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Chordiant is a software company that serves leading global brands with high-volume customer interaction needs. Chordiant Customer Experience (Cx) frontoffice solutions blend multi-channel interaction management with predictive desktop decisioning, enabling companies to capture and effectively anticipate and respond to customer behavior in all channels, in real-time. For global brand leaders in insurance/healthcare, telecommunications, and financial services, this deeper understanding cultivates a lasting, one-to-one relationship that aligns the most appropriate value proposition to each consumer.

Revolutionizing how enterprise software is developed

The software Chordiant sells treats each interaction with a customer as a unique opportunity to delight the customer and generate the most possible value for both customer and company. It's the art and science of managing a conversation. And Chordiant knows extraordinary results are based on real-time data access and decisions in response to real-time interactions.

The uncommon sense of building software that customers want

What is unique about Chordiant is that instead of falling into the typical cobbler's-kids syndrome of software developers, they had the uncommon good sense to apply their own expertise to how they develop their own software. The result is nothing short of revolutionary: developing software as an on-going conversation between Chordiant employees, developers, customers, and partners—and delivering what customers want, when they want it.

Software development as a conversation

We all know the painful traditional enterprise software release process: gather requirements from stakeholders (internal and external); decide on release priorities; get feedback from customers; disappear for 18 months, fattening the feature list with more "neat" ideas; release software that is disappointingly 18 months behind what customers and stakeholders want; do it all over again...

"Through our Mesh online community we have been able to greatly improve both our product innovation and our software development process. Our clients experience breakthrough interactions using our software when they talk with their customers AND when they deal with Chordiant."

Chuck Altomare,
Vice President, Engineering, Chordiant Software

Chordiant decided it was not good enough for them. They wanted to deliver software with shorter release cycles, implementing the features that were truly important to their customers, making adjustments along the way as priorities shifted. Chordiant needed to coordinate the work of software engineers spread across multiple geographies and time zones. And it also wanted to engage and enable the implementation partners working with its customers and the customers themselves.

In a nutshell, Chordiant needed community, collaboration, and transparency.

Jive powers the Chordiant Mesh Community

Chordiant Mesh was designed as an online community where Chordiant employees, developers, customers, and partners collaborate from across the globe in an open and transparent software development environment. Social software development is not just for open source! Mesh integrates multiple technologies to support four key functional areas:

Collaboration: discussions, documents, plans, decisions
Access and management of deliverables: documents, software, test scripts
Management of issues: problem reports and enhancement requests
Access and management of source code

Technology selection

In the first incarnation of Mesh, Chordiant used a hosted wiki platform to support the collaboration function. Several challenges with that approach forced them to search for alternate solutions: performance was poor, customizing the look and feel imposed unacceptable overhead; the platform was limited to collaborative content creation, building community and connecting people was critical to Chordiant, but not supported; once defined, the structure of content was difficult to reorganize, holding users prisoners of an ineffective taxonomy.

Jive was selected to replace the wiki platform because it:

Integrates in one platform all the elements required by Chordiant: member profiles, discussion forums, questions and answers, wikis, blogs
Groups and structures content in flexible ways and can evolve as needs change
Fully enables social software development as a conversation
Provides a rich and flexible API to integrate with Chordiant Mesh
Implementation

The implementation involved multiple dimensions: integrate Jive in the Mesh environment; enable it for single-sign-on; tailor it to reflect the Chordiant brand; and migrate all development project content from the existing wiki platform (53 projects) to Clearspace. Mesh powered by Clearspace went live in December 2007 and a smooth migration of previous content was completed by mid 2008.

The flexibility provided by Jive SBS enabled Chordiant to implement a dual navigational approach that allows Mesh community members to browse from a functional perspective all areas of Chordiant software products, or navigate from a timeline perspective across each agile development iteration (sprint) taking place. Customers can immediately interact with content without learning a complex organization scheme.

"The rich community capabilities of Jive saved us months of development time and allowed our employees, customers and partners to produce better software in a truly social software development environment."

Amanda Shenon,
Product Owner, Chordiant Mesh

Mesh Community stats

All Chordiant product development uses Mesh Collaboration
Over 30 companies participating from over 20 countries
Over 1,000 individuals participating
25,000+ pages of content
6,000+ discussion forum posts
35,000+ tracked features and issues
15 collaborative product releases

Customer loyalty and ground-breaking thought leadership

The level of full transparency that Mesh provides allows everybody to know what the roadmap is, the plan for each release, the content and status of each sprint, the open issues and their priority. Not to mention having instant access to the latest code, tests, and documentation. This would be a dream come true for any software development team—on top of that you make this also available to customers and partners and you truly make history.

In summary, the benefits of Chordiant Mesh Community include:

Delighted customers with visibility, influence and participation in the development of their software
More productive developers with shorter development cycles, better quality, and clear priorities
Ground-breaking thought leadership that provides great competitive differentiation

Access to Mesh is granted to all Chordiant customers and employees. Customers and members of the partner program execute a Mesh participation agreement in order to join the community. A community that brings together in collaboration major competing companies, knowing that they are all going to benefit from the capabilities they are adding to the Chordiant platform.

"The Chordiant Mesh Community has given us better products, happier customers, and a big competitive differentiator in the market."

Steven R. Springsteel,
CEO, Chordiant Software

Learn More About Jive

Jive Social Business Software brings the best features of social networking, collaboration software, community software, and social media monitoring to your enterprise.

Download our Social Intranet Resource Kit and learn more about employee collaboration and communication
Download our Customer Service Resource Kit and learn more about customer and support communities
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