How Polaris saved 1.3 million unproductive hours by going social

What if an Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) solution could help you eliminate more than a million unproductive hours? That is exactly what UnMail, an innovative ESN solution launched by Polaris Group’s Intellect Design Arena Ltd (IDAL) on August 11, 2015 did.

Earlier known as Octopus, UnMail has helped the company convert 1.3 million unproductive hours to productive for 12,000 employees over a period of one year. It has been in use inside IDAL for over three years now. Six months after it was deployed, IDAL started measuring the outcomes and found a 30 percent reduction in attrition and 32 percent reduction in support calls. In May 2014, Market Watch predicted a growth of over $3 billion in the global ESN market, from $4.77 billion in 2014 to $8.14 in 2019.

UnMail can be used at all levels in an enterprise and claims to enable an organization’s smooth evolution from passive and closed email technology to more social, collaborative and transparent functional ESN technology like at Polaris. It has modular socio-business apps which are built for a universal employee workspace on the web, mobile (iOS, Android, Blackberry) and tablets and provides a central enterprise platform with a ‘Social Business’ out of the box.

ESN has been around for quite some time now and Sashi Mohan, CIO and CTO at IDAL thinks that while ESN has been talked of a lot in the past, companies are only now realising the importance of employing it because of which launching UnMail is just the right move for the company.

“We have our differentiators from other ESNs in the market which gives us an edge and the market is picking up. The concept of being socially connected in our daily life is increasing and social connectivity over mobile has taken over all other forms of communication,” he added. In the last 18 months, after the company implemented UnMail, it has done away with the facility of email interaction for all internal communication. The company has experienced a reduction of 20 percent in workflow processing time using UnMail’s Social Flow and says that employee engagement has increased exponentially in the organization with employees being able to socially interact with the employer.

UnMail has also helped IDAL in tapping enterprise knowledge where Knowledge Circles have led to a quick identification of experts inside the organization itself. The organization had an 80 percent increase in innovation quotient for all employees have been able to contribute to the focus areas of the business. The most remarkable change is the 75 percent of employee on-boarding time with 100 percent business continuity with a risk free and email free company.

“With UnMail, we no longer waste time on junk mail. Big savings and big connectivity as well as idea sharing and productivity gain are some of the ways UnMail has helped IDAL,” said Mohan.