CRM CASE STUDY
A CRM for Technology. Dell Technologies uses Coveo
How Dell’s Intranet ESAT Score Climbed 37 Points in 12 Months
“With Coveo we can bridge the gap between expectations and experiences.” Will Hudson VP, IT Marketing
About Dell Manufacturing
Dell helps organizations and people build their digital future, and transform how they work, live, and play.
When Dell and EMC joined forces in 2016, it represented the largest technology merger in history.
One of their unifying platforms was their intranet, Inside Dell – the place to go when you don’t know where to go, who to work with, or what to do. Today, it’s the digital destination that brings together 165,000 team members, but it wasn’t always this way.
Breaking the cycle of intranet upgrades
An integrated experience is often the stated goal of digital workplace strategies and initiatives. But the reality can look starkly different. App diversity continues to grow and as employees increasingly reach for best-of-breed tools, it can be challenging to create a seamless experience.
With a core set of applications at the heart of its team member experience, including Jive Software, ServiceNow, and Workday, Dell also had this problem. Each software provided its own experience.
“On day 1, a new hire had to go to 50 different places, that all look different, just to get up and running, and gain proficiency in their job.” Ruchi Garg, Product Manager, Inside Dell
Prior to its relaunch, Inside Dell was the company’s lowest scoring enterprise application for employee satisfaction with an average ESAT score of 23%. Like at many organizations, the intranet was an under-invested technology, caught in a multi-year upgrade cycle that was more aligned with maintenance contracts than user needs.
It wasn’t until a change in perspective, combining the intranet and search initiatives together, that a new vision for the digital workplace took shape.
It’s as much about the journey, as it is the destination
In order for a digital workplace to support the changing work environment, it has to be designed for a flexible, consumer-like computing environment that emphasizes usability, autonomy, and community-oriented collaboration.
In preparation for the intranet relaunch at Dell, a sampling of employees was gathered across each unique role in the business to map expectations and inform decisions in its design. Inside Dell’s relaunch was an opportunity to rebuild trust.
“Making sense of all those different resources available to employees, it can be confusing at times – and hard. One of the reasons why we adopted Coveo as our internal search is to help give some clarity to that.” Will Hudson
While rolling out the new intranet, the team approached every email and every help ticket as an opportunity to improve. As the feedback came in, the team was prepared to iterate, making small changes to the query pipelines that led to big impacts to relevance and an exponential increase in satisfaction.
The team at Dell combined Adobe Analytics’ traditional web metrics such as visits and pageviews with Coveo’s rich reporting to identify content gaps and understand which employee interactions lead to successful outcomes.
Every new piece of feedback was an internal marketing opportunity. Every advocate became an active participant in changing how employees viewed the intranet. Dell’s philosophy: Go above and beyond to serve employees, and see the impact it has.
Working better amidst growth and change
Post launch, ESAT scores climbed from 23% to over 60%, recording the most significant quarterly jump ever by an IT application at Dell and taking home the prize of most improved application each quarter in its first year of operation.
More and more employees began to rely less on bookmarks, and more on the search engine to locate what they were looking for.
Search was not just for content, but people too. With the power of Coveo, a Dell employee doesn’t need to know a person’s name to find them; all they need to know is the skill they’re searching for.
Dell’s team also experienced some halo benefits in their content strategy. As their intelligent search got more use, content teams could rely less heavily on carving out space on the intranet homepage, freeing up valuable real estate for other priority communications from teams.
“You’ve got to look at the big picture. It’s not just about where one digital product needs to go, but how an entire ecosystem of products needs to work together.” Will Hudson
Inside Dell is now the application gateway when you can’t remember how to file an expense report; it’s the starting point for search when you don’t know who to turn to or where to look; and it’s the rallying point when you just want to know what’s new. It’s everything an enterprise intranet should be. So you can get in, get out, and get back to work.
Today, Dell continues to expand its use of Coveo in its pursuit of relevance, as new content sources come online and business units are strategically aligned.
Hudson says, “Coveo data and AI will help [our team] uncover preferences and priorities in order to build better experiences, whether it’s a new hire trying to navigate the business or a long-standing contributor just trying to stay connected.”
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