Chordiant Case Study

Chordiant is a software company that serves leading global brands with high-volume customer interaction needs. Chordiant Customer Experience (Cx) front-office 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.

The Chordiant Mesh Community has given us better products, happier customers, and a big competitive differentiator in the market. — Steven R. Springsteel, CEO, Chordiant

Business Opportunity

The uncommon sense of building software that customers want

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.

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...

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.

The rich community capabilities of Jive's Clearspace 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

Solution

Chordiant Mesh Community powered by Jive's Clearspace

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's Clearspace 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 Clearspace 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 Clearspace 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.

This is the most pragmatic and transparent approach to product development between a software vendor and its customers that we've ever seen. There is truly no wall between our development team and Chordiant's, everyone is treated as peers, and we get answers to questions and influence the product direction in real-time. — CompuCredit

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

Results & Benefits

Customer loyalty and groundbreaking 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.

When working with geographically dispersed teams, it's imperative that critical up-to-the-minute project details and deliverables are easily available to team members, stakeholders, and community members alike...relying on email or other legacy tools leaves far too much room for misinterpretation and mistakes. — David Sallet, Manager, Solutions Design, Chordiant