Facebook announced today that Workplace by Facebook has reached two million paid users, after launching just over two years ago in October 2016. This milestone has not been achieved just because Workplace is easy to use and empowers people to connect more easily with mobile-first apps that finally address the "deskless" worker who has never had access to software that connects them with their organizations.  

"We haven’t sent an organization-wide email in months," Kirsty Traill, VP of Customers at Hootsuite"

This comment was music to my ears. The last large company I worked for had locations across the country and around the world, so dealing with those mass announcement emails was a pain. There was always that one person who 'replied all', thereby starting off an email chain that lasted for days and you just couldn't get off of.

On October 18, 2017, Workplace by Facebook hosted a fireside chat called Workplace Goes Live with Hootsuite. Ursula Llabres, Customer Growth Lead for the Americas at Workplace by Facebook interviewed Kirsty Traill, VP of Customers at Hootsuite, who is responsible for Global Customer Support, Voice of Customer, Customer Experience and Customer Marketing. It is a fairly large team of 80 people across 5 global locations, which by itself demonstrates the priority Hootsuite places on being customer-focused. 

ChatOps is a hot topic. And when I say hot, I am speaking mostly about the conversations people have about what chat tool people should use to receive notifications. Among the top of the list is Slack, HipChat (Stride, coming soon), Flowdock, Teams, IRC (ok, maybe not IRC)? Each is good. You can run "chat operations" on them. But let's take a step back.

What is chatops? 

Customer Success teams already have an array of software solutions at their disposal to increase renewals, customer lifetime value (CLTV) and mitigate churn. Gainsight, Salesforce, Learndot, and other platforms are indispensable for driving successful customer outcomes. But these tools leave a notable gap in the realm of day-to-day workflow and productivity. Many Customer Success teams are mired in email, stuck playing phone tag, and are struggling to communicate effectively with customers, among their own teams, and across other company departments and with their leadership teams. Customer Success teams need a better way to conduct the actual work of enabling success for their customers that still happens mostly outside the aforementioned platforms.

"An incident just happened by our office in North America. Are our people OK? Do we know where they are?"

On April 18, 2017, at Facebook's F8 Conference, the Workplace team made several announcements that extend the functionality of Workplace to include much more useful functions to improve a company's ability to get more done, make faster decisions, and communicate better. Many of these announcements are long awaited improvements that will make many organizations very happy.

Worldwide spending on enterprise software was $314 billion in 2015 and expected to rise. This amount does not include the money and resources spent on professional services, migrations, integration work, training, and support. Organizations are spending big money on software. The problem is that nearly half of all software projects fail. Forrester Research has found that 49% of CRM projects fail, and according to CSO Insights, less than 40% have full scale end-user adoption.