Tesco, British Gas use Yammer to gain insight from employees on how mobile apps are working

Yammer used to get constructive criticism from employees on mobility strategies, delegates at Computing's Enterprise Mobility Summit 2015 hear

Tesco and British Gas have been using social enterprise tool Yammer to find out how well their mobility strategies are working in the enterprise.

At Computing's Enterprise Mobility Summit 2015 in London today, Tesco's former group technology director Tomas Kadlec explained that his former team used Yammer to get constructive criticism from employees on whether specific mobile apps are working.

"Sometimes we ask directly negatively phrased questions such as 'is it working for you', 'what kind of problems do you experience', because the feedback we receive is negative and [this tactic] works," he said.

"We get appraisal in terms of the silence and when it doesn't work we get feedback," he added.

Kadlec said Tesco used Yammer "quite extensively" including when it was driving its bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategy in order to understand what its staff were using in-store.

British Gas's Chris Patten, enterprise architect of business solutions at British Gas, said his firm was also using Yammer and said the tool was "very useful".

Kadlec explained that despite using Yammer for this kind of knowledge, it had to take a completely different approach to get feedback from its customers.

"We have very good stats in terms of how many people are connected and which sites they are using, but this is all secondary information – not really getting information from customers who simply could not connect or didn't find [a specific page] useful. So we started to use analytics and ask questions as to why there was this kind of distribution – we have to rely on insight and analytics," he said.