Nasi Jazayeri is Executive Vice President and General Manager of Salesforce Chatter

“There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everyone, from the chairman down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

                                                                         -- Sam Walton, 1977

The great Sam Walton was certainly right 35 years ago when he reminded everyone, and not just Wal-Mart employees, about who it was that they really worked for. That crucial bit of business intelligence is even truer today. If there is one thing that today’s consumers know, it’s that they have more channels, and thus more choices, than perhaps at any time in history.

And there is something else that customers know they now have in greater abundance than ever before: “Touch points,” or ways of interacting, with a company. Which is why salesforce.com’s mission is to help every one of its customers become a Customer Company.  We need to bring companies closer than ever to their customers. We do this by re-imagining every single one of those customer touch points -- from sales and marketing through service and distribution. The engagement never stops.

Actually, touch point is something of a misnomer. When you touch something, your senses tell you

that you’ve made contact. And if the surface you’re touching is red hot or razor sharp, the experience is actually going to be relatively unpleasant.

The kind of customer contacts we want to be enabling at salesforce.com are amazing, frictionless experiences.  The sorts that bring a smile, a thank-you, and a return visit.

And that is why I am so excited about the new Salesforce Chatter, and especially mobile as an essential part of the product. Frictionless interactions by empowered customers require a leap of faith for many businesses, because most businesses are currently imprisoned in a hierarchical and thus entirely predictable structure. But when customers are empowered, control shifts away from the company and toward the community it deals with. The concern of the business becomes less about customer management and more about customer engagement.

Mobile is entirely transformative in this regard, and there are two reasons why this is true. One is relatively straightforward, and involves the fact that today’s office extends well past the cubicle. The desktop-based, portal-centric enterprise products of a decade ago are of little relevance in a world of perpetually on-the-go knowledge workers, where an email can demand immediate attention as easily at 10 in the evening as it can at 10 in the morning.

More significant is the way mobile technology allows the easy creation of ad hoc groups of employees, partners and even customers. Thanks to mobile, the many previously isolated streams of knowledge can be combined into a single ecosystem that bridges the worlds of sales, marketing and service -- and whatever else the company wishes to add on.

This is tailor-made for what is being called the era of the new CMO. These are marketing officers that combine the long-term strategic thinking of a CEO with the sort of operational and technical knowledge once found only in IT shops. But today’s CMO knows that the typical IT shop is inevitably too overloaded to respond quickly to sudden shifts in the market place. And so, with the help of small shadow IT-savvy staff, today’s new CMOs roll up their sleeves and do their work themselves.

A great example of how all this plays out is from Pernod Ricard, the European distributor of distilled beverages. Few things are as important in retailing as store display. But how are desk-bound managers at an operation like Pernod supposed to keep track of the tens of thousands of locales where its products are being sold? 

The company is already a dedicated user of Chatter. But now, with sales representatives able to have Chatter on their mobile phones as they move about their territory, they can share what they are seeing live and direct with the district office.

And from there, Chatter can be used to pull in as many others into the conversation as is necessary. The more eyes on the problem, the more perspectives there can be on a solution. Almost instantly, a group is being created via Chatter, one based not on some arbitrary lines in an org chart, but instead involving expertise and interest in a real-time problem that needs a prompt solution.

This Chatter-based conversation is topic-based. Once it’s no longer needed, it dissolves, though always ready to reassemble at a moment’s notice. It is hard to think of a more direct way that technology can impact a company’s growth by helping every employee put customers first in every action and at every moment. And as these mobile-enabled interactions proliferate, it will be impossible for companies and their employees to imagine how they ever worked without them.