I attended the roundtable event yesterday to provide a user and developer perspective on Chatter based on our experiences at FinancialForce.com. The event was attended by some leading industry analysts who heard from different customers about their experiences.

Tim Barker, Salesforce’s VP of Strategy, EMEA, did a great job facilitating the event and provided a round-up of the Chatter Private Beta customer survey results. Parts of this survey have been quoted extensively in the media, but I still find the results compelling. Success metrics include:

- 27% increase in collaboration and team work (pretty hard to measure)

- 19% improvement in Salesforce user adoption

- 3% increase in sales revenue

- 90% indicate they will likely continue to use Chatter in the future.

That’s impressive! We are already sold on the application and our customers are finding that the collaboration it delivers improves customer service dramatically and facilitates sales, but it’s still a difficult concept to sell to anyone that hasn’t tried it. I was asked following my presentation, ‘if we had to pay for Chatter, what business case would we present to the CFO?’ And it struck me when thinking about an answer just how difficult a sell it is, which is why Enterprise 2.0 organizations major on the problems with user adoption. Without trying it out first, I don’t believe you’d even have the basis for a discussion with the CFO. But then you’d need to show where you have/could have lost revenue as a result of not having Chatter and where you have won deals on the back of better collaboration.

These things are difficult to measure. Salesforce.com private beta customers measured the improved time taken to find information, and the increase in close rates among other things. If Salesforce.com could provide a compelling guide to measuring your Chatter success and presenting a business case, I don’t see how it can fail.

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I’m attending a roundtable event on Monday organized by salesforce.com to discuss the merits of Chatter and the application in action. I’m looking forward to hearing other people’s experiences. The audience will be made up of EMEA industry analysts who will be provided with an update on Chatter’s progress and will be joined by salesforce.com customers who will share details of how they are making use of Chatter within their organizations.

FinancialForce.com has been invited for a few reasons. To discuss our own use of Chatter, how we have embedded it in our FinancialForce Accounting app and how we have built additional apps using Chatter
as a platform.

From our own experience and that of our customers so far, the main benefit by far is that Chatter highlights potential business issues to the right people before they become a problem, which in the end enables better customer service. We also note that it helps connect sales and finance over and above what integration between systems can do. If accounts and sales are alerted to a helpdesk issue, they will have a better understanding of why a customer might not be paying an outstanding bill, or why that customer isn’t extending their contract and a resolution can be found quickly for mutual benefit. In the words of one of our customers that I spoke with recently, “sales is finance and finance is sales, the two things go hand in hand….”

Yes, it’s official. Salesforce today announced the availability of Chatter following a private Beta which has already yielded some great feedback. Marc Benioff says that:

“Based on the [experience of the beta trial users], 90 percent of participants surveyed indicated they would recommend Chatter to others. Specifically, these customers reported a 27 percent increase in collaboration and a 22 percent improvement in productivity with Chatter.”

That’s pretty impressive and from our own use of Chatter within FinancialForce.com we’d agree. We’d describe it as a combination between Twitter, Facebook and Google Wave, focused on the enterprise. It has reduced e-mail volumes at FinancialForce, especially the long and fragmented message chains in which it’s sometimes difficult to discern who started a conversation, who is involved in it and what actions need to be taken. It makes it easier to see and respond to things which means you can be more proactive in dealing with issues as they arise because you see them so much earlier.

FinancialForce.com has built Chatter collaboration into FinancialForce Accounting and we see great benefits for innovative customers (as laid out previously). And with the price tag outlined by Salesforce (free to users and $15 per month to non users), now everyone can benefit.

We are in Boston today attending an industry analyst event called The Grape Escape along with Susan Randal from the WiFi Alliance who will talk about the organization’s experiences with FinancialForce Accounting.

The annual event is in its 10th year and is being attended by more than two dozen global technology analysts, some we have met before and some we haven’t. They will hear from different tech vendors about their future strategy and success to date, as well as receiving news announcements and hearing from customers.

