I was having an interesting discussion with Hal Wendel CEO of Fididel when the subject of Collaborative Networks came up. Hal has focused his company on helping Auto Dealers sell more cars by engaging the customer on their own websites. A discussion ensued where we talked about the various problems inherent in larger companies where chat may help. After throwing around some ideas, it became clear the opportunity is with engaging internal and external customers.

Chat is already used with external customers, but I haven’t seen it used internally. The ability to engage your internal customers, categorize the issues and then provide a constantly refreshing FAQ seems powerful to me. Additionally, the ability to mine that data and extract corporate information that can be used in improving internal performance, increasing efficiency, and surfacing new revenue generation ideas are incredibly compelling.

I like specifics however and not fluffy ideas without further thought. So for example – an internal customer service team that is exclusively tasked with helping new employees with the on-boarding process. Countless days and weeks are lost when new employees can’t get up to speed quickly due to the inability to find documents, people and training materials necessary to do their job. If an Enterprise Chat were enabled, these employees would be able to quickly engage with internal staff to compress the on-boarding time which means quicker time to productivity.

Another example related to revenue generation. Picture a chat team whose sole purpose is to help teams and groups of people get projects done faster. As employees are interacting with the chat team ideas emerge that are aggregated and categorized. These ideas are presented to management through Idea dashboards which highlight the top trends and thought analysis for further action. So if Proctor & Gamble found that as teams are completing their current product plans – new product ideas emerge for next year and/or new product launch efficiencies are discovered one can imagine the positive impact on revenue.

Chat makes these discoveries more likely to occur because project team members are not used to constantly updating a project page or sending email updates on a daily basis. However, if proactive chat were enabled ostensibly to help team members with expediting the completion of tasks, the chat team could be pulling additional information from team members to help with idea creation and project efficiencies goals. This information would then be automatically mined, categorized and dashboarded for decision makers to act on.

This is a potent concept in theory. Making it reality is something Fididel will have to figure out.