Veon Eurasia: digital transformation journey

JIVE
IN VEON EURASIA:
FUELING DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
VEON EURASIA
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY

VEON EURASIA
ABOUT VEON EURASIA
VEON, a NASDAQ-listed global provider of communications services, formerly known as VimpelCom,
aspires to lead the personal internet revolution for more than 235 million customers it serves today,
and many others in the years to come.
Our Eurasia Business Unit consists of companies in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan,
Armenia, Tajikistan and Georgia. That is around 50 million customers in the Eurasian countries with
113.5M total population. Team size of the unit is more than 9500 employees.
Tell us about your journey to Jive and/or why your
organization made collaboration and engagement a
top priority. What are the key challenges you were
trying to solve with your collaboration solution or
customer community?
1

STAGNATION
In the past few years, the telecom industry’s performance has
been lackluster in many markets across the world:
● Revenues fall.
● Sector lacks meaningful engagement with customers.
● Classic business model is challenged competing with
WhatsApp, Facebook and other Silicon Valley
upstarts. For a telco company there’s a risk to
become a dumb pipe for others, as consumers and
businesses communicate, share and socialize for free
through fast-growing OTT players.
● Telcos are in very tough competition for talents.
AMBITIOUS GOAL OF VEON
Jean-Yves Charlier, CEO:
“Reinventing a global communications
pioneer into a global tech company,
aiming to lead the personal internet
revolution by bringing new
experiences to hundreds of millions of
customers in the markets of
tomorrow”.

Mikhail Gerchuk, Eurasia CEO:
“Our customers want highly relevant
and personalized digital content,
products and services, delivered via
seamless free connectivity. VEON
will give it to them”.
Yogesh Malik, CTO:
“VEON is more than a new
name. It is about rebooting our
entire system, behaving like a
hustling startup, and building the
next generation network from
scratch. I call it the clean-sheet
approach, moving forward
without the legacy of existing
systems”.
TRANSFORMATION OF THE
COMPANY
Value offering
● Introduce new digital products and services
● Be the best in customer service
Operations & organizational structure
● Create shared services hubs in countries
● Speed-up decision-making
 give more voice and power to countries in the Group
 reduce bureaucracy
● Make it easy to locate internal experts and match them to
bright career opportunities within the company
Transform culture
● Introduce and make live new corporate values to empower
change from the inside
● Make company an appealing place to work for young and
talented digital-natives, retain young professionals
Give re-birth to the brand
● In support of cultural shift, less than a month ago, we have
announced change of our brand from VimpelCom to VEON

JOURNEY TO JIVE
Before introducing Jive to VEON Eurasia, it proved efficiency in Beeline Kazakhstan - part of the
group with 2 000+ employees.
Jive was launched there in 3 months with 200+ groups and spaces already in place to substitute
intranet of the company.

The numbers below were calculated in the first 3 months after official Jive launch in Kazakhstan
Some facts about the project in Kazakhstan
Upon its first anniversary, Jive project in Kazakhstan was recognized with prestigious HR Brand Asia
Award 2016.
Such great success has fueled the decision to implement Jive on Eurasia level and substitute all 7
local intranets with unified solution - to make ambitious transformation tasks possible.

WE BET ON OUR PEOPLE
With VEON, we have chosen to disrupt ourselves from within, and we have unique advantages that
position us for success in our ambition - first of all, our global team. We bet on the strong, loyal and
able multicultural team of professionals VEON already has.
DITCHING THE DINOSAURS
All too often, as companies mature, they become
segmented into departments with separate silos,
creating an unintentionally competitive
atmosphere between teams that holds back the
collaborative approach and the sharing of
knowledge needed to achieve common goals.
Digitalization – cultural paradigm shift, not just token
efforts – has the power to burn these barriers to the ground.
It allows talented people to be effectively deployed to the tasks
at hand.
Digital communication technologies have opened up new
opportunities for how work gets done.
Jive as a leading digital workplace solution is our weapon
of choice to fight company’s internal “dinosaurs”:
● legacy values and mindset
● scattered communications
● redundant corporate structure
● bureucracy
Please describe your organizational and program
goals for employee collaboration and/or customer and
partner engagement.
2

NEW WAY TO THINK AND WORK –
WITH JIVE
Having our “dinos” spotted and transformation goals defined, we built up our Jive implementation
strategy mapped to core needs of the business (see diagram below)
Diagram 1: Jive implementation strategy in VEON Eurasia (use-cases)
ENHANCE COLLABORATION WITH CULTURAL
DIVERSITY
As you remember, our team is very culturally diverse, consisting of people from 7 different countries.
VEON Eurasia organizational move to Regional Hubs made it crucial to embrace cultural difference
and turn them into source of effective collaboration.
That’s why our special effort in Jive implementation is devoted to engaging cross-country and cross-
cultural knowledge exchange, ideation and communication.

