Enhance Chatter Reporting

Monitor Last Chatter Date on Objects

The Last Activity Date (LAD) on key Objects - Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities and Cases - is a valuable metric for tracking progress and triggering business processes. With Chatter becoming a key tool for Customer-related activities and conversations, the ability to report on Chatter activity dates is essential. Until now this has not been possible … at S.P. Keasey Trading Co. we’ve got a solution!

Chatter is rapidly becoming a vital tool for Salesforce users, with Marc Benioff stating in March 2013 that Chatter will become the primary user interface for Salesforce. Further evidence of this trend was seen at the latest Salesforce release (Winter ‘14), where many of the features added were centred on Chatter. For example, upgrades to Chatter Publisher Actions now allow users to create records and perform other Salesforce Actions straight from the Chatter feed - information sharing and activities are taking place right in the Chatter feed

The Problem: Chatter is a relatively new feature in Salesforce, so there are still a few areas that need rounding out; one key limitation is that you cannot report directly on the Chatter feed. There are currently only two reporting options; Chatter Activity and Chatter Groups. These are great if you want to track adoption or to see the popularity of Groups, but they don’t let you see when users are Chattering on a record … potentially that key Account you have been chasing for example.

The Solution: The S P Keasey team have taken on the challenge to give greater insight into Chatter activities. By stamping various Objects with the Last Chatter Date, you are able to ensure that your key Records (Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, etc) are taken care of. This allows users to use Chatter or Activities to track their progress and interactions. Admins can then leverage the custom Last Chatter or standard Last Activity and Last Modify Date with formula fields or workflows to ensure key activities are taking place and can flag any issues if priority work is being ignored or forgotten.

Example

The day is 4th of September 2013, there has just been Chatter activity on one of your key Accounts and this is classified as an Action – ie the Customer has been taken care of.

Another one of our key Accounts has not had action for months, this should be flagged as not taken care of

Formula for Last Action

An example would be the Minimum of Last Chatter, Last Activity and Last Modified dates

today()-min(

if(isnull(today()-LastActivityDate),9999999,today()-LastActivityDate),

if(isnull(today()-datevalue(Last_Chatter__c)),9999999,today()-datevalue(Last_Chatter__c)),

if(isnull(today()-datevalue(LastModifiedDate)),9999999,today()-datevalue(LastModifiedDate))

)

With this information, you can set up more detailed reports showing more Chatter-related information and really highlight neglected Records.

Unfortunately this type of customized reporting it is rarely ‘one size fits all’ and requires some customization. Therefore we are unable to deliver the solution as an app (our preference) but if this capability is of interest to you, please contact us for more information about how you can implement this functionality or we can quote on customizing a package for your company.

S. P. Keasey Trading Co. are working hard to enhance Chatter so it has all the functionality required to be the central tool for all Salesforce users; our goal is to make Chatter an internal email killer to all Salesforce instances. If you are a Chatter enabled company, please be sure to check out our product ChattoMate which has been built to save time and streamline the maintenance of Chatter as well as mass and automated notification services.

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