British Gas Adopts Yammer As Their Enterprise Social Platform

Microsoft realized the potential of Enterprise social network and bought Yammer to make it as a Microsoft business solution. On the enterprise level, businesses have to be agile to keep up with the competition and exceed their customers’ expectations. Since communicating and sharing information with people is fundamental to the success of any business, many enterprises are taking measures to employ tools that can provide that extra edge.

British Gas, the largest UK energy and home services company has now become a Yammer customer. They started the pilot with just over 500 employees and more recently British Gas managed to have over 11,000 employees actively engaged around 700 communities on Yammer. This is a great success story.

“Now we have started to hit the middle manager layer.” This is perhaps the hardest change to implement. Culturally, British Gas has always had internal politics; trying to change the status quo, the normal way of working, is hard. “Middle managers can get very twitchy about our engineers. They are the people who control projects, outputs, people performance, processes and everything else. And they still want to reply on emails.”

But engineers are already using the BG Network despite what managers say. And managers are starting realising that they cannot control this. Leadership has also stepped in with a let it go message: “Let them use Yammer and do their job, they are adults and are not going to do anything silly.”

“However, we are getting there, the value of the ESN is undeniable. There is huge appetite and that cannot be stopped.” In fact, Liam is planning to run another 30-day Yammer campaign at the end of the summer. His goal is to have 30,000 staff on the BG Network by the end of the year. He knows that key is getting middle managers on board.

Read the full story here.