Slack-First Customer 360

What is so good about it?

The working world has changed as we know it. Most organisations now offer remote working roles and have seen their workspace move to a ‘work anywhere’ environment. In response to this shift, Salesforce has introduced Slack-First Customer 360, a virtual HQ allowing everyone in sales, service, marketing and analytics to communicate and collaborate across systems – with Salesforce being the central hub.

With Slack-First Customer 360, sales, service, marketing and analytics are powered and automated in channels within Slack to connect teams and streamline workflows built around data. And with Slack Connect, companies can work securely with external partners/customers to drive stronger relationships and see faster results.

Slack-First Sales

With sales reps using Slack, sales cycles are accelerated by an average of 15%. In this new landscape, Slack gives your sales team the ability to work even more effectively. When everyone collaborates in Slack/Connect, they’re able to:

• Receive lead notifications
• Log calls and meetings
• Create opportunities
• Review and submit updates to records
• Listen to sales calls
• Reduce routine tasks
• Move deals through the pipeline quickly
• And more…

With all of this done in real-time, Slack drives growth from anywhere. Granting everyone visibility of the pipeline, teammates can share insights and updates in public channels to increase transparency and engagement.

 

Sales best practices can be captured, documented and searchable without the need to remain in channels. Sales reps can react quickly and stay engaged with automated workflows that can keep work life interesting (e.g gamifying converted leads, customer signatures and won opps through a leaderboard). Through this you can celebrate your team’s wins!

Slack-First Service

In a new world of tech, customer expectations are higher than ever before and building customer loyalty is crucial for long term success. With Slack-First Service, service agents get instant access to relevant case data, improving collaboration in dedicated channels that has resulted in an 11% improvement in customer satisfaction scores. When everyone collaborates in Slack/Connect, they are able to:

• Receive notifications on high severity cases
• Create dedicated channels around products, themes and topics
• Review and submit updates to records
• Get nudges on cases
• Search answers and knowledge shares historically through Slack
• And more…

These innovations have aided service professionals to adapt in finding solutions quickly and solving problems for customers.

Slack-First Marketing

 

Slack helps remove friction from your processes by connecting the marketing team to other key players in a shared digital workspace. From intelligent AI-driven insights and automated workflow notifications, Slack ensures teams can take action fast so that campaigns can stay on track as well as collaborate and approve changes instantly.

In a world where engaging customers in real-time is a top challenge, 76% of marketers agree that Slack has improved their ability to make quick decisions.

When everyone collaborates in Slack/Connect they are able to:

• Automate alerts and grant approvals
• Start huddles to discuss issues
• Integrate Slack with social media apps to receive updates directly in Slack
• Monitor performance
• Streamline social listening and responding to customer feedback

Slack-First Analytics

Within a Tableau-integrated Salesforce organisation, Slack and Tableau expand the visibility of analytics across the organisation and enable customers to stay on top of data from anywhere.

View Slack analytics data directly in Salesforce via predetermined dashboard and reports. Measure success and make smarter decisions fast from automated notifications and watchlist digests to provide daily updates on selected metrics and trends.

 

Considerations When Rolling Out Slack

In order to be successful when making big changes, you have to plan ahead, continually gather data and make genuine improvements to get the most out of Slack.

There are four considerations when rolling out Slack:

Naming Conventions

Add hashtags and correctly named channels will allow Slack to naturally group channel ordering within the UI.

Workflow

Automate routine tasks and consider high manual processes that cost valuable time. Use Salesforce integration to get notifications in Slack. Increase transparency and productivity.

Integration

Slack workflows and integrated tools can help automate reminders and approvals.

Behaviour

Establish guidelines for using Slack, such as reacting to messages with emojis, pinning important docs/resources to channels so newcomers find it quickly, searching for info first before posting in channels in case the information is already available in Slack.

The Power of Automation

With Salesforce and Slack integration there are many ways in which automation can power your business.

From lead notifications and approvals in Slack-First Sales, case history and knowledge shares with Slack-First Service, streamline social listening with Slack-First Marketing and watchlist digest form Slack-First Analytics, automating processes is a driving force within the integration.

Some of these processes include:

• Configure message destinations in Slack Setup to be used with the “Send to Slack” invoiceable method in Process Builder

 

• Send messages and content directly to Salesforce records with the Salesforce connected app in Slack.

• Integrate Slack channel messages directly on Lightning pages/components so that you can see conversation history in real time.

• Manage standard and custom “Slack Alerts” in Slack Setup to notify channels on record updates such as successful opportunities and leads with hot ratings.

• Create workflows directly in Slack with Workflow Builder to automate tasks and processes.

• Build apps in Slack that help increase team engagement and productivity. Get your apps to automatically reply as well as create tasks and aid your team in Slack via events and web API’s that can be configured in hosting providers such as Heroku, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and more. Use Glitch or Ngrok to develop and test live projects using AI.

• Use Slack’s UI framework to power your app and produce interactive content such as buttons, multi-select menus, time pickers and overflow menus to collect info and trigger a link of a complex workflow. For example, approval processes or channel polls. Build all of this seamlessly with Slack Block Kit Builder.

What’s next?

The Salesforce and Slack integration has proven to be a handy tool to combine and optimise businesses moving forward. We have seen improved collaboration, searchable conversations, and greater transparency as a result.

Not only this, but the power of automation between the two systems, both with clicks and code, make this a good fit for admins and developers – not only just for businesses as a whole – but for Salesforce professionals to pick up a new skill and earn credentials on the platform (see Slack certifications here – https://www.slackcertified.com/). Slack-First Customer 360 is available with the new Winter 2021 Release and can be installed today free via the AppExchange.