What exactly is Salesforce Chatter? It looks like Facebook, you can post statuses and tag people, but is that all you use it for? Many people underutilize Chatter and are unaware of all of its benefits other than communication. Chatter can do much more than act like Facebook! 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. If you aren’t using these six awesome Chatter features yet, you aren’t taking full advantage of Salesforces’ #1 enterprise social network.

Follow Everyone & Everything

In Chatter when you ‘Follow’ someone, you are notified via email or in your Chatter feed of their real-time actions like commenting or liking posts. However, 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, helping to lead to successful 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.

Approve or Reject Records in Salesforce Chatter

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.

Out of Office Automatic Message

Have you ever spent time waiting on answers from someone just to find out that they are out of town? If yes, you must start using Chatter ‘Out of Office’ statuses. Users 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!

Take Actions! Create Polls & Tasks in Chatter

Actions are a cool feature of Chatter that let 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, like who should be staffed on which projects. Polls make decision making easy and clear to everyone in your organization.

Another underutilized Chatter action is the ability to create Tasks right from a record’s Chatter feed. In the 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 employees.

Invite Others Outside of Your Company

Chatter does not have to be just an internal communication network. You can invite customers to get involved too! Salesforce offers special Chatter External licenses that can be granted to people outside of your workplace. The licenses let them see information on Chatter, connect with Users, and follow groups all while restricting access to your Salesforce data. Sharing documentation, information, and collaborating with customers is easy with external licenses. Customers can receive Salesforce Chatter notifications, share information or files, and write posts. Overall, Chatter is a great way to communicate and share information, both internally and externally.

Upload Files & Manage Version Control in Salesforce Chatter

How many times have you run into issues from having the wrong version of a document? These issues can be small internal hiccups or larger, client-facing problems that leave you looking and feeling disheveled. Chatter Version control is an awesome feature that helps stop this. First, you can keep collaborative files like PDFs or Word documents organized and up to date with Chatter Files. Then, you can share them with 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.

Use These Salesforce Chatter Features Today!

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. When it comes to Salesforce project management, Chatter is a vital addition, especially when using the Inspire Planner project management app. Inspire Planner is not only a Salesforce-native app, but it also integrates seamlessly with Chatter. By together utilizing Inspire Planner and Salesforce Chatter, you will increase efficiencies, reduce email communication, and complete tasks faster than ever before.