Coles: Building an engaged Yammer Community to drive exceptional customer service and improve performance
APAC | Yammer & Viva Engage Festival 2022
Learn about Coles's Yammer journey with some amazing advice from Sophie Wong and Sam Muir on how to engage leaders Yammer! Sophie says: "Yammer is the window to the stores".
-
Thanks, Emily and Cai, for those fantastic introductions. I'm super excited to be here today with Sophie. I would like to first start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which I'm beaming in from today and pay my respect to elders past and present and acknowledge any other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may be on the call today.
Super exciting, Sophie and I here to speak about Yammer and our journey at Coles. My perspective from a very corporate internal comms lens and then Sophie from a leadership perspective when we look at our supermarket operations. I'm just going to share my slides if these work and I bet you they won't.
Okay. So essentially, Coles, we've been on a journey with Yammer. We launched it a number of years ago, but it was never officially launched.
There was no real content and channel strategy sitting behind it. And what happened is we led to a lot of inconsistent pockets of engagement right across the business. So different team members based on their location or team were getting a different experience with Yammer.
Yammer played a small role and probably one of the only roles we had in that direct connection with our team members. Up until relaunched really recently, we were relying on leader cascaded messages through other channels to connect with our team members. We had about 10,000 active users on Yammer per month, but it was the same users every time.
So from a team member perspective, we had the same people coming back, engaging with the limited and varied content on there. And then for the rest of our cohort, it was quite disjointed for lack of a better term. What I would like to introduce everyone to is our team member ecosystem.
So I believe with anything, timing is of the essence. So we launched Teams nationally to our supermarkets team members at the end of October. And what we saw was a very quick uptake in the use of Yammer as it was obviously plugged into Teams.
We're now sitting at around 40,000 active users a month on Yammer, which is super exciting. And the growth and adoption of this platform and the content on it is much more aligned to how we want to share and connect with our team members. With over 800 stores, a platform like Yammer is critical for us to have that connection with our team members.
With Teams as well, it's probably the first time we've been able to get that direct connection with our team members and have direct two-way conversations with their leaders, with each other, and then us from a corporate perspective as well. What I would note as part of this, and I know we're here to talk about Yammer, but our broader internal comms strategy at Coles is around giving choice for our team members. So we want team members to feel empowered to choose how they engage with us.
Yammer provides us a fantastic platform to be able to develop our content and information that really connects them with the company's purpose and vision. But Teams does that as well. And we use other tools such as EDMs for team members that wish to engage with us via email.
What we've been able to do, and it's probably no news to anyone on this call, is move towards more informal communication, developing out those moments that matter, that are quick, they're easy, and they're easy to get off the ground and post to team members, which is great, and create more connection and two-way dialogue. And I'll hand it over to Sophie shortly, who can speak to what she's doing from her team perspective and leadership perspective, but it is creating much more of an authentic and genuine connection with our leaders, their team members, and each other. So that's enough out of me, the corporate mouthpiece.
I'm going to hand over to Sophie, who will talk to leadership engagement on Yammer. Thank you, Sam. And that's probably fairly appropriate.
I'm probably about as uncorporate as you can get. I have a very simple view on Yammer and why I love it so much, and that is because it is the window to the stores. And we are really blessed at Coles.
We have over 800 stores across Australia. To Ryan's question, we have over 100,000 team members, and that's a huge number of people to get across. And so for me, finding ways to not just communicate to the team, but actually engage with Yammer and use it in a sense so that we can listen, we can understand, we can ask questions, we can celebrate, we can recognize, is such a fantastic opportunity for us.
And Yammer honestly provides one of the few ways in which we can do that. So that is why I personally love Yammer. It's the opportunity to engage directly with team members, to listen to them, and also to cheer them on.
And it is something that I'm very passionate about. We have a bit of a 24 hour sundown promise within the team. And our commitment and promise is that if any one of the team ask a question, we will always respond to them within 24 hours.
