Slack and Salesforce release new tools to accelerate team performance

For companies to thrive in challenging times, speed matters. Closing deals, serving customers and getting products to market all require fast decision-making and nimble execution.

But all too often, the old ways of doing business slow companies down. Information is siloed. Data is guarded. Teams talk past each other. All these inefficiencies can hinder your ability to deliver value to customers.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, you can make information accessible to everyone, empower your teams to freely share ideas and welcome all teammates into a single inclusive home for collaboration by making Slack your digital HQ. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in the Slack platform to give everyone unlimited ways to customise Slack, automate workflows and adapt their workspaces to meet the specific needs of their teams.

Now, we’re taking that even further. At TrailblazerDX, Salesforce’s leading developer conference, we’ve introduced a first-of-its-kind collection of tools for bringing Salesforce data, workflows and apps into Slack quickly and easily. With Salesforce, we’re combining the single view of customers with the place where that collaboration happens, providing business teams – from sales to service to marketing and beyond – with customer insights in the context of their digital HQ, so they can make smarter decisions faster than ever.

Easily simplify and automate work across all your systems

Salesforce Platform for Slack

Salesforce Platform for Slack, alongside new capabilities from Flow in Slack, empowers more than 11 million Salesforce developers to build best-in-class Slack applications natively on the Salesforce platform. With Apex SDK for Slack, developers can write in familiar Apex code and have it automatically ported to Block Kit to build Slack UIs powered by Salesforce data.

‘This toolkit will not only save our developers valuable time, but make it possible to surface key product features within Slack to encourage collaboration, both internally and for our customers,’ says Stuart Thomson, a solution architect at the software company Kimble Applications.

Meanwhile, Flow in Slack helps to bring Salesforce automation to any Slack conversation by taking Einstein-supported Flows within Salesforce and redeploying them directly into Slack, saving developers time and resources.

‘Salesforce Platform for Slack is a toolkit that empowers developers to quickly contribute to their digital HQs using the coding languages and tools they already know and love,’ says Rob Seaman, the Senior Vice President of Product at Slack.

But you don’t have to be a coding expert to take advantage of Salesforce Platform for Slack. Flow in Slack features low-code development tools for building Slack-first automations with full support for Salesforce data and actions, so you can more easily customise workflows and speed up processes across your company.

Elevate performance by bringing your team and Customer 360 data together in Slack, your digital HQ

These Salesforce integrations for Slack will allow teams to make faster, smarter decisions grounded in business insights and up-to-date customer data, all at their fingertips.
‘Vonage is creating a global immersive customer engagement platform and offers integrations with applications like Slack,’ says Savinay Berry, the Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering at the telecom company Vonage. ‘Slack is the single pane of glass where we can interact with data from Salesforce Customer 360. Using the two together allows us to extract real insights and apply them to the right services at the right times.’

Sales Cloud for Slack

The Sales Cloud for Slack integration allows reps to quickly share and collaborate on opportunity updates in dedicated account channels. With Salesforce and account information at the ready in Slack, the digital HQ for Sales, everyone from the finance to legal departments can chip in on the digital sales floor and help to move deals across the finishing line. Win-win.

At Procore, a software platform for the construction industry, the sales team no longer has to toggle between Slack and Salesforce to find key information about a prospect. Instead, account executives can access Salesforce data directly within Slack, reducing context switching so that reps can spend more time selling. When teams can access customer data and business insights directly from within their Slack workflows, more informed and productive conversations can take place quickly.

Service Cloud for Slack

With the Service Cloud for Slack integration, agents can instantly connect with the right people across every department within their digital HQ for Service and surface immediate answers, with all activity saved in Service Cloud. And when more help is needed for complicated issues, they can quickly tap experts in Slack channels, driving the fast, accurate resolutions that grow customer loyalty.

At the cloud data platform company Snowflake, support teams are seeing better collaboration across the board. ‘With the ability to pull up customer data from Salesforce right in Slack, our support teams can be in a position to resolve complex cases faster while bringing the right cross-functional experts into the conversation to get answers quickly,’ says Samir Dhruva, a senior business systems analyst at Snowflake. ‘We look forward to seeing different teams learn from each other while gaining skills and knowledge outside their domains. After all, when agents have more knowledge, they can more quickly and easily solve issues themselves. That’s a huge benefit to us as a company moving forward.’

Salesforce recently piloted a Slack-powered swarming model for some of its own service agents, too. The results were so impressive – including a 26% improvement in days-to-close rates and a 19% jump in same-day case resolutions – that Salesforce now plans to roll out the model across its entire global support organisation.

Marketing Cloud for Slack

With the Marketing Cloud for Slack integration, marketing teams can plan and execute campaigns within Slack, automatically updating their Marketing Cloud data along the way. Alerts on lead engagement and campaign insights, powered by Marketing Cloud data, are piped into campaign channels, allowing marketers to analyse and iterate on campaigns in real time – all within Slack, the digital HQ for Marketing.

Marketers at the financial services company LendingTree rely on the combined power of Slack and Salesforce to help drive customer acquisition and revenue growth. Thanks to an integration between Slack and their Salesforce CRM data, they get instant in-channel notifications when customer issues or requests arise, so they can better understand market needs and adjust their campaign efforts accordingly.

Salesforce integrations for Slack, available today

To learn more about these helpful innovations, read today’s news from Salesforce. Need more guidance on the right tool for your team? Take a look at the Salesforce integrations page for Slack.