Driving 24-hour collaboration—and competitive differentiation—around global brands in the restaurant industry

Business trigger: global collaboration

Yum! is in a highly competitive segment of the market. To grow, Yum! focuses on staying fresh and relevant in its domestic markets and expanding aggressively into international markets. As the company's business expands, their corporate operation expands with it, and today it takes 6,000 corporate employees to manage its far-flung empire. Yum!'s interest in Social Business Software was born of the need to create a smaller world inside its business for corporate employees to collaborate more effectively. They felt that it was especially critical to break out of functional, departmental, and geographic silos so that they could "work as one" to aggressively drive international expansion and "build strong brands everywhere."

Solution focus: build global know-how

Yum! prides itself on its strong cultural foundation of building, sharing, and recognizing know-how to drive innovation. The old Japanese proverb "None of us is as smart as all of us" echos the foundational element for their initiative to drive more effective collaboration and knowledge sharing. Yum! looked at this initiative as "bringing the outside in" by adapting mainstream social media technology for business use. In short, they wanted to give their corporate employees above the restaurant level familiar tools to better enable collaboration efforts each day. Their solution focus: build "global know-how" and break through silos to accelerate business results and drive innovation. Their technology focus: find a "one-source" solution.

Why Jive? Market leadership and vision

To assess potential vendors, Yum! assembled a project team to test pilot the solutions and evaluate the product documentation of several vendors. Two important factors weighted Yum!'s decision to go with Jive. One was Jive's leadership position in the marketplace—especially the credibility its adoption by more than 25% of the Fortune 100 gave Jive. Second was Jive's ability to stay ahead of the curve by continuously deepening their domain expertise in Social Business Software, which gave Yum! confidence that they had selected the right vendor.

Launch strategy drove outstanding results

Yum! launched its new Jive platform, which it called iCHING, with the kind of marketing power and resources typically reserved for marketing a new product in one of its restaurant brands. As Yum! built the iCHING brand, they adhered to a consistent look, tone, and theme, one that was hip and contemporary yet smart and sophisticated. And one that challenged the status quo. An awareness campaign was launched at each of its domestic campuses and 15 international business units using a number of elements ranging from viral and buzz marketing to giveaways like t-shirts and mousepads sporting the tagline "iCHING. Do U?" as well as signage and high-energy testimonial videos. The messaging reminded users of iCHING's global accessibility, which served to lessen fears of difficulty and drove home the point that everyone could work more efficiently by forming groups on iCHING.

Yum!'s outstanding launch campaign drove outstanding results: they expect to reach 100% adoption by the one-year anniversary of their launch.

Jive Professional Services: a strategic partner

Jive Professional Services is renowned both for being a strategic partner and for delivering high quality service and support. Yum! took advantage of this expertise to customize the design and user interface of iCHING to map to their collaboration objectives and the unique persona they had built around the iCHING brand. A number of other customizations to the platform were made, including:

• Allowing community members to upload images with associated text to award "badges" to an individual's profile— effectively transitioning their "culture of recognition" to their new online community
• Making tagging mandatory to increase the searchability of the platform
• Adding prompts to certain actions, such as the prompt before a user forms a new group: "Have you checked to see if a similar group exists?" which helped Yum! reduce duplication of effort

Jive at work across a variety of functions

At the six-month mark, iCHING had 3,600 corporate users and 645 groups dedicated to a variety of functions, including shared business initiatives. Seven on screen tabs unique to the Yum! deployment encourage users to actively participate in the online community in these ways:

• Group it! Form communities and collaborate around business imperatives, common interests, and best practices.
• Discuss it! View or create discussion boards to establish dialogues on a variety of business subjects.
• Search it! Search and retrieve valuable know-how captured in iCHING.
• Share it! Contribute valuable know-how to help each other work more efficiently without "reinventing the wheel."
• Create it! Post, view, and rate new ideas and innovative solutions.
• Work it! Form teams and make your project details visible across Yum! organizations.
• Dig it! Recognize contributions, achievements, and breakthroughs to maintain Yum!'s longstanding positive recognition culture.

Business value: go to market faster

Yum! reports that "creating a smaller world" via Jive has delivered clear business benefits that help them go to market faster and improve their competitive position. Yum! is seeing collaboration and sharing of best practices that would have never happened in the past. Some recent examples:

Saves critical time. Yum! calls it 24-hour-a-day innovation: users around the globe pose questions at the end of their day and wake up to answers. A manager asked for help with innovation for a new pizza, offering a $50 prize to the winner. Within a week the manager had 100 replies from locations around the world—"something that simply wouldn't have happened without Jive."

Saves money and promotes sharing of best practices. Questions asked by brand managers across a diverse set of geographies are answered "at zero cost," without the addition of resources. A question was posed on iCHING by a UK KFC about possible breakfast options. Several brand managers— including one from a different brand—shared best practices to help the restaurant build their breakfast "know-how."

Eliminates duplicated resources and efforts. iCHING has produced a series of successful wins by promoting a "search and re-apply" mentality, where a user seeks know-how on a project or initiative from existing community resources, which eliminates the need for costly research steps and dedicated resources to find answers to questions that have already shown proven results.

Promotes knowledge transfer. iCHING had over 4,500 documents uploaded and over 26,000 downloaded in its first six months, which meant that, on average, every document that was uploaded to iCHING was downloaded five times. To Yum!, this indicates that people are doing more than posting information: they are finding content they need to get their jobs done.

Next steps

Yum! has a number of strategic initiatives for the next phase of iCHING. From a usage perspective, they are focusing on deepening and broadening engagement to ensure that iCHING drives value every day. They have also engaged smaller "activation squads" at each brand to lead a focused effort to gain 100% adoption before the one-year mark of launch. These squads are helping fellow colleagues understand how to "work differently" with iCHING and to leverage its value for more efficient business use. From a business value perspective, they want to understand and measure how knowledge transfer impacts the company's innovation goals.

Learn More About Jive

Jive Social Business Software brings the best features of social networking, collaboration software, community software, and social media monitoring to your enterprise.

Download our Social Intranet Resource Kit and learn more about employee collaboration and communication
Watch our video demos and see Jive in action
See all of our case studies