So I think with Yammer and any communication platform, you get out of it what you put in. And that's why I really like it so much, because I've seen firsthand some of the benefits. So without further ado, Sam, do you mind kindly going to the next slide? What I thought I would do is over the next couple of slides, I didn't want to have too many slides, because I always think the richness is in the conversation and the questions, is I guess I wanted to share over my time in using Yammer, what are some of the suggestions or ideas? And then I'll move to the second slide, which is probably just a couple of highlights or examples of what our team are doing that we found has, I guess, elicited the best response and engagement from some of the community on Yammer.
So I've proudly worked at just over nine years, and I've literally been using Yammer for just over nine years. So it's something that I engage with and I'm super passionate about, as I mentioned. My first tip and suggestion would be if you don't have a community of users to reach and engage with, then you don't really have people to talk to.
So a big part of building a community, and whether it's the main page or you set up a subpage of your own, it's trying to build a community of followers as quickly and as often as you can. That way you've got a large audience to speak with. I've really tried over the years to stay away from, you know, follow me, follow me, follow the page.
We've always tried to do it organically and naturally, and we try to do that through creating interesting and engaging posts that we hope and believe that our audience, our team members, will actually be really interested to read, to interact with, and hopefully like the page so that they can, I guess, keep informed and stay abreast of what's happening. The second tip I had was it's really about understanding who your audience is. And I think no matter what, everyone is going to be different.
Everyone will have a different perspective, everyone will have a slightly different view, but where you can be as targeted as you can around your communication and understanding what's important to your team or to the people that you're engaging with, that's where we can really tailor our communication and our message to really suit the audience. And in the next slide, I can share with you a couple of examples where we think we might have found the secret sauce into, I guess, what hits their hot buttons and what gets them to engage with our posts. The third one, and I'm shamelessly stealing from the amazing Swoop team, and one of the top tips that Emily taught me very early on was like and share more than post, or like and reply more than post.
And so as a general rule of thumb, I try not to post too often, and when I do, I try to make it as meaningful as possible. I spend the bulk of my time liking every post, replying to every post, asking questions, cheering and celebrating the team's progress. And I find I actually get more value out of that, and I have a bit of a personal belief that if someone is taking the time to take a photo and make a post on Yammer, the least I'm going to do is reply to it and also put a genuine and meaningful response.
I think sometimes it's really easy just to like everything and write well done, good job, and I could do that, and that would definitely save me a lot of time. But actually taking the time to craft a genuine response people can tell. People can tell the difference between someone that's actually taking the time to read and understand what's being written versus just quickly ticking and liking everything.
Now sometimes that's not always practical, and if you're dealing with thousands of messages, I know that that isn't easy. We can still manage it for now, but it is getting tougher as our community gets bigger, that's for sure. I've put here don't be afraid to mix it up a bit and have a bit of fun, particularly in cold sometimes.
We can be very corporate, and hopefully on our page one of the things we've tried to do is just be different, and it's okay to have fun, it's okay to tell a joke, gifs and emojis, and I'm actually not very good at them personally, but you know certainly the younger generation of team members, they respond really well to that. So the more different you can make it, the better. And it's also really good for team morale and culture.
I will share that I'm not opposed to dressing up and wearing a costume or two, try not to do it too often, but I find sometimes if you're not afraid to be silly and have a bit of fun and not take ourselves too seriously all the time, I think it does make us more authentic and relatable as leaders, and that's something that's definitely appealed. The next one I talk about is visuals. So very rarely will I just post text, because I think just text on its own can be a problem.
So I usually try to do photos or videos, and I find they can be incredibly effective. With photos often I try to do collages, because then that way you can just see in one post all the different pictures, and there's heaps of free collage apps as I'm sure you all know, and it only takes a couple of seconds. Videos are also really great.
We try to keep our videos fairly short, no more than two or three minutes, because after that I think people get a bit bored, so we do try to keep them short, sharp and snappy. I'm really lucky we have an amazing team who are much more creative than me, and they are brilliant at making videos, photos. I saw earlier Austin from our team is also on the call today, and I have to say some of Austin's posts are the most popular on Yammer.
He definitely knows how to engage with the teams on Yammer, which is fantastic. The biggest one we find is you can never go wrong in celebrating and recognising the team, and whether that's during store visits, we take a photo, we post a photo, or we share a video, you know, creating those type five moments and making the team recognised and valued is one of the most powerful ways that we can use Yammer, and certainly in my experience it's usually those posts that generally garner the strongest response and the strongest positive feedback as well. My seventh tip would be be consistent.
