Slack supercharges customer success with an expanded global consulting partner ecosystem

Companies worldwide are increasingly embracing more digital-first and distributed ways of working. This trend has only accelerated with the recent pandemic-related surge in remote work. But to remain productive and competitive, organisations today aren’t just taking the old ways of doing things and recreating them in a digital environment. Instead, they’re fundamentally reimagining how, when and where work gets done.

Today, Slack is announcing that it is now partnering with Salesforce consulting partners, including Accenture, Deloitte, IBM and Slalom, to deliver the next wave of workplace innovation for customers across industries. This will further expand Slack’s existing global ecosystem of certified services partners.

As one of the first companies to pioneer collaboration in the cloud, Salesforce was already well positioned to help customers succeed in this new digital-first era of work. And now, with Slack joining Salesforce, companies have an even more powerful suite of technologies to build their digital headquarters.

‘Adapting to the rapidly changing work environment is a challenge that executives across all industries are facing,’ says Richard Hasslacher, Vice President of Alliances and Channels at Slack. ‘Our partners see Slack as their digital HQ and an important enabler of change.’

Often, companies lean on experts to help them set up digital tools to optimise for the very best results. That’s why Slack is proud to partner with a variety of consulting partners to help customers build out their digital HQs and ensure that they’re getting the most out of the latest innovations from both Slack and Salesforce.

The booming market of digital transformation

Businesses today are investing heavily in the tools and technologies that power cloud-based collaboration, and that’s only expected to increase. In fact, IDC forecasts that cloud-related technologies will account for 28% of digital-transformation IT spending in 2021, growing to 36% in 2025. Companies are allocating more spending towards establishing digital HQs as they focus on delivering customer and employee success from anywhere.

This trend is creating a huge and growing opportunity for consulting partners, with more and more customers seeking a helping hand as they embark on their own unique digital transformation journeys. Consulting partners can assist these companies in a number of ways by:

• Helping customers to develop and execute technology roadmaps
• Optimising Slack and Salesforce environments to best serve customers’ specific needs
• Delivering tailored solutions, such as large-scale implementations and custom apps

How Slalom serves enterprise customers with personalised solutions

Consulting partners are building advisory services and solutions to extend the power of Slack and Salesforce to businesses of all sizes and across all industries, including:

• Global healthcare and pharmaceutical companies
• High-profile investment banks
• Leading technology companies
• Global retail and telecommunications providers
• Local public sector and health entities

Consulting partners can even help specific departments within companies to achieve success with Slack. For example, one of Slack and Salesforce’s consulting partners, Slalom, recently worked with a large biotech customer to help it leverage Slack for the research and development arm of its business.

Supporting more efficient and secure workflows in a digital-first era

Slalom began by assessing the specific business needs, legal requirements and regimented processes of the company as well as its research and development (R&D) department. One of the R&D team’s main responsibilities was reviewing cancer research data and sharing it more broadly within the company to help drive the development of new products.

The company eyed Slack as a solution for several reasons:

• Sharing data and driving effective conversations via email alone was proving challenging; it recognised that channels would allow for scientific conversations to evolve over time, while also allowing those outside the project to engage in relevant discussions
• With hundreds of relevant stakeholders working remotely around the world, being able to collaborate asynchronously across countries and time zones was critical
• The company is in a heavily regulated industry, and much of the data being reviewed was highly confidential, so security and compliance were top priorities

Slack proved to be more flexible, more inclusive for distributed teamwork and more secure than email for the company’s needs. Also, some teams within the company had already been using Slack, so there was a sense that migrating the entire R&D department to Slack would prove to be a popular decision.

Designing and deploying a tailored Slack environment

The experts at Slalom helped the biotech company to design a Slack Enterprise Grid for its R&D department. This work included developing unique Slack channel structures and naming conventions to align with the R&D department’s needs and workflows. With this intuitive system now in place, researchers can navigate through Slack more nimbly and efficiently.

This new Slack environment is also helping to affect one of the R&D department’s key metrics: productivity. At each step of the process – compiling data, sharing it with other teams, receiving feedback and advancing it for further review – Slack helps to save the biotech company’s time and ensures more effective handoffs between groups, accelerating the R&D team’s overall efficiency.

Slalom also helped to roll out Slack across the rest of the functions within the R&D department, enabling scientists and researchers to start using Slack for project work and collaboration. Slalom guided them on best practices, such as how to set up channel structures, manage permissions and even create workflows to automate their most common administrative tasks.

By the closing of the six-month engagement, Slalom had successfully migrated 20 disparate Slack workspaces onto the company’s new Slack Enterprise Grid. They had also onboarded more than 2,800 employees with a targeted approach, engaging the team by identifying how Slack could solve their specific stakeholder challenges.

A growing network of supportive partners

With the help of consulting partners like Slalom, enterprise customers are more confidently adopting Slack as their digital HQs and embracing the growing movement towards more flexible and inclusive collaboration. And with Slack and Salesforce joining forces, Slack’s ecosystem of global consulting partners is growing. We’re adding new consulting partners via Salesforce’s ecosystem of thousands of partners to drive transformational change for our joint customers, while continuing to develop programmes to help our customers maximise the potential of the Slack platform and their digital HQs.

Stay tuned for updates as we add more partners to support our customers. To learn more about how to partner with Slack and Salesforce, and keep abreast of the latest programme updates, take a look at the Salesforce Partner Community.