At the event, we are making two new announcements. The second I will tell you more about when we announce to the market on Monday. The first has been much anticipated. We have released Summer ‘10, the fourth generation release of FinancialForce Accounting. This is significant for a number of reasons.

This new version includes significant new features and a Chatter powered inter-departmental collaboration engine. As the only accounting application that ‘speaks Salesforce’, the collaborative element of this release will set FinancialForce Accounting customers apart.

Customers will benefit from collaboration around business processes like order to cash, which dissolve inter-departmental boundaries that hinder the running of an effective business. The Chatter-enabled FinancialForce application will allow more frequent and effective collaboration around sales opportunities, customer accounts and service issues in order to achieve best pricing and payment structures for big deals or avoid costly payment delays and disputes.

The latest FinancialForce release has been developed with a focus on making accounting processes even more efficient for users. It includes a completely new user interface with an enhanced look and feel, increased depth of functionality related to intercompany accounting and revenue recognition, and a faster pay process.

Click here to view the full announcement and customer endorsements of FinancialForce Accounting.Â

We’re attending this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston and opening keynotes are currently underway. It is the first time we’ve attended this event and we’ve heard good things about it. It is a gathering place for the growing community of business and IT people bringing enterprise-class collaboration and productivity tools into their organizations. As well as attending panel sessions, we will be meeting with a number of influencers in this space to discuss our own approach to enterprise collaboration and how we see the new generation of tools, like Chatter, breaking down departmental barriers to effective business.

The way we work is changing rapidly and cloud developments have had a big role to play in the way companies procure, implement and use technology. Those that can leverage new tools for more agile and simplified information exchange and collaboration will have a huge competitive edge. Particularly as Cloud has eradicated some of the typical barriers to international expansion. 

Enterprise 2.0 promises to liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email. It provides business managers with access to the right information at the right time and takes advantage of the collective intelligence of many. There are huge implications for how businesses will manage customer service in the future for example. Finance will have a pivotal role to play as a source of business intelligence to solve business issues right across the organization.

We’ll be making another related announcement on Thursday at the Grape Escape analyst event being held in Boston on the 17th. More on that later.

To follow Twitter coverage of Enterprise 2.0 search: #e2conf

Since we began building Chatterbox and working with Chatter, we have joined the salesforce.com Chatter developers community (DevZone) site where thousands of developers use Chatter to connect with each other, demo new apps, and share and discuss ideas.

We have received some great feedback about our Chatterbox application. One conversation in particular is worth noting.

Ed Schlesinger, a developer at studentforce (@studentforcenow), is excited by the possibilities delivered by Chatterbox. He created a notification system in minutes that works with their student application to notify students of assignments due and can see real value for organisations in Higher Education.

Great example of Chatter in use, the value of Chatterbox and the importance of collaboration.

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Today, we announced our new Chatter integration and new business collaboration app, Chatterbox, which has received some very positive reactions. We made the announcements at salesforce.com’s Cloudforce2 event in New York.

 

 

Comments on the news so far:

“For me this is the first potentially large scale business use case of social computing where the direct integration between applications has genuine business meaning.”

Dennis Howlett on his ZDNet blog

 

“The big question is what will hook the enterprise on Chatter. Facebook analogies are nice, but real business cases like those surfaced by Roche will ultimately win the day—even if they won’t sound so great in a keynote.”

Larry Dignan, ZDNet

 

“I’ve always been cautious about social tools that promise to revolutionize the enterprise – but I have to say that an integration between chatter and a third party force.com application really shows the promise these social tools can bring – dragging information kicking and screaming out of the app and to where a user needs it.”

Ben Kepes on cloudave.com

 

“Will it make it? I think so. Is there still a need for proper strategic planning and follow through for large scale uptake? No question about it. But that’s no different from any other enterprise software category. One things for sure – having the software make it simpler to illustrate business cases out of the box makes it a hell of a lot easier to pass the initial litmus test… Finally, social starts to embrace process.”

