Yammer, social media unite global staff

Concur Technologies has employees in the United States and overseas who need up-to-the-minute information in order to serve their clients.

Getting that vital data to people in the field was a growing challenge for the Redmond, Wash.-based company, which has operations in Europe and a new office in Sydney, Australia.

“Employees are being spread all over the globe so we needed an initiative to reach them,” says Cherie Sykes Plaisted, director of corporate learning and employee communications.

Concur accomplished that by revamping its portal into a multimedia machine—complete with audio, video, podcasts and microblogs.

She says the company’s mission is to “raise the level of [employee] interaction … with the very explicit purpose of driving our business forward.”

Concur offers Web-based and mobile applications to help companies effectively manage their travel costs and expense reports. “Our goal is to make sure [workers] get the information they need to service their customers,” Plaisted says.

Comfort level

The first step was to update Concur’s Web portal. Employees now receive information and report customer feedback through multimedia and social networking, communication tools they use every day.