You can't be on Yammer every day and then not be on Yammer for three months. People will know, and you do have to try to be as consistent as possible. I'm not on it every single day.
I try to be, and usually what I will do is I'm usually on it every second day, or I might batch things up, and at the end of the week that's when I'll make sure that I read everything and reply, and I try to keep my inbox to zero. I think once it gets past about 20, I just lose it and I can't catch up, so I do try to keep the inbox under 20. That way I'm always on top of Yammer and what's happening across the messages.
My eighth tip would be Yammer is such a powerful feedback channel, but only if it works two ways, and only if we listen, respond, and take action. There is nothing more powerful than a you said we did moment, and so if a team or a team member has raised some feedback and we've listened to it and we've done something, quite often what I'll try to do is go back on Yammer and respond to the post and share with them what we've done and the action that we've taken. It can make a really big difference.
This one is really key, which is that you can't do it on your own. No person is an island, as they say, and I'm really blessed to have an incredible team. Not all of them are as passionate and excited about Yammer as I am, but I'm really fortunate that quite a few of us are now, which is great, and in that way it's not just one crazy person on Yammer all the time, it's a few crazy people on Yammer all the time, but certainly I know that we all love being on it, and as a leader I've never forced my team to go on Yammer.
I've never said you must go on Yammer, you must do three posts. It can be easy to chase metrics and it can be easy to set targets. I've chosen not to do that because I don't think social media can be forced, and I recognise that you have to want to do it, and if you force something it's never going to be genuine, but if you try and you like it, keep going, keep doing it.
You can't break anything or you can't hurt anyone, and over time I've seen some amazing engagement from some of the leaders within Coles, which is awesome. And then my last suggestion would be stay curious. I always find that I learn so much from Yammer, and I'm a little bit obsessive with it, so quite often on the weekend if I'm just sitting on the couch I'll have a look at some of the other community pages that we have.
I've also read a lot of the SWOOP benchmarking studies as well, and learned from what other companies are doing and tried to implement those ideas and just test it and see. And I don't know if the KFC team is on the call today, but I just want to say thank you if you are. In one of the benchmarking reports you spoke about keeping it fresh and interesting and having competitions to try to keep it interesting for the team.
So I pinched that idea and in the follow-on page, actually Sam if you wouldn't mind kindly going to that now, it actually came from the KFC idea that I saw and it was one of our best posts, which is the one on the far right. So I thought, well what could we give away? And when you're a company that's over 100 years old, people love Coles memorabilia. So what did we do? We created a George Bear toy, it was a toy George Bear, a soft toy, and I named him George because the founder of Coles was G.J. Coles.
So we named him George and we got a few bears made up and we put it up on Yammer as a bit of a competition to answer questions and immediately it just went nuts and it went crazy. And I can't even see how many, but I think there's like nearly 4,000 views there. We had over 141 comments and answers to it and it really did start a trend where suddenly everyone wanted the George Bear, which I didn't quite anticipate.
And then we had to go into production, more George Bears, but it really was a great example and I just want to say thanks again to the KFC team for sharing that idea. It was brilliant. The second one that I wanted to share is by Kate, one of our team, and I mentioned one of my suggestions was around understanding what your audience is looking for and seeking to understand or hear more about.
And one of the areas that we look after is loss. And it's not always a fun area, but it is really fascinating and one of the things that makes us really grateful for our team at Coles is a lot of our store team are really passionate about their stores and they treat their stores like it's their own business. So, you know, they do get very passionate if they think that people are unfortunately stealing.
Majority of people do the right thing, of course, but for the few that unfortunately don't, our team members get really passionate about that. And so, we developed some smart stop trolley technology and that basically stops the trolley from walking out. And we posted a video on that and again that had one of the biggest uplifts.
We had nearly 6,000 people viewer, we had lots of comments, we had lots of likes, which was awesome. So, video, tailoring it to what they're interested in. And then the one on the far left with me in the Aunty Sam costume or the Uncle Sam costume.
No, thank you. No, no hot chocolate for me, but thank you. And you would see the George Bear costume in real life.
