IM - Chats in the work environment

I have worked in the field of marketing at a large frequent flyer program. I was working in the travel partner department. It was ofter neccasary to have conference calls with the different partners to create a new "package" deal, e.g. rent a car with a specific company and if the customer does that we can book into a certain hotel very cheap. In my time being at the company we used more and more IM and chatrooms as it was more partical for some people. It was often difficult do hold conferece calls as some peoples english skills where not as well and they had difficulty understanding people on the phone. Using Chatrooms people had more the opportunity to look up words online and respons accordingly. Also there was always a writen protocoll, therefor writen effidence of what has been talked about, where as it was often difficult to do with the conference calls. IM - chats have lots of nice features to them and I personally think make live in certain work environments easier as well.