Salesforce Chatter Usage

This article explains how Chatter in Salesforce can be used to enhance team coordination and increase productivity.

Salesforce Chatter can be used extensively as a tool in management activities to minimize common day-to-day problems and focus more time on getting tasks completed successfully. Chatter has the capabilities to help you increase team productivity, spend more time on meaningful activities and have full visibility over projects leading to successful project management in Salesforce

Here are some scenarios explaining the use of Salesforce in Project management-

1.     Efficient Communication Tool

Lack of proper communication is a huge problem for project managers and their team members too. Clear communication channels are a must-have in order for team members to get the right information that they need and for projects to get completed effectively. In Salesforce, you can communicate in a variety of ways. In particular, Salesforce Chatter is a great communication tool. You can post messages on to records in Salesforce and tag relevant people so that they see the message. This helps ensure that everyone has been informed of the message.

2.      Assigning Tasks to Team Members

Oftentimes, a task may be completed incorrectly due to an employee not being on the same page as a manager when it comes to an expected deliverable or outcome. This can be frustrating for all parties involved and can waste a ton of time. With Salesforce, you can clearly identify the task and their owners, directly creating a clear expectation.

Chatter provides the ability to create Tasks right from a record’s Chatter feed. In the chatter post, you populate fields like Subject, Assigned to, Due Date, and an actual Task record is created. The “assigned” person is notified they have a Task too. When using Chatter to create Tasks, you only need to populate the most vital fields upon creation and avoid scrolling through the entire record. Overall, Chatter Actions can save you a ton of clicks and time, all while allowing you to continue to communicate often and effectively to your team members.

A manager can post a Chatter message on a record allowing for a User to know exactly what needs to be done in relation to it. Salesforce can help add clarity to project expectations, increasing job success, and decreasing frustration amongst team members.

3.      Follow Team Members

Chatter lets you follow more than just people by enabling Feed Tracking. With Feed Tracking, Users can follow records and are notified of changes to them, directing to successful and efficient Salesforce project management. Sales managers stay updated on relevant Opportunity information without having to chase down employees. Many standard objects already have feed tracking enabled too. Also, you can ‘Follow’ an individual User so that you are notified via email or in your Chatter feed of their real-time actions like commenting or liking posts. This is great because project managers can be followed by all team members, ensuring that everyone is updated on any actions the project manager takes in Salesforce. 

4.      Approve or Reject Records

Salesforce’s Approval Process feature lets Users approve or reject changes to records in various situations like management approving hours or checking information changes. To approve/reject records, Users must navigate to the record, search for the changes then finally find where to approve/reject. This is time-consuming and tedious. However, if you Enable Chatter Approvals, Users can see a consolidated overview of relevant record information and approve/reject options right in their Chatter feed. This saves tremendous amounts of time on searching through records and allows information to stay relevant and accurate. Enabling Chatter approval/rejection capabilities makes the approval process much quicker, easier, and clearer for Users. This will help in securing faster approvals from customers.

5.     Out of Office Automatic Message

Managers and Team Members can write a post and specify the start/end dates for the time they’re gone. Depending on your version of Salesforce, the message is posted as an automatic response when someone writes on your feed, creates a post tagging you, or it will show up almost everywhere that your name appears. When your specified “End Date” passes, the message stops posting. This feature saves time and keeps everyone in the office informed. Additionally, the automatic post is great for customer-facing Chatter portals where customers reach out to you and are told immediately that you are away, not ignoring them! Also, Project managers and team members are aware of each other’s absence.

6.      Actions! Create Polls & Tasks

Actions are a cool feature of Chatter that lets Users write special types of Chatter posts and create records right from your Chatter feed. One useful Salesforce Chatter action is creating Poll posts. Similar to Facebook, you can create polls that people vote on via clickable choices. Many companies use this feature for internal decision making like what time to start a meeting, but it can also be utilized to aid in more strategic business decisions in Project management, like who should be staffed on which projects. Polls make decision making easy and clear to everyone in your organization.

7.      Topics

With Chatter, you can create separate chats around topics, so the discussions of different projects don’t get mixed up. In addition to sending member messages, Chatter can also send the project team notifications when any task changes happen.

8.      Upload Files & Manage Version Control

Chatter Version control feature allows team members to keep collaborative files like PDFs or Word documents organized and up to date with Chatter Files. Then, you can share them with Managers, individuals, groups, or associate them directly to records. Finally, use Chatter Files Version Control to very easily and clearly replace the old version of a file with the new one, alerting everyone who follows the file. You’ll easily be able to collaborate on documents, keep attachments associated with the correct records or projects, and never reference an old file again.

Chatter features enable your team to communicate better, increase productivity, and spend more time on meaningful activities. Users can use various Chatter features to quickly follow and create records, spending less time searching through data. Using Chatter correctly increases visibility, allowing the right people to see the right information at the right time, like with Version Control.