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July 8, 2019
This June, we were fortunate to join our partner Igloo Software and our customers at the ICE Tour two-day regional user events held in both Toronto and Los Angeles. It was a fantastic opportunity for Igloo customers to share their digital workplaces, lessons learned, and creative solutions for shared problems. At both events, the first day focused on Igloo updates and customer presentations; and the second day emphasized training workshops around integrations, analytics, widget configuration and digital workplace layouts.
We met up with a super-engaged group in Toronto at the Woodbine Racetrack June 12-13.
Here were some of the highlights:
Brian McIlravey, head of customer success, shared Igloo's point of view as well as a tour of the updated Customer Care site. Igloo has a renewed focus on sharing the product road map with customers, and is emphasizing more peer-to-peer sharing within the Igloo community.
David Bistolis then ran a session on Partner Development and TAM Services. David gave Social Edge a lot of shout outs, and discussed some of the products we've built for Igloo, namely our integration for Bonusly (a rewards platform), and our Mosaic and World Clocks widgets. (Editor's note: If you're interested in these integrations and widgets, please contact us and we'll get a demo set up).
The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) team, Virve Aljas and Jessica Johnston, presented their Digital Workplace and discussed their strategy, challenges and next steps. The last several slides of their presentation focused on Staff Applause, the Bonusly integration we have been working with them on, which was then launched the following week. They not only emphasized how seamless this integration is but also how it fits into their overall organizational employee engagement strategy.
Our thanks to the OMA team for mentioning how much they enjoyed working with Social Edge and the Igloo team, especially during this development process! The feeling is mutual!
Next, Mike Tomon from Cigna, demoed their Iris Community. Cigna recently grew from 60K employees and contractors to going to 100K employees with the acquisition of Express Scripts. They are currently working through moving from 3 spokes to 1 hub as they onboard all of the Express Scripts staff to Cigna's AD systems.
Their key use cases are mostly around communications and change management, especially in communicating with staff about the acquisition. Cigna's now in the next phase of their community where they are getting teams to use Iris to collaborate (starting with his HR IT team). Lastly, Mike took a moment to share how they are using our Mosaic widget in Iris spaces to promote different internal communications stories.
We also heard from Andy Hawkins of Indeed, who shared their new intranet. Andy joined Indeed in late January, and they launched their digital workplace in March. The site is very high activity, but Andy admits they have barely scratched the surface of what they can do.
Mayer Tanuan and Jose Castro at Saje Natural Wellness shared a progress report on their Igloo community refresh. This was a project that we worked on last year. There was some great feedback from the crowd because of how clean and different it looked. It was nice to hear that the engagement is going very well, that it's helping with profitability in the stores that are heavily engaged in the site, and that they have continued to evolve the site for their needs.
Lastly, George Thomas from MedExpress, presented their DWP, HeartBeat, which launched in April. Currently, they are using it right now for communications and policies. Engagement is good so far. They have about 6K users, mostly medical professionals, in their walk in clinics across the U.S.
After the show-and-tell's, we broke out into four groups to discuss Governance, Engagement, Evolve and Measurement. Igloo team members were leading the conversations and I was able to contribute with best practices and customer examples. Finally, we finished out the day with dinner, drinks and gambling at the racetrack! It was very fun, and some of us were winners!
The West Coast Tour in LA happened June 25-26 at the Crowne Plaza - Los Angeles Airport!
LA may have been experiencing "June Gloom," but our ICE Tour attendees were bright and engaged!
Starting out the day in a similar way to Toronto, our Igloo colleagues, Brian McIlravey and David Bistolis, covered some updates on the Igloo value proposition and partner and development ecosystem. They introduced the Product Ideas area on the Customer Care Site where customers can create feature request ideas, and other users can vote for their favorites, and track the status of implementing the ideas. Go vote for your favorites!
Next up were the customer presentations, always the most eagerly awaited part of these events.
At this West Coast event, Cigna's Andrew Jayne highlighted how the company uses Igloo to engage employees in Employee Resource, Affinity, and Interest Groups.
Next up, Forrest Paetterson of Shorelight, gave a rundown of how Shorelight planned its Igloo digital workplace and launched it to users just 3 weeks ago. Her best advice? Make sure you are solving a business problem with your digital workplace, and be data driven.
Anitra Rohrer, of Lancaster, PA based professional services firm RKL, took us through the evolution of their intranet, In the Loop, from when she started through today. One key strategy she has used to grow and develop their digital workplace has been a "land and expand" approach, developing a space for a very engaged team, building up engagement with that group and gathering feedback, and then using that space as a model of success as she demonstrates and engages with other stakeholder groups.
Lastly, we had an impromptu show-and-tell by the Hulu team, Linny and Jared! In keeping with its fun company culture, Hulu calls its intranet the Huluverse. Members are Huligans, and they can recognize each other's accomplishments by rewarding each other with Hudos.
To end up the day, attendees broke out into round tables to discuss issues and lessons learned around Governance, Engagement, Measurement and Evolving a digital workplace to a next iteration. It was interesting to learn that many customers are not documenting metrics, and aren't quite sure what is important to measure. We recommend picking very few ( no more than 3) KPI's to measure success, and tie them directly to your digital workplace goals. Here's some of what we asked. For starters, what is important to your organization?
To end the day, attendees headed over to the Proud Bird for networking, dinner and drinks.
Day two focused again on deep dive training with users, including Workplace Analytics and coverage of awesome integrations, such as the Mosaic widget, available in the Igloo Marketplace.
That's a wrap for the 2019 ICE Tour! Next up, the ICE Conference at the Linq in Las Vegas November 4-5!
