This is What Your Intranet is Missing

When evaluating the merits of a given intranet platform, the discussion naturally tends towards features and technology. This makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, what you’re purchasing is a piece software. But while great software can support a higher standard of work at your organization, that’s only true if the software is used to its fullest potential. That’s the part that often gets left out of these discussions: the importance of an equally great support team.

Without a team (or teams) of experts to walk you through the process of scoping, configuring, executing, and continuously improving your intranet implementation, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever reach the full potential of the investment you’ve made. Throwing internal team members at the challenge can bring you closer to the outcomes you desire, but at the cost of significantly more time, stress, and resources than you should need for the results you deserve.

The best intranet vendors are more than just sellers of software: they’re partners who are eager to work with you at every step of your digital transformation journey so that you can get the best possible results with their platform. Working with a great support team is like adding experienced, fully-trained professionals to your organization, allowing you to accomplish more with your investment than you ever could alone.

Let’s see how this might look for a team with a fairly narrow set of goals for “V1” of their intranet. (Many intranet implementations start with a single, targeted outcome, and broaden with guidance from their support team.) In this case, a retailer has gone through rapid growth, and their ~20 locations are starting to lose sight of core branding and customer experience standards. Their immediate intranet goal post-implementation is to realign their retail stores with the merchandising, dress codes, customer service, and marketing standards set by the head office.

How would this look in practice?

Step one: Preparation

Your support team should start working with your organization well before the project kick-off. By helping you to identify key stakeholders at your company, and by walking that team through requirements, goals, and expectations for your intranet experience, you can not only be confident that you’re planning for the right outcomes, but that you haven’t overlooked anything that could add value to your intranet down the road. Your support team can show you possibilities and solutions that never would have occurred to you without their input.

Step two: Planning & consulting

Now’s the time for your support team to help you with your execution strategy. Where do you want to go with your intranet? What are the milestones in your implementation? What will it look like, and how can you leverage visual design to instill a sense of community and shared space within your branded ecosystem? A great support team will use this time to turn your intranet from an abstract concept into something you can visualize and understand in a more practical way. You should also receive access to training materials at this time to ensure you’re up-to-speed by the time the intranet launches.

Step three: Implementation

The time you and your support team spent together is about to pay off. All the strategic knowledge your support team gathered during the previous two stages has resulted in a desktop experience for your corporate team, and a mobile app for your retail workers. The two are connected, and will support stronger communication and knowledge management from the get-go.

To combat the increasing discrepancies between corporate expectations and retail execution, your marketing and brand teams have access to FAQs and brand zones that can be populated with merchandising best practices, brand color palettes, customer service and greeting guidelines, and any other information that is currently getting lost in translation.

Your retail teams can find all of these resources from the homepage of their app, and the contents of these FAQs and knowledge bases is searchable for even faster answers.

To emphasize the importance of this new resource, your communications team has access to targeted communications tools, allowing them to create awareness campaigns for frontline workers specifically. Frontline workers, in turn, have a Q&A area where they can get clarity on rules, expectations, and best practices from your corporate experts in an accessible, social media-style environment; there’s also a separate social area where retail workers can share tips, observations, and questions with their peers to encourage camaraderie and the organic growth of collective wisdom.

All of this is built, reviewed, and tested to ensure that everything is ready for the big day.

Step four: Digital workplace launch

Your intranet is now more than just a concept or a piece of software: it’s a digital workplace, populated by all your employees. This is now a thriving hub where work is done to a higher standard, and with less strain. Your support team will be with you during this exciting step to ensure that everything goes according to plan.

Step five: Engage & evolve

One of the reasons you can be so confident in your goals for the launch is that you have the knowledge that the launch is only the beginning. While you may have kicked off your retail intranet with a large focus on communications and frontline engagement, your support team will stand with you from here on out to identify new goals and structure a roadmap for future expansion of the digital workplace.

As long as you chose the right partner for your digital transformation, you can feel secure in the knowledge that your intranet will grow, evolve, and improve along with the needs of your workforce. Maybe the next step is corporate knowledge management—centralizing vendor contracts and SOWs would streamline many moving parts that have become confusing and poorly organized during your period of rapid growth from five stores to 20.

Learn about Igloo’s support, and how they work with you to bring your visions into reality.

Conclusion

This is a simplified hypothetical situation for a fast-growing retailer, but the principle is the same for any organization: a complex, deeply involved process is necessary to accomplish your intranet goals, but the right intranet provider should allow you to navigate that process with clarity and confidence. At Igloo, we pride ourselves on the depth of our support infrastructure and the passion they bring to your intranet initiatives. Find out how you can achieve more with the right combination of industry-leading intranet platform and award-winning support by talking to one of our intranet experts today.