Still not convinced? Here are more reasons why Chatter is superior to email -
- Contextual communications; discussions grouped by Account, Opportunity or any other record give greater depth of understanding.
- Sharing in groups; create centers of excellence that are easily accessible for information and questions.
- Sharing files; unlike email, links to files are updated when a file is modified so you always get the latest version, categorized for easy searching.
- Gauge feedback; use polls to quickly gauge demand or get feedback from your user-base.
- Prioritizing topics; understand what the pressing issues are with popular discussed topics bubbling to the top.
- Influencers; know who is really influencing the organization by understanding the influencers.
- Communities; involve your customers in conversations, leveraging groups and communities allowing for quick response to critical questions.
- Leveraging the feed; create a task, create a case… Benioff’s vision is that users will be able to do everything from the feed.
- Include Chatter Free users; even users without a Salesforce license cane benefit from Chatter … for free!
Clearly we at SPK are sold on the benefits of Chatter and believe it is a better tool for internal communication than email. If you need more proof, please contact us or Salesforce for more information … there are a number of white papers, case studies and examples with much more detail.
Like any powerful tool, reaping the benefits of Chatter requires a bit of effort. From our experience, we have found 3 main reasons why Chatter fails to achieve the status of an internal email killer;
- insufficient effort exerted to maximize the benefits,
- lack of Administrative tools, and
- workflow notifications still going to email.
Chatter implementation needs to be approached like any other software deployment project with up-front planning, change management and on-going support all being critical to success – the old adage “you only get out what you put in” applies!
Helping users to understand and apply various Chatter tools and methods is vitally important – they need to know how to create a profile, follow people, follow records, comment, like, unfollow and manage their interaction with communities. This is a significant shift from traditional email, but the benefits are substantial and well worth the effort.
An active program of on-going support is essential to maximize success. Providing forums for users to discuss their experience and actively communicating users successes are some of the approaches we recommend.
Our Salesforce AppExchange app, Chattomate, has been designed to assist successful Chatter implementation by reducing administrative effort. It provides tools to help users Follow or Unfollow and set up rules to automatically follow important conversation and clean up any follows they no longer need. Administrators can auto assign certain users into different groups using a variety of status-based rules.
The last reason Chatter has not quite achieved the status of internal email killer is workflows still notify users through email. For Chatter to really take over, all internal communications need to go through Chatter first. Salesforce have done a good job at setting up notifications to go to email from Chatter if that is required by select users.
These are the reasons we created ChattoMate. Reduce the administrative and manual effort to reduce ongoing maintenance cost at the same time increasing the benefit by pushing notifications all through Chatter.
What has been your organization’s experience with Chatter? Do you share our vision that Chatter can replace internal emails? We are keen to hear from any organization that has views on how Chatter can be used or improved as an internal communications tool. Our goal is to make ChattoMate a ‘must have’ Chatter add-on to maximize the benefits of Chatter and kill internal emails forever.
Try ChattoMate for 30 days FREE on the Salesforce AppExchange
Try ChattoMate for 30 days FREE on the Salesforce AppExchange