Reed Exhibitions has deployed Salesforce Chatter enterprise wide for enabling closer collaboration amongst its global employees.
"Chatter is transforming the way our global business communicates and collaborates and is contributing to ongoing cultural change," said Dominic Shine, Group CIO, Reed Exhibitions. "It is adding more power to sales and marketing processes already benefiting from the rest of the salesforce.com platform and totally changing the way the entire organization works together to share best practices, collaborate on global programmes and improve every aspect of the way we operate, as though we were all based in the same office."
Reed trialed Chatter with a six-week pilot project involving 150 people in 10 countries. The company also tested several other potential technologies, including SharePoint. Over the course of the Chatter pilot, more than 20 interest groups had been created and more than 70 per cent of the participants were using the application actively.
Reed selected Chatter over the competition as it provides a secure and private way for workers to collaborate and follow the real-time information that matters most to them, without being inundated by irrelevant messages. With Chatter, those interested in a particular topic can opt in to follow the discussion and participate accordingly. For the company’s existing salesforce.com users, the integration of the collaboration and social media capabilities with the features of Salesforce CRM is an incredibly powerful additional advantage.
Chatter is helping to break down the organizational silos and barriers and connect experts and information across the business. This helps Reed’s employees drive a new level of productivity by providing an opportunity to collaborate in real-time around documents, people, processes and application data. For Reed, it is already proving to be an enabler of social change by delivering an open platform for asking questions and tapping into the knowledge and resources across the business.