Here in VEON we are trying to maximize ROI of any strategic project, and Jive community is no
exception. Almost any feature of Jive is utilized on our way to complete digitalization.
7 COUNTRIES, ONE PLACE TO GO
To make Jive our ubiquitous tool for transformation we started from unifying our communications. We
literally “killed” separated time-worn intranets of each country, substituting them with single cloud-
based Jive solution. Our task was to create a powerful group-wide homepage which serves you
personalized selection of most interesting info, as well as, global news, career opportunities, important
messages from top managers.
At the same time each country has its own secondary homepage for local news, discussions and
collaboration. All such homepages have similar structure but unique identity, based on national colors
or local brand identity. They are the new homes of the content migrated from old intranets.
Our global homepage (click on picture below to download gif with dynamic)
What key product elements do you leverage uniquely
to help you achieve those goals? Please share your
key features such as mobile, gamification, CRM
integrations, etc.
3

Speaking in Jive language, our global homepage is based on News page plus advanced tailor-made
tile, which is configured to automatically identify globally important content and instantly promote it.
Using power of Jive’s APIs we have set each block of the tile to look at specific spaces, authors and
tags to pick up content as soon as it gets published. All those settings are highly configurable and
doesn’t require any technical skills to reconfigure them based on new priorities.
Rich configuration of a homepage tile

MOBILE EXPERIENCE IS VITAL
As a telco our team heavily uses Jive in mobile browser
and Jive Daily. This especially relates to our C-Suite, retail
team and network engineers, who work on-the-go.
We pay special attention to mobile browser view of our
most popular and important spaces and groups.
Recent Jive Daily update which brought gamification and
tiles to mobile apps even allowed us to save on custom
mobile application to support important top-management
kick-off event - we used our Jive instead.
DIGITAL
One of the first things we launched with Jive is our “Digital”
space, which brings the latest and most important internal and external news on tech, startups, new
internet products and more. This is the place of inspiration for new product ideas and discussions
which fuel our shift towards digital culture.
Technically that is done with a super-flexible content aggregator tile. In real-time it takes blog posts
from our global leaders and local execs plus shows selected content from external media like
TechCrunch or Mashable.
Homepage of “Digital” space

Flexible settings of our Digital-aggregator tile
DIGITHON = DIGITAL + MARATHON
We are heavily using Jive’s ideation capabilities + social groups to brainstorm on new products &
services with which we can win hearts of our current and future customers.
There’s a regular practice in VEON to run events called “digithons”. By analogy with “hackathon” this
kind of event is named after “digital” + “marathon”. Jive is playing a crucial role in:
● communicating goals and news on such digithons,
● identifying talented and ambitious employees who are eager to participate,
● gathering and judging ideas.

Eurasia Digithon 2017 announcement
Digithon’s video report

CUSTOMER-OBSESSED IN ACTION
One of our corporate values is being customer-obsessed. That’s is also obvious from our community
stats. Spaces, groups and content on Customer Service initiatives are usually in the top charts by
popularity.
Video from top-managers of Beeline Armenia on “How to love a Customer”, which went viral in our
community
FROM CUSTOMER FEEDBACK TO GREAT
SERVICE IDEAS
The most prominent customer-centric spot in our community is “Voice of Customer” space, where we
gather around 70 high-quality ideas quarterly. Most of them are getting implemented within a month
after approval. All those ideas are inspired by direct customer feedback and submitted by call center
agents.
The initiative is hugely valued by our top managers. Especially, when they periodically work as call
center agents themselves. This is a common practice in Eurasian operational companies of VEON. Of
course, Voice of Customer space is fueled by Jive’s ideation capabilities.

