Microsoft: An Incomplete Change

Have you ever changed? Was it easy?

Li and Bernoff describe the importance of preparing for organizational change and transformation in the context of interactions with customers, or the groundswell.

Before Satya Nadella became the new CEO of Microsoft in 2014, the company was seen as not being able "to connect with the new generation of users".

Nadella became CEO to lead an internal change effort to better connect Microsoft employees to its customers.

After four years, many argue that Nadella has made Microsoft feel "like a different Microsoft".

Nadella has attempted to bend the company's structure. He believes that this will keep customers and employees in tune with each other.

Is the change effort complete?

Li and Bernoff indicate that "when you're tapped into the customer community you get feedback quickly".

Organizational innovation is better with the help of customers.

Under this consideration, organizational change is tied to the commitment to engage with your customers.

If we look at Microsoft on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, the connection between Nadella's change effort and customer engagement is blurry.

For a company that has over 12 million likes on Facebook, it is surprising to see that most of their posts do not receive much attention.

As indicated by the two comments in the picture above, Microsoft does not let users rate their page on Facebook and it seems that their reception on Facebook is not very positive.

With over 1.6 million followers on Instagram, Microsoft looks very different here in comparison to their Facebook presence.

Their posts are more varied, receive more likes & comments, but Microsoft does not really seem to be responding to questions or general comments.

Microsoft has several accounts on Twitter, one of them being its support page, where they directly interact with customers.

We can see that the company replies to customers daily in this platform.

However, at the same time, Microsoft, like in Facebook and Instagram, does not really respond to customers in their other Twitter accounts, and this has an overall negative effect on their Twitter presence:

In this day and age, Li and Bernoff point out that, in platforms like Twitter, it is important for companies to listen to their users, to respond to them, and to even re-tweet them.

This is also applicable, to an extent, in platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

Our quick overview of Microsoft's presence across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram shows us that Microsoft lacks clear interactions with its customers.

On one hand, Microsoft has structurally changed in positive ways under the leadership of Nadella over the past four years.

However, at the same time, our quick overview of Microsoft and social media leaves many questions:

Has the employee-customer relationship truly improved? Is Nadella's change effort inclusive when it comes to customers? Are social media presence and engagement a talking point of this change effort?

Change, as described by Nadella himself, "Should never be done. This is a way of being. It's about questioning ourselves everyday".

We can use Microsoft as an example and a living testament that, in our world today, organizational change and customer engagement are intertwined.

As stated by Li and Bernoff, organizations who engage and interact with the groundswell experience a mental shift.

Moving forward, Nadella and Microsoft need to incorporate a social-media-based strategy into their change effort.

In an era of constant organizational changes, organizations and companies need to look at change through a customer engagement perspective.

Innovate. With your customers.