• Home
• About

Business Instant Messaging: Core Features

More firms are leaning on their employees to get lean, mean, and efficient. One of the best ways to empower employees is to enable communication to flow freely through the organization. Business instant messaging has quickly become a primary communication tool in companies of all sizes.

But business instant messaging has its own risks: security and even productivity are threatened when a public instant messaging client is used, such as MSN or AOL. So a business instant messaging client is used instead – one that includes robust security and the ability to control with whom employees are chatting.

But not all business instant messaging clients have the same feature sets. Which ones form the core tools your employees need? Some of these im clients only offer chatting, but what about other important features?

Chatting – of course
Sure, you should make sure that your business instant messaging client has chat features. Also make sure emoticons and basic emphasis tools like bold, underline, and italics are included. These embellishments help employees communicate subtle – and not so subtle – emotions that may not always be clearly made through plain text alone.

Screen shot
The screen shot tool is quickly becoming incredibly important for support purposes. Instead of calling support staff, employees can just use the screen shot tool to send a snap shot of the problem.

Co-browsing
Another key feature is the co-browsing feature which allows employees to show each other information that is accessible through a web-browser. Since many people use different browsers – Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and IE – a co-browsing tool will make sure everybody sees the same thing.

Video and audio chat
Finally, the ability to chat by video or audio is becoming important as well. Not many companies take advantage of this feature – yet. More firms are utilizing webcams so employees can chat face-to-face; often from across the world!

Conclusion
Give employees all the tools they need. Business instant messaging goes beyond plain text. Make sure emoticons and other basic emphasis tools are available. Screen shot and co-browsing are two other features that should be available to help in times of need. Finally, video and audio chat are becoming increasingly important, so make sure your im client contains these as well.

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.