Customer Communications: IM Comes to the Marketplace

Instant Messaging(IM) has quietly jumped from the realm of social communication favorite of rabidly multitasking teenagers to primary electronic communications tool in today's workplace. consider this from Cnet's recent piece:

“If you don't have IM in this business, you're not there,” says Sal Morreale, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. “I tend to have 10 or 11 IM windows open at a time.”
And it's not just information-greedy traders who are enraptured by IM. Roughly 85 percent of all North American companies use IM, according to a recent report by market research firm Radicati Group. Some researchers even predict it will surpass e-mail as the primary way people interact electronically by the end of this year.
For companies, however, widespread use of the technology presents an important challenge: how to control and manage employee use of IM and, critically, protect against viruses and other security threats while also extending its benefits of instant communication and enterprisewide collaboration.

IM is a great tool to use in your customer communications toolbox. While you and/or your organization might not be IM savvy who is to say your customers aren't. If those survey results are to be believed a lot of people are adopting IM and fast.

Read the whole Cnet piece for a nice overview of enterprise IM application including a word or two about the special needs for logging, security and virus scanning.

[Cnet on IM]

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