Since its inception, the Slack Community has welcomed thousands of people from around the world to community events hosted by our Slack Community leaders. These events cover a wide range of topics (about Slack, of course), including Slack 101, app integrations, industry-specific use cases, Dreamforce recaps, and much more. Whether you’re an end user, an expert, a beginner, a developer, or an admin — or maybe you just want to get to know Slack a bit better — everyone is welcome at community events.
Recently, our New York City chapter hosted an event titled “Slack for Customer Support Leaders,” facilitated by a panel of three Slack enthusiasts (Jared Gaynes of Thena, Sara Dillon of Bryd, and George Dilthey of Clay) alongside Slack Community NYC co-leader Zach Hawtof, the co-founder and CEO of Tightknit.
The session focused on how teams are navigating customer support in the B2B space and how Slack can set support teams up for success while maintaining strong relationships with their customers. Attendees like Peter Burger saw this as a valuable opportunity to meet and connect with NYC community members.
“The Slack Community event provided a fascinating forum for hearing the latest best practices for the platform.”
How Slack is driving transformational change between organisations and their customers
The event welcomed many perspectives and stories about how teams of different sizes and scopes are using Slack to drive positive change, keep customers happy, and take operational efficiency to the next level. But don’t just take our word for it. Here is some of what the panelists had to share during the discussion.
Q: How do you use Slack to enhance customer support?
Jared: Initially, we had no way to track and manage support conversations. So Thena built the capability on top of our various customer Slack Connect channels to manage customers’ issues to make sure questions get answered.
Sara: All of our customers love Slack because it’s a seamless way to meet people in their flow of work. We help customers build on the institutional knowledge that’s collected in Slack, making a huge amount of information from public channels accessible to their entire organization.
George: I’m the head of support at Clay. We help clients grow using targeted data and automated GTM outreach. Our founders built a Slack Community to support lead generation by meeting our customers on the platform they’re already using successfully. The goal is not only to support them there, but also to enable them to help each other. Our Slack Community currently allows customers to search the history of an issue so they can help each other out. Sometimes our customers get back to each other even faster than our support team does. The community also lets us see what other folks are asking across their individual channels.
‘Slack is great for customer support because the data architecture of its threads supports seamless, contextual customer conversations while avoiding email.’
Q: Do you internally self-test (‘dog food’) solutions prior to launch?
George: Right now I’m hyper-focused on how to use AI to create a knowledge base to provide support and to deflect more of our tickets away from our support specialists. The answers to many key questions already exist, but need to be identified and curated for easy access and delivery to customers.
Q: What are your customer success metrics?
Sara: Retaining customers is extremely critical. We want to build better Slack experiences through enhanced Slack design and implementation. We’re doing this by custom-designing apps that enable client teams to maintain their Slack space, developing an onboarding bot to enhance the customer experience, and creating custom workflows that let customers engage more effectively with clients on Slack.
Jared: Response time resolution time is important. But one thing I personally emphasise is building rapport. The other day we signed a big account, we were pushing for adoption, and I noticed one of our primary stakeholders’ profile picture was her puppy. I DM’d her about it, started a conversation, and now we’re friends. That’s hard to do in the world of email or phone.
‘Slack communication is one of the best indicators of account vitality.’
Q: What would be a game changer for Slack customer support?
George: Clay has a high adoption rate and lots of great content being created all the time. The problem is, with the volume of content that’s generated, we need an effective strategy for turning content into knowledge‑based articles.
‘I want to use our Slack Community as an information source to build an AI‑powered knowledge base.’
Q: What does a healthy account look like?
Jared: If you’re communicating with customers in Slack, it means the customer is at least attempting to use our product, even if it’s negative feedback. We have about 600 Slack channels, so we’re healthy and improving from a position of strength.
Find your place in the Slack Community
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