From days to minutes: How Multiplier disrupted customer service with Slack

"Our platform and our operations are designed so the speed of onboarding of new customers is incredibly fast. One of the reasons we are able to do that is because we pipe everything into Slack."

Vamsi KrishnaCo-founder and Chief Product Officer, Multiplier

Leading organisations don’t accept that talent searches must be restricted to one city, or even one country. In the age of remote work, the world is a hiring manager’s talent pool.

Multiplier is a global employment platform that helps companies hire and onboard employees in any country they wish, with just a few clicks. It automates the relevant tax, compliance, legal and other challenges that typically slow down international employment. Multiplier empowers anyone, anywhere, to hire the best talent in the world.

“We enable the hiring of a person in any country in just five minutes,” says Vamsi Krishna, Multiplier’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer. “That’s our value proposition.”

The fast-moving business practices what it preaches. In just two years, Multiplier has grown from three staff to more than 350 people who work remotely in 20 countries and across more than 10 time zones. Its digital office—where work gets done—is Slack.

“The resolution time for our customers on the Slack support channel is at least 3-4x faster than those who go through a channel outside Slack.”

Vamsi KrishnaCo-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Multiplier

Enabling class-leading productivity with Slack

Recognising its growth ambitions from day one, and knowing its workforce would be international and 100% remote, Multiplier’s founders faced several challenges.

One was around ensuring productivity and collaboration between staff. Another was developing the capability for class-leading customer service while constantly scaling the platform with new features. Others included the ability to make decisions fast, and aligning various individuals and teams behind specific objectives and outcomes.

All of these challenges would require a best-in-class productivity platform.

“I have used WhatsApp for collaboration,” Krishna says. “I have also used Microsoft Teams, email, Google Chat, and several other lesser-known chat tools.”

“But when we started Multiplier, Slack was a very easy decision for us. We wanted to scale in a remote setting and we wanted best-in-class customer success metrics. For that, we needed Slack.”

Exceeding customer success expectations

One of the most influential key performance indicators in the HR technology space is how quickly a company is able to respond to customer queries. Typically, response time is measured in days. But Multiplier has a higher bar for success; it aims to ensure a 60-second response time.

“An HR tech organisation is only as good as its customer support teams and how fast they can resolve issues,” says Krishna. 

Multiplier currently offers white-glove, dedicated support to around 50 customers using Slack Connect—which transforms how companies work with partners, vendors or customers by moving conversations into the same place.

“You know how you send a ticket to a support desk and, after a day, somebody emails you saying they picked up the ticket?” Krishna says. “After another day, they get in touch to diagnose the problem. That goes on for a week. We eliminated that cumbersome back-and-forth using Slack.” 

“The resolution time for our customers on the Slack support channel is at least three to four times faster than those who go through a channel outside Slack,” Krishna says.

“Our customers are super happy that they can talk to us directly in Slack.”

“Instead of daily meetings, using Slack we only need to sync once a week, saving an enormous amount of time for everyone.”

Vamsi Krishna

Replacing endless daily meetings with weekly Slack catch-ups

In a fully remote and asynchronous environment, Slack helps Multiplier deliver multifaceted projects. 

There are often 20 employees involved in delivering single projects. Rather than sit in back-to-back meetings that hold up work, Multiplier uses channels—shared spaces that bring together the right people and information to move work forward—to drive projects forward. 

“We spin up a channel, then Slackbot prompts everyone for an update and summarises their messages. So instead of daily meetings, we only need to sync once a week, saving an enormous amount of time for those 20 people.”

Automating onboarding so it’s fast and engaging

Onboarding an employee is complex—often involving five or six teams.

Multiplier has streamlined its onboarding process thanks to integrations—the ability to integrate industry-leading software and custom apps right into Slack. Multiplier uses a mix of custom-built software and external tools, connecting all of them into Slack. 

For example, Multiplier has recently implemented Sales Cloud as its primary CRM. 

“One of the things we really like about Sales Cloud is the ability to integrate with Slack in a super powerful way,” says Krishna. 

“We especially like the smart notifications and deal updates that Salesforce pipes through Slack. This spurs real time insights and enables discussion around our deal flow almost instantly.” 

He adds that Sales Cloud’s analytics set up helps the team make strategic and data-driven decisions. 

Integrations have also sped up the customer onboarding process, since each team receives an automatic prompt when they need to action an element of the onboarding process. 

“We’re now onboarding customers faster, saving 15 to 20 minutes per person. Without this seamless workflow, each team member would have to manually go through a log of what’s happened so far to figure out what they need to do.”

“One of our key differentiators is the speed of onboarding at Multiplier. It’s the fastest in the market today. That’s thanks to Slack, which really is a productivity multiplier.”