It’s been a little over a week now since I launched Chatter in my organization. Cliches aside it really added a whole new level of energy to my org. Of course it also gave my users another way to get information. One comment a user made during the launch has stuck with me and maybe it’s something you have had to work with as well. The comment was: “Somedays its like drinking from a fire hose, and now you just upped the pressure.” I can totally see where they are coming from, the addition of chatter gives you another way of getting information from Salesforce. So here is how I broke it down for my users and maybe this will help you as well.
Chatter
This is really good for quickly keeping track of records that in the short term are important you. For example: Opportunities closing this week. Or collaborating real time with users outside of email. For us admins it’s really the easiest way to set up an alert system for our users if you think about i. But by no means should this replace scheduled reports or dashboard freshes- you just can’t take in that kind information. I actually had one user ask me “I want to automatically follow all Contracts.” When I pressed them for why, their only response was- “I want to make sure that I know when anything changes on any contract.” Boy, talk about drinking from a fire hose. Sure Chatter can do that, but why not build a clean report and schedule a refresh once a week, or once a day. Thankfully, that answer worked for them.
Email Alerts
My users love this feature. When a field changes on an Account they love to get an email alert. But this can be overwhelming as well. Too many alerts and your users can be disenfranchised with Salesforce- as it can fill up your inbox. Use these wisely. When your users ask you for an email alert ask them for their motivation for it, and then give them a worse-case scenario. My org isn’t that big- 6K+ accounts. But what would happen if their statuses all changed- that is worse-case scenario.
Scheduled Dashboard refreshes
Not to sound like a broken record, but I’m surprised my users haven’t started a fanclub for this feature as well. To date I have over 35 scheduled dashboard refreshes, many that run weekly. My users like these because its a lot of aggregate data packaged in one neat email. And its colorful.
So there is the three nozzles to my fire hose. As you can see between Chatter, email alerts, and dashboards there is a lot of information to take in. As a button-click admin we need to be very aware of the number of emails that Salesforce is sending to our users everyday. Too many and they can be overwhelmed- i.e. you don’t know what your doing or the classic ‘Salesforce is broke and sending me a ton of emails.’ Too few and they think that nothing is going on or you didn’t set up your org correctly.
Photo credit: Hamed Saber via FlickrTags: Chatter, Dashboards, Monday AM Admin
Mike, well said. I think Chatter is one of these new, great features that people don’t really have a feel for, or know exactly the best way to use it yet. Setting some rules of engagement will bring a lot of clarity, not to only your users, but the community. I’m involved with a few brand new chatter implementations myself, and advice like this is very well received.
Salesforce has what they call “Chattequitte”, which is a similar concept, what is appropriate to use chatter for, and their party line is something like “Only use it for work related information, use it for collaboration. DO NOT use it for anything that requires a hard and fast followup, use tasks for that. Use Chatter for small “one off” updates but reports & dashboards for seeing global data”.
Great blog!
Garry