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Salesforce.com's Chatter: Cloud-Based Collaboration for Better Business Communications and Customer Care?
Salesforce.com has announced at its Dreamforce event in San Francisco something called Chatter, a "collaboration cloud" platform that brings social networking features to business applications, content and users. Chatter promises to bring the agility and ease of use found in applications such as Facebook and Twitter to businesses, enabling feeds from business applications, content and users that can be followed, profiled and shared. Salesforce.com expects to begin shipping Chatter in 2010. Can such cloud-based collaboration and social networking features help collaboration and customer care at your organization? If so, how? If not, why not?
Posted Nov. 18, 2009 in Information Technology
Keywords: Twitter, Facebook, collaboration, social networking
Best Answer
Sure they can help - with two big caveats:
a) This will only work for companies that use actual knowledge-workers in their customer support & facing roles. And those types of workers are probably doing this anyway - all Salesforce.com has done is provided some organization around tools that are already available.
But for the typical $12/hour call center agent, these tools won't make a bit of difference. It could actually make them much less productive (true also for the knowledge workers) if the integration of social networks causes those employees to get distracted from their 'business use' by their personal use.
b) Salesforce.com needs to walk a very fine line - they have provided a nice 'in app' organizing framework for social networks and tools, but the power of these networks is their openness. Chatter needs to add value without locking any of these capabilities into proprietary frameworks - I didn't hear anything suggesting that Salesforce would try that, but it will fail if they attempt to do so.
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Anything that eliminates email as a collabortation tool is fantastic in my book!
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Sure they can help - with two big caveats:
a) This will only work for companies that use actual knowledge-workers in their customer support & facing roles. And those types of workers are probably doing this anyway - all Salesforce.com has done is provided some organization around tools that are already available.
But for the typical $12/hour call center agent, these tools won't make a bit of difference. It could actually make them much less productive (true also for the knowledge workers) if the integration of social networks causes those employees to get distracted from their 'business use' by their personal use.
b) Salesforce.com needs to walk a very fine line - they have provided a nice 'in app' organizing framework for social networks and tools, but the power of these networks is their openness. Chatter needs to add value without locking any of these capabilities into proprietary frameworks - I didn't hear anything suggesting that Salesforce would try that, but it will fail if they attempt to do so.
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