Customizing Standard Chatter to Offer Consistent User Experience

Salesforce Chatter is a tool that allows businesses to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing among their internal and external stakeholders. You can share data, send/receive files, brainstorm new ideas, and conduct surveys or polls with your customers and prospects leveraging your Chatter page.

Despite offering immense benefits, standard Salesforce Chatter looks very basic and offers limited components. Since its standard UI doesn’t go along with the branding aspect of any website, it results in an inconsistent user experience. Therefore, it is advisable to customize your Chatter page as per your business needs and branding guidelines to deliver a seamless user experience.Below are the ways custom Chatter benefits Chatter managers-

Creates a Consistent User Experience

First and foremost, customizing Chatter in Lightning enables businesses to revamp it as per their website layout, theme, and branding guidelines.  It helps you deliver a consistent user experience to your audience while conversing on the Chatter page or browsing through the rest of the site.

Allows Feed Curation

Furthermore, standard Chatter, which is built in Salesforce Classic, doesn’t offer streams. It prevents community managers from feed curation. By customizing Chatter, you can create multiple streams and add all kinds of feeds from profiles, work records, etc. to a stream.

Offers Custom Components

With a custom Chatter, you can deliver fast navigation and a better search experience to your audience. Users can run a search, select Chatter groups, and sort Chatter results by relevance or latest trends. You can also integrate live feeds, where push updates make posts appear in the feed in real-time.Learn How Grazitti helped an antivirus solution provider customize their Chatter

The Customer:

The customer is a California-based company that offers antivirus programs and computer software. They develop solutions that prevent, rather than reactively detect, viruses and malware.

The Challenges:

• Overall look and feel of Chatter UI was basic and different from that of the website
• The default component set offered limited functionality

The Objective:

1. The customer wanted to customize the overall look and feel of their Chatter page as per their branding guidelines.
2. They wanted to make it more functional so that they could manage their community directly from the frontend.

The Solution:

• To let Chatter sync well with the customer’s branding, our Salesforce developers re-designed the Chatter page, to make it look like a part of the client’s business website. We also built a new layout using a custom stylesheet to make Chatter look more dynamic.
• To make Chatter more functional, custom components were introduced to the Chatter page.
• For fast community management, new features were added to enable community managers to add and manage all group-related page list activities without any internal login. Community manager/admin could manage notifications, view/manage groups, change profiles (group details), manage files, manage group notifications and view/post records directly from the front-end of Chatter.
• To deliver a seamless search experience, a custom search box was developed and integrated into Chatter. This enabled community members to access the internal database and knowledge base, apart from the standard feed search.
• For providing quick support, a custom widget was added with links to the knowledge base, help articles, contact support, and for case escalation.
• A file widget was introduced to enable the community managers to directly upload files and data from Chatter without having to log into the backend.

The Result:

There was a significant boost in engagement on their Chatter page after customization. It became very easy for the customer to manage the Chatter page as it was clean, clutter-free and more functional.

Takeaways

Custom chatter has revolutionized the way a business communicates with its stakeholders — internal and external. It does not only revamp the look and feel of your Chatter page, but also adds more functionality to help you serve your audience better.

Looking forward to customizing your Chatter as per your website branding? Let’s talk.