MOVING TO HUB-BASED ORGANIZATIONAL
STRUCTURE
Jive’s collaboration groups are a good suit to exercise our move to closer cross-country teamwork. As
HR is a primary driver of Jive in VEON, we decided to lead here by our own example with HR HUB
group. Using Jive functionality of social groups and MS Office integration, seasoned with mobile
access capabilities, we managed to save massive amount of time and emails during the process of
approving Hub’s first business processes.
Homepage of HR HUB Eurasia

SINGLE EMPLOYEE DIRECTORY AND
ORGCHART
You can probably imagine what a headache it may take to find contacts of the right person in multi-
country and multi-brand organization, where no single employee directory exists. We were among
such organizations before Jive. It could take up to several days to find a needed contact on a project,
if somebody relevant to the topic was on vacation. Now this mission requires up to several minutes.
Unified organizational chart in VEON Eurasia (real photos substituted)
But nobody said it was easy to implement :) We had to address various challenges: local legislation on
personal data protection, repetitive information security checks, loops of remnant bureaucracy and
different data sources to integrate with. And Jive was here to help as well! One day our project
manager was tired by identical email-requests from each country’s Legal / IT / Information Security. It
took her half an hour to convert all those emails into Jive discussions with magic of Jive Anywhere.
Finally, we’ve got centralized place for all communications on the topic. By the way, this case and
release on Jive for Zapier add-on have inspired us to create Jive stream integration with Wrike - our
project management tool*.
* Legal approval of the integration is in progress

Our collaboration group on Jive integration with various employee record systems in Eurasia
CAREER CENTER IN JIVE
VEON’s deep transformation encourages ambitious career moves and gives lots of opportunities for
that. We aggregate all those opportunities in Eurasian Career center, taking actual vacancies from
both group-level and regional recruiters.
Here our employees can:
● search and filter all recent vacancies across functional and
regional HUBs
● apply for a vacancy
● subscribe to notifications on new vacancies in
interesting areas and receive updates in a
dedicated Jive’s news stream.

Homepage of our Career Center (click on picture below to download gif with dynamic)

EMPOWERING CULTURAL SHIFT
Around a year ago our corporate values were completely revamped to make a foundation for VEON’s
universal metamorphose. Now we prioritize such qualities as being Collaborative, Customer-
obsessed, Entrepreneurial, Innovative and Truthful. Jive is both a tool for the change and a reflection
of it.
Truthful in communications
Transparent by its nature, Jive is used in VEON to make our communications more Truthful:
● provides basis for massive sharing of views, knowledge and expertise, especially for
executives,
● enables bi-directional communications and instant feedback with comments, likes, “helpful”
marks,
● delivers all global and regional news to all our employees.
Jive’s blogging capabilities are the most popular among Eurasia’s C-suites. VEON Eurasia’s CEO,
Mikhail Gerchuk even has dedicated Leader’s Blog space where all his posts are easily browsable,
even from mobile.
Leader’s Blog space of VEON Eurasia’s CEO

Regional CEO’s most recent blog posts highlighted on local homepages

FOSTERING ENTREPRENEURSHIP
In addition to digithons you already heard about, we are using Jive to develop entrepreneurial skills in
our people within other initiatives as well.
There was an interesting program in Kyrgyzstan last year, called #YESvember[123] – combination of
“Yes” and “December” – a month of challenges, educational events, mentorship and product
development sessions targeted to boost entrepreneurial culture. All those activities were coordinated
in dedicated Jive groups. Educational materials and videos from coaching sessions were available
here as well. Moreover, program finalists, who had to complete their projects by the end of the
challenge, used Jive projects to collaborate on them.
#YESvember[123] initiative homepage
Educational materials for #YESvember[123] challenges

GAMIFIED RECOGNITION
One of the pillars of VEON Eurasia’s cultural transformation is gamified employee recognition. We are
actively using Jive Rewards out-of-the box capabilities to support that and especially value mobile
gamification features in Jive Daily. Employees thank their colleagues for help or acting within one of
our values – with a matching badge. We also use quests to motivate people to share inspirational
stories around the values, follow news on culture-related topics.
Out-of-the box Jive gamification we use for employee recognition
Actually, we are not new to the gamification topic and started this journey during Kazakhstan-pilot
days 2 years ago in Jive self-hosted environment. There were badges, ratings and profile-embedded
personal KPIs - all of these fully transparent, creating spirit of healthy competition and culture of
achievement.
But this custom gamification app was lacking mobile support and required additional costs while
upgrading. Possibilities of Jive Rewards came just in time for us, while migrating to cloud. Jive’s out-
of-the-box gamification allowed us to smoothly move the recognition program to cloud without
additional cost and time.