Sameer Patel, Pretzel Logic, Enterprise 2.0 blog

“…First, FinancialForce, the ever surprising FinancialForce, released Chatterbox - highly customizable and easily configurable Chatter streams associated with activities that you choose to access and subscribe to… What makes this interesting is that by having a substantial number of conditions that you can apply to the specific Chatter stream, you are filtering out what you don’t want and receiving and responding to what you do want.

Note: FinancialForce is a company to reckon with in the salesforce.com ecosystem. Last week they announced integration with SAP - one of the few in that ecosystem who understands the need to do that.” Paul Greenberg, zdnet.com

When was the last time you spoke to your finance team? To chase up late payment of an expense claim perhaps, or to confirm your budget for the year? Maybe you had problems finding details of a customer payment or a customer order? And I bet email was your choice of communication tool every time.

Finance has historically been seen as a back office function where accountants are the people you talk to as a last resort to help you solve a problem. In turn, accountants have typically found that they spend all day problem solving, answering queries and putting out fires.

When you think about it, this makes no sense. Everything in business has some sort of financial impact, and will ultimately end in a debit or credit. So finance professionals can bring a particular, highly useful perspective to most business activities going on. If sales and finance collaborated earlier on putting together sales bids, or customer services brought finance in as soon as there was a client issue, then the business benefits could be massive.

If the wall between front office interaction with customers and back office finance was torn down, the potential for improved responsiveness, better customer service and more efficient business processes is considerable. Accountants need to be put front and centre to drive activity and process in the business, yet despite numerous attempts this hasn’t really happened.

As alluded to in a previous blog post, FinancialForce.com will soon be announcing some work around collaborative accounting and Salesforce Chatter which will do just that; transforming the accounting function and its role within business. Whilst we are passionate about finance and financial processes, by extending this thinking, we can see huge benefits for the rest of the business too.�

Just a short post at this stage with further details to be announced soon.

Following the launch of Chatter from salesforce.com , the FinancialForce.com team is excited to announce it has been busy building social networking capability into FinancialForce Accounting . We’re close to unveiling it to the public and as the only online accounting vendor that truly ‘speaks Salesforce’ we expect to be the first that ‘Chatters’ too. We are not developing this on a whim, this is part of a long term push by FinancialForce to help finance and business professionals collaborate better within their organization, bringing clear benefits to accountants and the wider business. They include:

• Faster, more automated finance processes; fewer bottlenecks
• The ability to quickly identify and communicate with colleagues who have the information and expertise they need to get their questions answered
• Convenient updates when relevant documents are changed or added

These are just some of the advantages of close communication between finance and sales. We expect to have more to say about exactly what we’re doing in the coming weeks. The sociable accountant – whatever next?!

In a guest post on TechCrunch, Marc Benioff of salesforce.com talks about why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social.

In it he asks why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?

Typically, social networking tools and business have been kept very separate. The fact that many bosses have banned the use of these tools and labelled them unproductive has not helped. But like anything, it’s about how they are put to use. The technology behind sites like Amazon is impressive and is something all enterprise software vendors can learn from. So, the question is – how can we repurpose these tools, based on the kind of technology we are all used to using in our personal lives, to enhance our work lives?

Cross department communication is still a problem in the workplace. We still work in silos at our individual workstations despite in many cases spending our personal lives socialising online. Actions are often delayed if someone is out of the office and not accessing email, which is still the communication tool of choice. Many companies are making good use of tools like Instant Messenger, but what if we could extend those benefits for more advantage? If Chatter and similar enterprise tools can help overcome this and some of the problems related to antiquated software that many companies still rely on, based on the kind of technology we all know and love, that has got to be a good thing. Then if department specific processes can be built in aimed at specific and only relevant groups, it has to be a no-brainer.

At FinancialForce.com, we are looking at how we deliver extra advantage to our customers using these tools. From the perspective of an online accounting software vendor that speaks salesforce, we believe that as more and more businesses grow their presence on sites like Facebook, there are integration opportunities to enable better collaboration with business for finance related processes. We’ll talk more about this in the coming weeks so watch this space…