Chatter is a social networking tool for the enterprise, to integrate with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and the Force.com platform. It allows users to share case or sales information, discover what colleagues are working on and assist in answering queries. The melding of social media and CRM is a hot topic and makes the release of Chatter timely. Enterprises are constantly looking to use social networking in the business environment, and Chatter offers a way to do this. It is currently undetermined whether Chatter is more than a glorified content management system, but it is clear that employees need better collaboration tools and that social networking, like cloud computing, is here to stay.
Enterprises will face challenges adopting Chatter. They already have issues with limiting the time employees spend on social networks. Chatter potentially adds another outlet for staff to waste time and could be misused. Ovum believes that enterprises' key concern with Chatter will be managing and controlling access to information. The solution allows administrators to assign feeds and updates as private or public for certain user groups, increasing their workload and training needs. Enterprises may find it difficult to track information that employees should have access to, particularly in the contact center where there is often high staff turnover and sensitive customer information.
Although Chatter will be free for current Salesforce.com users, the real value in collaboration tools is inclusivity. Topic experts and back-office staff need access to participate. Salesforce.com clearly wants to expand into the rest of the enterprise, but its provisional price of $50 per user per month seems high, particularly as enterprises' current priorities are around cost savings. However, pricing will likely come down before release.
Chatter for customer service is unlikely to take off anytime soon
Salesforce.com is gradually expanding from its 'SFA vendor' roots. It ramped up its customer service solution with the acquisition of InStranet in 2008 and the release of Service Cloud in 2009. Salesforce.com has also made its position clear with regards to social media, announcing integrations to Twitter and Facebook early on. Even so, the examples demoed with Chatter at Dreamforce were mostly sales-related. This doesn't necessarily mean the solution isn't suitable for the contact center, but the difference in environment means there are more obstacles. Agents already handle numerous applications, and simplification of the desktop is more important than adding functionality. Agents dealing with high volume, low complexity calls need to answer calls efficiently and don't have time to assist colleagues. Updating statuses and checking cases will take valuable time away from answering the phone.
Chatter could be used to resolve complex queries where employees with specific knowledge are needed. Agents and managers can rate each other on their areas of expertise and then be contacted if this subject area matches that of an open case. This use for Chatter relies on 'experts' regularly checking the status of relevant cases to see if they can help. Users need alerts or intelligent routing to ensure important queries are dealt with quickly and aren't tackled by more then one person. Unified communications (UC) vendors have begun to address this type of assistance from knowledge workers through presence, instant messaging and conferencing, which allow collaboration between agents and back-office staff. Salesforce.com may face 'co-opetition' from UC vendors, if they add presence to Chatter as suggested by Salesforce.com during the conference. At present Chatter doesn't integrate with the voice channel as UC does. Given that voice is still the most important channel for contact center operations, this will need to be addressed before we see strong uptake of Chatter in the contact center.
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