How Google Chat keeps Colgate-Palmolive’s global team connected

Colgate-Palmolive (Colgate) has been around for more than 200 years, reimagining a healthier future for all people, their pets, and our planet. Our customers have always depended on our products to care for their homes, families, and pets, which is why trust is fundamental to our business. Taking care of our employees has helped us continue to grow and serve our customers effectively for 200 years. That’s why, in 2015, we made the decision to adopt Google Workspace as our collaboration suite. 

Our mission was to give Colgate’s people, who work in more than 130 countries and 200 locations, the ability to collaborate and communicate more easily with each other. Now, everyone from the C-suite to the mailroom at Colgate has a Google Workspace account and uses it daily. This is especially true for Chat, Drive, and Meet, which are closely integrated with our day-to-day operations. 

A new type of communication for a new era of Colgate

Chat has become critical to our daily work. With spaces in Chat, our teams spread around the world can more easily coordinate, share information, and connect with one another. The IT group that I work with is made up of nearly 150 employees, spread from New York to Mumbai. We use our  team space to discuss everything from system health and IT tickets to birthdays and memes. 

That communal space helps us build connections that we couldn’t over email, and that’s vital for a global organization that doesn't see each other a lot in person. In the event of any IT incident, a Chat space is created with the relevant people, so we can share information much faster than before. Chat has helped us resolve incidents more quickly, and this means the company is more secure.

One-on-one chats are used frequently for shorter, time-sensitive conversations, and we can pivot quickly to Meet for more detailed discussions if needed. This transition has helped take some noise out of our Gmail inboxes, because we have more options to tailor communications to different channels. For example, by moving company announcements to a space, or by shifting new topics in an email thread to a group chat, when people look at their inboxes, they see only messages that require their input or action. They don’t have to spend the first hour of their day sifting through emails to figure out which ones they have to respond to.

One organization growing with one tool

With Google Chat, we're centralizing our global account management and giving our people on the ground in new countries and regions the confidence that they’re part of the wider Colgate team. They can focus on knowing their customers, markets, and products, and we can support them from anywhere in the world.

We’ve seen a steady stream of improvements in Chat over the years as well. Our teams have connected some great 3rd-party services directly with Chat. For example, our IT Service Center has a ticket chatbot that helps folks resolve issues much faster. We also have some employees using the Trello Power-Up to get notifications about their tasks without having to leave their core workflows.

The redesigned interface is going to help us better prioritize incoming messages across the organization. Beyond that, large moderated Chat spaces make it even easier to oversee company-wide communications directly in Chat, and the updated connection between Drive and Chat means we can read and respond to documents without leaving Chat. 

We set out to find an easy-to-use toolset that would support innovation across our teams and fundamentally change what people could accomplish. We found that in Google Chat, and it’ll continue to support our company over the next 20+ years, with new feature releases and our own team’s use of it continuing to evolve.