Gamification app we used for values-based and performance-based employee recognition in Jive
Kazakhstan (before moving to cloud)

Please, consider that calculations in this chapter are based on assumptions and publicly available
data. Every concrete case should be calculated separately. The presented data is an approximate
one. These figures shouldn't be used as a benchmark and each figure should be rediscovered and
revised according to market realities and company needs. These costs don’t consider spends on
licenses and technical support of Jive.
We have discovered a formula for successful community for ourselves:
Ambitious business-related goals + Top-manager’s support + Commitment of community
management team. And it works!
USER ADOPTION
In half a year after official launch we see pretty impressive community usage analytics, compared to
benchmarks from “A State of Community Management Special Report. Benchmarking the Jive
Communities”.:
● 15.4% of our users create relevant content by sharing knowledge, ideas and news (almost all
execs are in this group) - 3.2% higher than for a typical best-in-class Jive community
● 42% of users are qualified as active participants. They comment, vote for ideas, collaborate
on documents, etc. - 7% higher than for a typical best-in-class Jive community. These people
are foundation for two-way communications culture we are moving towards.
What results have you seen? Please share business
outcomes, qualitative results (anecdotal feedback),
specific success stories, and quantitative metrics (e.g.
revenue, cost savings, etc.). Be specific and as
concrete as possible — the more quantitative data,
the better.
4

User Adoption analytics compared to Jive’s Benchmarks
Those results are especially promising when put into Jive ROI calculator. Please, consider that
average salary of a professional in telecom in our region is only $7,105 annually (average from
statistical data on salaries in telecom in our countries of operation). That is almost 10 times (!) less
than median salary for telecom in US (according to payscale.com).
Even with this data Jive ROI calculator shows 543% return on investment and project
payback in 5 months in the most conservative scenario.

ENGAGEMENT GROWTH
We are currently in the phase of active growth, which is illustrated by our recent stats on daily activity,
where March 2017 is compared to February 2017.

This becomes even more obvious when we compare usage data quarter-to-quarter:

TIME FOR BUSINESS RESULTS!
Of course, growth of user base and community engagement is important but it’s only a basis for
getting the needed business impact. And we’ve already started harvesting here as well!
AVOIDING MISTAKES AND DOUBLE-EFFORT
WHEN LAUNCHING NEW PRODUCTS &
SERVICES
We see active cross-country knowledge exchange on top-management level, when launching new
products and services. Project leaders from one country are sharing their conclusions, mistakes to
avoid and metrics to track with colleagues, who are to launch same services in their countries next.
Calculate cost & time saved on avoided mistakes and multiply those numbers by 6
other countries per each product launch - that means tens of thousands US
dollars of cost savings only on this use case.
Cross-country knowledge exchange on launching new products & services

JIVE INSTEAD OF CUSTOM MOBILE
APP FOR ANNUAL TOP-MANAGEMENT
KICK-OFF
Another practical cost-saving use-case relates to rich Jive’s mobile
possibilities and recent update of Jive Daily, which allows to customize
group’s homepage right in the app.
These features allowed us to save a decent sum of money on custom
mobile application for annual top-management kick-off. We needed the
app to deliver a meeting agenda, share insights, gather feedback and
even coordinate offline quest event for participants.
Estimated cost of such application by http://howmuchtomakeanapp.com/
calculator is $78,400
Not a bad saving for a single kick-off in the company, where we have
around 5 events of such a level in a year. Another benefit – all other
smaller events now can have their “mobile app” with Jive as well
(around 200 events annually)!
EFFECTIVE CLOSING OF
INTERNATIONAL VACANCIES
Our Career space, where all international vacancies
of VEON Eurasia live, shows great performance
results and conversion.
For the last 6 months:
● 120 international vacancies were placed in Jive
● 202 internal applicants applied via Jive
● 51.6% of vacancies were closed
$9,300 were saved only with optimizing recruiters’
time on promoting vacancies, getting and
processing applications.
If we calculate alternative cost of filling those
vacancies with external candidates, number are
getting even more impressive: $93,310 saved with
62 vacancies closed (we used
https://www.greatbiztools.com Cost Per Hire
Calculator for getting the cost of an external hire).

FROM 7 INTRANETS AND NEWS
MOBILE APP TO JIVE
One of the goals for Jive launch was to close and substitute all local intranets we had in each of our 7
countries.
● There was a substantial reduction in technical support and hardware usage as we now moved
to Jive cloud with all of those included in Jive’s license costs
● Cloud move also reduced our costs for upgrading custom gamification functionality we had in
Kazakhstan.
By very conservative estimates, with Jive cloud we are saving $106,500 first year and $96K
consecutive years!
And we believe that is only a beginning of our successful journey with Jive!

Veon Eurasia: digital transformation journey

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