Instant Messenger as Communication?

[Karen Hudgins]

There is an ongoing debate in our office about the use of Instant Messenger as a form of legitimate, useful, appropriate, and professional communication. In the last week, I've been contacted by two potential affiliates who wished to communicate via IM. The second one was from South Africa so I could imagine a phone call would be very costly and IM is obviously faster than email.

My question is, how do you view IM? Would you say this is an acceptable form of professional communication or inappropriate?

[AndrewX]

Hi Karen, (got your email today BTW)

IM can be a big drain on time because you generally respond when the other person is ready to interact. Even email, which is known as a time consumer, allows parties to respond at their convenience.

Of course, it's really up to you and what works. IM is important to quick interaction between teams. But I wouldn't want to be at the beck and call of new clients, etc. who want to chat.

[Karen Hudgins]

Very good point. Thank you for sharing.

[rackaid]

We us IM (Trillian, which support AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN) on a regular basis. We don't, however, openly publize our addresses. We try to limit its use to our internaltional clients or when issues arrive in which rapid client communication is required. It is important not to publize your address as spammers may get a hold of it.

In our server support work, we find it can be better than the phone as we are able to cut and paste information.

In terms of interuptions, it is largely no different than the phone. If you are busy, you may let the call go to voice mail. On IM, we set an away or busy message to tell clients that if we do not respond within 5 minutes to send us an email.

Also, make absolutely clear to your clients that IM should not be used as a first line of contact. We stress to all of our clients to use email and then use the phone or IM as appropriate.

Another problem with IM (which Trillian and other clients can resolve) is accountability. Trillian logs all conversations. Some IM clients do not do this. Logging the conversation can be critical becuase unlike email, many IM's will lose the history of the conversation once the session is closed. By logging the conversation, you can refer back to prior contacts. On a couple of occassions, we have clients state we told them a different price during a chat session -- a quick review of the log will bear this out.

In terms of clients, we use Trillian:
http://www.trillian.cc/
We have also registered company related names at hotmail, aol, yahoo for our use.

Using a client capable of multiple methods is good for you and your clients. This means that you should almost always have the right client. Trillian and other clients offer this. Also useful is organization. I can organize contacts into groups independent of their client. This allows me to put clients into various support groups so I instantly know what type of support contract the have with us.


Two more considerations:

Security: We do not permit file transfers through any chat clients. Our border firewalls are configured to only allow chat not file transfer which on some clients uses different ports.


Web based chat: If you rule out IM, consider web-based chat. We have tried both and as our IM chat volume is low, we find it superior to web based chat programs. Clients are more familar with ICQ, AOL, MSN chat type programs so they are more likely to use them than to go to your web site.

[truelysam]

IM usually come with feature of internet phone as traditional phone alternative

[pedstersplanet]

Originally Posted by rackaid

We us IM (Trillian, which support AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN) on a regular basis.

So much for Microsoft and Yahoo changing their protocol to block Trillian! Haha!..

[rodrigoelp]

Hello everyone, i am a new member.. (in fact i sing up to post here :P).

Anyway, i am working with a company related to software development and i can tell you IM is one of the most important things in my job. We have a lot of people in colombia, venezuela, puerto rico, usa and london and the instant messaging is one of the most effective and shippest way of communicating things. Even better than emails.

as AndrewX sed before, it is really up to the person that it is using the im.

[Affiliate Boss]

Yes IM is good way of communication.