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Revolutionizing Communication: A Deep Dive into Salesforce Chatter

If your team doesn’t communicate and collaborate, your business won’t be successful. The thing is, you’ll need tools to help your team along. Thankfully, Salesforce Chatter helps your team stay in touch, get updates, give feedback, and share files, all within a well-known dashboard.

In this post, we’ll look at Salesforce Chatter a bit closer to help you decide if it’s the right fit for you!
 

What Is Salesforce Chatter?

Salesforce Chatter is a tool that helps your employees connect and collaborate more effectively. Think of it as Facebook for your business. So, your team can interact with each other, share information, and send files through Chatter. They can also update their status just like on typical social media platforms.

If you’re already using Salesforce, Chatter will be the obvious choice if you’d like a communication and collaboration tool for your team. They’ll have profile pages, communicate effortlessly, and work together efficiently, all while you control exactly who gets access to what information.

Since your team can use Salesforce Chatter to create specialized groups, your Sales and Marketing teams may, for example, rally around a campaign. Data silos will become a thing of the past once they can seamlessly exchange information and help one another out whenever there’s an obstacle.
 

What Does Chatter Offer?

You now know that Chatter is a social network for your business. But what exactly does it offer? Here are some of its features:

  • Chatter Groups. When using Chatter, you can create groups for your projects or goals you’d like to achieve. You’ll add all the members or stakeholders involved in the project. They can then stay connected during the project. You’ll be the group owner by default when you create the group. You can, however, assign someone else to own the group and add or remove members.
  • Email Digest. Email Digest keeps your team updated. After they join a Chatter group, they can subscribe to an email digest with the latest project updates. You can even adjust the mailing frequency.
  • Following. Your team members can follow their colleagues or groups. When they do, they’ll get the most relevant updates, which helps them stay updated.
  • Chatter Questions. Chatter Questions helps your team save time by functioning like a mini support hub. When they start typing a question, they’ll see if someone asked a similar question before and what the answer was. If they can’t find a similar question, they can just post it and tag someone who might have the answer. When there are too many answers, a moderator can choose the best one.
  • Quick Actions. Quick Actions is another helpful Chatter feature. It allows your team to set up quick actions that help them get things done faster. These include posting questions and transferring files.

 

Why Use Salesforce Chatter?

With so many communication and collaboration tools (including the big names like Asana and Slack), why should you use Salesforce Chatter?
 

Salesforce Chatter Eliminates Clutter

With Chatter, your team can rely less on (mass) emails and, as a result, communicate more effectively. This is because Chatter lets them communicate through group forums, newsfeeds, chat, and file sharing. They can also share group updates, files, and other media securely.

Ultimately, Chatter connects everyone in your business, so they can get answers to questions from other colleagues, get feedback, and collaborate with others.

Chatter helps you cut down meetings by 27%. Simply create groups and invite the right stakeholders so they stay connected on a particular project or subject. This allows them to share ideas without spending time arranging and scheduling meetings.
 

improving collaboration
 

Improve Collaboration

By now, you’ve probably guessed that Salesforce Chatter is an excellent tool for businesses to get their teams working together. It ensures that everyone on your team stays on the same page without reading tons of emails or spending hours on the phone.

Your team members can also easily ask for input, get answers to their questions, and share feedback easily, which are all components of effective collaboration. This is especially helpful when working with a remote workforce or a team spread out across different locations.
 

Increased Productivity

When using email and other communication tools like Slack, your team must constantly switch tabs. While this only takes a second or two, these seconds add up and, over time, lead to a lot of wasted hours. With Chatter, you’ll eliminate this problem.

Your team can chat with their colleagues, ask questions, and discuss topics with each other, all without ever leaving Salesforce. This way, your team can stay focused and get more done in less time.
 

Seamless File Sharing

It takes a ton of time to upload and send files by email. And then, the recipient needs to spend time and take action on the other side to download the attachments. Chatter simplifies this process because it allows you and your team to upload large files quickly. And, because these files are saved on the platform, they don’t have to be downloaded by any recipients.
 

Simpler Management

One of the core components of management, whether managing your team or a project, is constantly staying up-to-date. In other words, you should know who’s doing what, what needs to be done, and what the next task is. Chatter unlocks this ability for you.

It gives everyone real-time updates on what everyone else is busy with. In turn, knowing this helps them work more efficiently and respond to changes quickly.
 

Reduce Miscommunication

Because your team uses Chatter inside Salesforce, they’ll have immediate access to all your account records. As such, they’ll have all the information they need to answer any question, give feedback, or solve a problem. It also means that everyone on your team will be on the same page, so you’ll nip miscommunication in the bud.
 

Best Practices for Using Chatter

Take Small First Steps with Salesforce Chatter

Remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to business tools. So, while Chatter is an excellent tool to improve communication and collaboration, it might not be the best solution for your business. As a result, you should try Chatter with a small group of employees before implementing it across your entire business.

When you decide where to implement it, choose a team that will use it for everyday communication and collaboration and provide feedback on how it works. In this way, you’ll know if making the switch will be worth it.
 

Go All in (When You’re Ready)

Once you’ve tried the tool with a small group of employees and decided to implement it, you should go all in. In other words, once implemented, Chatter should be the only tool your team uses in its category. This increases the adoption of the platform and ensures that all communication exchanges stay on one channel. Also, when implementing the tool, you should take advantage of all its features and customize them based on your business’s unique requirements.
 

discussing salesforce chatter
 

Create Guidelines for Using Salesforce Chatter

Before letting everyone use the tool, you should give them some training. Also, create guidelines or rules about what’s okay to post on Chatter (and what’s not). Combined, the training and guidelines will help you eliminate many communication issues.

You can even ask a few Chatter-savvy employees to become the de-facto Chatter moderators, or managers can take the helm as the team gets used to a new tool in their Salesforce dashboard.
 

Go Mobile

Nowadays, everyone uses communication tools and social media platforms on their mobile devices. When implementing Chatter, ask your team to install the Salesforce mobile app. When they do, they’ll be able to share updates with their colleagues, keep up to date on meaningful conversations, and always have the latest information, even if they’re not in front of their computers. This is a best practice for working from home – just make sure they’re not logging on when they should be resting!
 

Monitor How Your Team Uses Chatter

Once your team uses Chatter, you should monitor how the software is adopted, how your team uses it, how often they communicate, what files they upload, and more. You should also get their feedback on how the tool’s working for them and if it makes their jobs easier. Doing this will give you valuable insights into how you can improve your implementation so you get more bang for your Salesforce buck.
 

Get Started With Chatter Now!

Staying within Salesforce’s ecosystem (when your team already loves it) simply makes sense. Plus, no one likes switching tabs between Salesforce, Zoom, Slack, and a myriad of other tools! Salesforce Chatter is an elegant option for keeping your employees connected and reducing the time they spend searching for information.

And, as a bonus, Chatter is free with most Salesforce licensing types!

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