Earlier this week, I talked about why Google's partnership with Salesforce.com was important for corporate social software -- specifically it's integration of GoogleChat directly within Salesforce's CRM application.
Shamus McGillicuddy's article from earlier this month offers another good scenario explaining the value of integrating real-time communication directly within social software. As Forrester's Henry Dewing outlines:
"...a call center agent at an insurance company might receive a call from someone who wants to insure a diamond ring. The agent collects basic information about the potential customer and enters it into an SAP-based insurance underwriting application. Through a presence client integrated with the application, the call center agent will then be able to see a list of the company's insurance underwriters.
Inside your underwriting application you see a list of eight people, and one of them has a green button next to their name, so you click there -- then, through an immediate instant messaging session or a phone call, the agent goes over the basics of the prospect with the underwriter to determine whether the company will insure the ring.
You get back a real-time answer -- yes or no. To the business, it looks like an incremental improvement in business process speed. To the customer, it looks like a whole new process.
Instead of sending your stuff in and waiting three weeks for the insurance company to come back to you and say you're covered, you get it done in one call. That's all because you exposed the presence of the people who are able to say yea or nay on underwriting inside your underwriting application..."
Whether it's with the next release of Microsoft and SAP's joint product, Duet -- or the growing enablement of "communication-with-context" that Microsoft and IBM will drive across their platforms...real-time chat, IM or whatever you choose to call, it is here to stay.
Although not a new idea, the notion of providing a means for instant communication, when it is actually needed is absolutely intuitive -- and finally appears to have caught on in mainstream software.
All social networking platforms should have this capability.
With luck, Moore's Law will ensure we don't have to wait as long for it to become mainstream in public social software, as we did for the same capability delivered by Martin Cooper's nifty gadget.
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