This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to IBM’s support. These notes cover my individual interview, Customer Conversation – Russell’s Convenience with Raymond Huff, Russell’s Convenience.
Ray began with an overview of Russell’s Convenience. They are a convenience store chain that only locates in large buildings of over 600,000 square feet and are usually on the first floor. They have stores in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hawaii. Ray is located in Denver. They are an IBM shop with Notes, IBM services and servers. Recently, they have been using Lotus Live (aka Smart Cloud for Social Business) to become more social and get great financial benefits in the process.
Russell’s has used Lotus Live to help dramatically reduce the costs of a major remodeling campaign they have undertaken. They are doing a significant upgrade of their stores. This can be a complex process because in addition to the architects, contractors and other normally connected with this type of process, they also have to involve the building landlords and others who have a stake in what is going on in the front of a very busy building. This involves both the look of the store and the hours of construction.
Their agreement with IBM for Lotus Live involves not only an attractive price per user per month but also the ability to invite guests such as those involved into the construction effort to have access to the system at no additional cost. Ray also said he was very impressed with the interest that IBM showed in his relatively small organization. They invited him to an all day seminar with other company presidents a few years back to go over the benefits of social business. In preparation IBM took a look at his business at no charge to him and came up with a number of useful suggestions for using social.
Looking at the current construction effort, they were encountering a lot of extra costs. A last minute crisis would a occur with landlords and Ray or a staff member would have get an expensive last minute air ticket to deal with it first hand. Communication with contractors was not always received and there were some costly change orders to undo unwanted work. Everything was also taking more time.
With Lotus Live all of this changed, they went from over 20 change orders to under two. They were able to schedule site visits well in advance to secure cheap flights and eliminated last minute visits for trouble shooting.
How did this occur? With Lotus Live they could simply put the latest information on the site and invite the stakeholders to see what was the absolute latest. There was no confusion over allowable construction hours. There was no confusion over the latest plans. The stakeholders knew to go to the Lotus Live site and trust what was there over what they had in their hand. They looked there before placing a call and it was there 24/7. This saved a lot of money in travel costs and change orders, more than paying for itself.
Now Ray said they are looking to new uses of social business. Operations people use it to communicate with software service providers in the same way the construction effort is going. Successes in one store are quickly communicated to other stores in all locations. For example, one LA store had great success with a breakfast burrito and now others are trying it. They are also using it to better handle customer feedback and minimize the impact of complaints. They have always been very responsive to customers but now they have an additional channel to handle this and share experiences across stores to avoid repeating any issues of concern.
Ray said they are looking to use SameTime for direct interface with staff and partners. I think this is a wonderful and very concrete example of the power of social business.
It is the great article. An appealing conversation should focus only on a specific aspiration at one time. Thank you.
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conversation and www.crucialconversationsapp.com/blog.php
Posted by: Jon Andrew | January 19, 2012 at 02:21 AM