So, George became so popular that we made a costume and obviously one of our team are wearing it. And we had a bit of fun. We did a crazy video.
I'm a bit obsessed with movies, so we did a bit of a kill bill, don't ask, montage. I promise we didn't kill anyone, I just used the music. And we recreated one of the scenes and we talked about service and we brought it to life.
And again, you can see it was pretty popular and we had quite a few comments in it, which was great. What you can't see in that post, and I think this is where we always try to bring it back to the teams, is we were recognizing and celebrating the launch of a program that we launched in our stores and we called it Five Star Service. And within the video, we actually brought a montage together of all the photos of the store teams that had posted, promoting the program and having their own launch party.
We pulled that together and recognized the team in the video. So, wherever we can, we try not to make it about us. We try to make it about the stores.
And I think every time you make it about the stores and what they're doing and how great they are and how much we appreciate and value their work, they really respond well to that. And I think that's because at the end of the day, our store teams work incredibly hard. And any moment we can take to support them and to celebrate them, I think that's a really great thing.
You know, we take our title very seriously in terms of we are a support center. And what that means is our primary role is to support all of the amazing team members that we have across our stores, our DC network, and of course, the Store Support Center as well. And Yammer is one of the strongest and best tools that we can use to genuinely demonstrate our appreciation for our team.
And that's why I love it. So, that's it for us. I guess we'll just throw open to questions, Em? Yeah, great.
Thank you so much, Sophie and Sam. I really do love the story. And even just to hear from a leader really, you know, walking the walk when it comes to Yammer and those tips, I'm sure everyone will be really inspired and hopefully even use Sophie yourself as a great case study example for what leaders should be doing on Yammer.
So, we do have some questions coming through in the Q&A. So, Sam, Sophie, I'm happy for you to decide who's the best position to answer these. Do Coles provide employees with devices to use Teams and Yammer on? And have the on-the-floor employees been empowered to know they can spend some of their work time engaging on Yammer? How does that all work at Coles? Sam, do you want to go or do you want me? Yeah, I'm happy to do it.
Our policy is around bring your own device. And for us, it's very much in line with, you know, you've got internet banking on your phone, you've got all of these other things to access on the web. So, it's quite expected now in society around using your mobile device.
We did do a big upgrade of our Wi-Fi service across all of our stores. So, team members have access to pretty decent Wi-Fi across all of our stores. So, we don't want them using their own data.
And what was the empowered to use during work time? Yes, like how have the on-the-floor employees been empowered to know they can spend some of their work time engaging on Yammer? Yeah, we have a lot of sales incentives. So, for example, we've got one at the moment called Yammer Time and it's, you know, sell Christmas hams. And there's a hashtag going around on Yammer hashtag Yammer Time.
And we encourage team members, you know, to take pictures of the ham stocked on the shelves. And we do a lot across fruit and veg as well. So, there's definitely the empowerment there for our team members to participate and share what they're doing on Yammer.
Great. Thanks, Sam. And do you have any examples of where employees in store have done something with Yammer that has pleasantly surprised you? Sophie probably is better to answer that one.
Oh, look, I think all the posts from the teams amaze me. I think the ones that are the most fun are where the teams share personal stories. So, there's a page on Yammer called Pets at Coles and that's where the team actually post pictures of their pets, obviously.
And I love that one. I also love the ones where they share insights into what they're doing around supporting health and well-being and not being afraid to show, you know, a sunset or the beach because that's where they are. And I think that's really nice.
It shows the human side of who we are and that we're not afraid to talk about that and talk about looking after each other's health and well-being. Excellent. And then we have another question here.
So, I'm making an assumption here that you've got a leadership team who support employees across Coles stores. How is their uptake on Yammer? Are they as passionate as you about Yammer, Sophie? And did you have any challenges getting them on board? I know you briefly touched on this, but happy for you to share anything extra. Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks, Ryan, for the question. We definitely have, and we call them operations team. So, we have operations team, regional managers, a couple of different type of roles.
I was and still am in operations, but I used to support the state team. So, I used to, well, I still live in Adelaide and I looked after all of our stores in SA&T. So, definitely came from ops and live and breathe it every day.
