How service teams are reinventing the customer experience

Last year, the near-overnight transition to remote work disrupted many service processes and call centres. But it also exposed new ways to think about service delivery and how best to support the people who do such important work.

Many service teams have found success using Slack to support their service teams, empowering them to collaborate faster and resolve customer issues more efficiently. In fact, a recent study by Forrester Consulting found that service teams using Slack saw an average reduction of ticket handling time by 10.7%, with a 17.4% drop in ticket escalations and a 15.1% reduction in cost per ticket.

In our new e-book, Reinventing customer service, we’ve compiled insights about how companies are using Slack to power their customer service operations in the changing world of work.

In writing the e-book, we talked to business leaders across industries and countries about their challenges, strategies and predictions for what comes next. From their input, we identified five big themes:

• Employee engagement is breaking free from the 9-to-5 mindset
• Culture and alignment are the next source of competitive advantage
• Customer-led disruption is forcing rapid CX convergence
• A new ecosystem economy demands a new partner playbook
• The winners are accelerating work through automation

The guide examines what these themes mean for customer service teams, and how some of the world’s most successful companies are adapting to the new world of work with Slack.

Micro-coaching and centralised support

In the e-book, you’ll learn how service teams are leveraging Slack in new ways, like how:

• Managers are increasingly using Slack to “micro-coach” agents by diving into channels and DMs to initiate conversations around performance issues and provide crucial guidance in real time
• Support agents rely on Slack as a knowledge repository, quickly searching through channels and pinging cross-functional partners to find answers to customer questions
• Service leaders integrate key services into Slack, like Salesforce Service Cloud and Zendesk, to create a single centralised system for customer support and ticket resolution

Real results at top companies

The guide also includes real-world examples from companies that have used Slack to execute successful customer service strategies. Learn how:

• Cloud-based accounting platform Xero replaced an array of disconnected messaging tools with Slack, creating a central hub for agents to share knowledge and communicate with each other and SMEs
• Intuit QuickBooks uses a custom Slack app called Quincy to provide agents with quick, automated answers to common questions, raising customer satisfaction by 12% and saving agents significant time in the process
• Nordstrom relies on Slack to keep its teams aligned, quickly sharing news about policy changes to its distributed, multinational customer service workforce
• Leading Canadian grocery and pharma provider Loblaw leveraged Slack to onboard and train a surge of new customer support agents in response to skyrocketing demand at the start of the pandemic
• Online insurance provider Oscar Health created tiered Slack channels and utilised Slack’s Workflow Builder automation tool to help customer service representatives find answers faster

“Slack drastically reduces the time to overall resolution,” says Jon Brummel, director of enterprise support at Zendesk. “It allows you to get closer and more connected to people across the company.”

Read the full e-book to learn more about how service teams are reinventing work with Slack.