As Etsy’s Senior Engineering Manager for Internal IT, Sara Hopper is receiving Slack’s Champion of the Year Award for her role in helping her colleagues to unlock the value of Slack Enterprise to scale Etsy’s customer experience organisation.
A unique global marketplace, Etsy is home to a wide range of goods, from vintage pieces to thoughtfully crafted items. The company has leveraged Slack since 2016, enjoying 45% fewer emails and 21% fewer meetings by building a single go-to destination for every topic, project and team in the secure, channel-based messaging platform. Almost 4,000 active weekly users send over 150,000 daily messages and use more than 2,500 apps to facilitate work in their digital HQ.
Slack’s operational presence at Etsy became essential in early April of 2020: within days of the recommendation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that people wear cloth face coverings to protect themselves from Covid-19, Etsy got to work. The company empowered 60,000 of its sellers to offer masks, and by the end of April, they had sold 12 million.
To scale their customer experience (CE) organisation and keep up with business, Hopper advocated for the company to adopt Slack Enterprise, enabling Etsy to work with agility by segmenting Etsy outsourced partner agents into a separate workplace. Here, they were securely and easily onboarded to work in Slack and to help manage the influx of CE-related enquiries.
In addition to inviting 1,352 colleagues to use the platform, Hopper leads by example with her Slack usage:
- She’s used 1,856 emoji reactions
- She’s been mentioned 3,057 times
- She’s streamlined tasks using seven automated workflows made with Slack’s Workflow Builder
- Over an average two-week span, Hopper sends 1,110 messages to facilitate work in 73 Slack channels
‘Slack is the core communication channel at Etsy. It’s what keeps us all connected, whether working in the office or remotely from home. For my team, it’s the fastest way for employees to get tech support when they need it. And with custom workflows and integrations, we’ve used Slack to optimise our daily operations.’
Already a well-respected, active and on-the-ground member of Etsy’s CE organisation, Hopper’s leadership and initiative empowered her colleagues to meet demand during the pandemic and become even more efficient by championing Slack’s capabilities as their digital HQ.
