Hearsay unveils social business maturity model

Leveraging years of experience and intelligence empowering the world's largest financial services and insurance firms to grow social business, Hearsay Social developed the Social Business Maturity Model to help guide program development and advancement for financial services firms.

The proprietary Social Business Maturity Model provides a quantitative metric for companies with large distribution teams to measure how well their enterprise social business programs are doing and how they rank relative to their peers and industry averages. By knowing the Social Business Maturity score, firms gain a comprehensive understanding of where their social business programs currently stand, as well as an actionable roadmap to steer them toward the next level of maturity. Based on these insights, they can:

• Learn and prioritize what steps they need to take in order to remain competitive and accelerate their programs to the next level
• Have a benchmark to measure against as they implement these steps and progress along the maturity spectrum
• Generate increased return on investment and value across the business

"We not only analyzed a tremendous amount of information to develop the Social Business Maturity Model, we also took into consideration the challenges unique to the financial services industry, such as compliance and user adoption across large networks of distributed teams," said Abhay Rajaram, vice president of customer success at Hearsay Social. "Ultimately, we hope the Maturity Model will encourage and empower companies to accelerate their social business programs and collectively shift the maturity of the industry as a whole."

"The standardized evaluation process provided by the Social Business Maturity Model better enables companies to pinpoint areas where they excel, as well as areas of focus to move toward greater business value," added Corina Roy, an assistant vice president with MassMutual.

Organizations Scored on Seven Practice Areas

The Social Business Maturity Model score is a cumulative measurement of how well a firm ranks in seven critical practice areas that Hearsay Social has identified as imperative to social business success. These areas are based on years of experience enabling some of the world's largest financial services companies -- with a distributed sales force of more than 110,000 advisors and agents -- to integrate and grow social business across the enterprise. The practice areas include:

• Project team dedicated to the social business program
• Active championship and sponsorship at the C-suite level
• Robust content marketing strategy
• Adoption and penetration across the entire firm and/or field
• Continuing engagement and education at the individual user level
• Integration with other digital initiatives
• Measurement of progress to plan and of value against set key performance indicators

Dedicated Project Team Makes Biggest Impact on Social Business Maturity

Hearsay Social also unveiled a new assessment today that identifies what makes the most significant impact on a company's social business maturity. Using the Social Business Maturity Model, the company evaluated the social business programs of more than 100 financial services companies, including seven of the top 10 global firms. Key results include:

• A dedicated project team is the top indicator of maturity: Organizations that have a dedicated project team have scores more than 43 percent higher than those without a dedicated team.
• Firms need both top-down and bottom-up engagement: Programs with more than 80 percent of users deployed in the field have overall scores that are more than 24 percent higher than those with less than 80 percent roll-out. Additionally, programs with executive sponsorship have average overall scores that are 13 percent higher than those that do not.
• Measuring success begets success: Companies that focus the team on reaching specific, measurable key performance indicators have an average overall score that is 21 percent higher than those who do not.