketing initiatives! We now have an army of advocates ready to help us with our efforts and it's fun to see how creative our advocates are with some of these challenges.
Third, It's been great to see groups all across the company get the vision of advocate marketing and engage with me to make their projects more successful!
Fourth, another result we saw was that Mitel Champions is helping us unite our company! In January 2014 Mitel acquired a company called Aastra and it was a culture challenge for sure. The Mitel Champions has united us by providing us a single mission we are all working towards - promoting our company and helping it be best poised for growth!
Metrics:
The results have been amazing. In less than two weeks we have had 456 advocates sign up and seen these results:
1) 456 joined advocates with 318 engaged.... ~70% engagement rate. This is amazing!
2) 3,950 challenge completions from 320 engaged advocates in the past 30 days is very strong (~12 completions per advocate).
3) New Twitter Followers: 173
4) New LinkedIn Group joins: 227
5) Tweets: 1142
6) LinkedIN posts: 1018
7) Facebook posts: 403
The Technology:
Influitive’s AdvocateHub is advocate marketing software that helps B2B companies capture customer enthusiasm, and use it to turbocharge marketing and sales efforts. AdvocateHub allows marketers to build advocate communities and invite customers, partners and employees into it to complete “challenges” like referrals, reference calls, product reviews and more. As advocates complete challenges, they earn points, badges and levels that can be used for a variety of perks and privileges.
Disruptive Factor:
The biggest disruptive factor was the Mitel culture. We are a 40 year old company with old processes and legacy systems. When I joined last fall only a few dozen of the 3400 employees were even on social media. Now I am seeing hundreds in social media every day which is great! Plus our customers and partners sharing our story in social media which adds even more credibility to our story.
Another challenge was that our culture didn't want interaction between customers, partners and employees. However to move forward and become even a bigger company we needed to change this mentality. It took a lot of time and effort but once people understood the vision, they were 100% behind this project!
In addition, our systems are pretty old at Mitel and we are not known for embracing cutting-edge technology. It was quite the challenge to get things set up but Influitive had a success manager assigned to me and tasks assigned to me in Basecamp to make sure I had everything taken care of before the launch. I had a three month pilot which was perfect for developing everything and working through challenges
Shining Moment:
I think my shining moment was when I launched the Mitel Champions Hub on a Friday and saw people doing it all weekend long. People were excited and working on challenges 24 hours a day. I don't think I slept for three days because I wanted to see how people reacted to the various challenges. Seeing that I could change our company perception, grow our revenue and engage our employees with one single product was definitely the pinnacle of my career!!!