It's not going to be the same for everyone. I wish I could sit here and say, yes, everyone was uber passionate, is uber passionate about Yammer. It's like anything, social media, TikTok, Facebook, it's not everyone's cup of tea.
What I do find is there's generally a pretty strong correlation between leaders who engage with Yammer really well, generally have very strong engagement with their store teams. And so, the ones that I've seen do it really well, you can see that correlation in store. I think for the most part, our ops teams are really good with Yammer, which is fantastic, but there's always going to be a couple that aren't necessarily as interested or passionate.
They clearly have strengths in other areas. Yammer is just not a particular interest of those, but generally in the main, everyone's super engaged with Yammer because it's just got a following and it becomes one of these things where if you're not on it, then maybe you're missing out. So, I guess it's a bit of the FOMO coming out.
You've got to be on it so you can see what's going on. And do you have any insights on how you attract new users to Yammer? So, this could be any employee across any store in Australia. How do you get them onto the platform in the first place? I definitely think talking up the page.
So, every chance I get when we're presenting or we're talking, we'll often say, oh, if you jump onto our Yammer Smarter Profit and Service page, and Austin does a particularly great job with that, then we do find that people will jump on. Also, we find that if you continue to share engaging posts and you're also replying and listening, word does spread. And so, we organically do find users jumping and joining the page.
But I think it's twofold. It's about gathering a strong group of followers, but it's also making sure you've got active people within the group as well. You kind of want that healthy balance.
Great. And then what's the, in terms of your administrative staff who are working in a corporate office versus your store-based employees, is there any massive difference in the engagement levels? Are one more engaged than the other? What does that look like? For us at Coles, and actually Sam can obviously share his view from a centre point of view as well, Yammer is probably more store facing and is designed for the store teams. It doesn't mean our support centre can't and don't use it.
They do, but it is predominantly for store teams. Yeah, and I would add to that, Emily, our support centre team members have access to a myriad of other channels to engage with each other, whether that's email, whether it's teams. Yammer is kind of the only platform and now teams that we have to connect with our team members in operation.
So, it definitely is more geared towards our ops team members. It's not to say we wouldn't shift down the track to focus on administrative team members as well, but for the moment, it's definitely more focused to our ops team members. And any sort of quick insights on how you have measured success throughout your Yammer journey as well? Yeah, definitely.
Since we rolled out teams, we're measuring our active users and that's definitely, we want to drive adoption from now until the end of the year. To be really honest with everyone on the call, for 2023, our focus is how do we drive engagement and people continuing to come back into the platform and keep the wheels spinning from a best practice perspective. So, we're definitely, we'll look at metrics beyond adoption into the new year, but for now, it's really just what are our active users per month? What's our month-on-month return users? Our first-time users as well has climbed to about 20,000 team members in the last month, which has been quite an interesting stat.
So, yeah, it's pretty exciting. Excellent. It's good to see that you're sort of pivoting from those sort of adoption uptake type metrics through to the engagement metrics.
Of course, that's music to our ears at Swoop. And just one final question as well. How did you change the mindset of leaders from an organisation where uptake of Yammer was patchy to one that is at a very engaged level? So, changing leadership mindset, any tips around that? I know that we've covered this a few times, but any further insights would be awesome.
I think from my point of view, we're always going to be on a journey of engagement. And it doesn't matter if it's Yammer or Teams or Work Jam, whatever it might be, it takes time, especially if you do have a lot of team members to engage with. I think the one word I'd probably use in all of that is consistency.
And if we're consistent and we're consistently listening, liking, replying, sharing, posting, responding, then that creates a strong platform and a strong foundation. We'll never catch them all, particularly, you know, we have 100,000 team members, but I have the philosophy that every person counts, every person matters. And so, if I can help or try to help even one person in Coles, then that's a really great thing.
And what lights me up more than anything is when I walk into a store and the team member says to me, you liked my post on Yammer or, you know, it was great to celebrate that, then, you know, that fills my cup and makes me feel grateful for what we do. So, every person, but it is a journey and be consistent. Amazing.
Meet the speakers:
Sophie Wong
General Manager Supermarkets Transformation, Coles
Sam Muir
Internal Communications Manager,
Coles
More from Yammer & Viva Engage Festival:
