Salesforce Channels are Where Data Meets Dialogue

Teams need to navigate communicating in email and texts and working in various apps and legacy systems to serve their customers. But toggling back and forth wastes valuable time and creates silos of information that are disconnected from your CRM, preventing teams from ever having a full picture of their customer. This means that deals slip and cases sit cold, leading to the majority of companies today failing to meet customer expectations. To meet those expectations, teams need a way to efficiently work together with a single, shared understanding of their customer.

At Dreamforce, we introduced Salesforce channels, a new type of Slack channel that revolutionises the way teams act on their customer data. Generally available to Slack Sales Elevate customers today, this industry-first solution connects your Salesforce CRM data to the customer-focused conversations your teams are already having in Slack, giving teams a unified, AI-ready space to work together on their customers’ needs so that they can collaborate and make data-driven decisions quickly.

Let’s dig into why Salesforce channels matter and how they work.

Align teams faster around customers by bringing your CRM and conversations together

The days of having to hunt for customer information in multiple places are over. Salesforce channels ensure that your teams have the most up-to-date information about their customers in one place, where they can have conversations around the information and take action.

These channels do this by securely bringing together the CRM data from your Salesforce records – including opportunities, cases and custom objects – with the tools and people your teams need to track progress, share knowledge and support customers. All of this information is organised at the top of the channel with tabs so you can quickly access your customer data, files Slack lists and more in one view.

With Salesforce channels, teams across every line of business and industry will be able to improve the way they work together and serve their customers. Enterprise account teams can use them to monitor deal progress, strategise on how to navigate complex issues, and manage contract approvals for each of their customers more efficiently. And in the coming months, small and growing organisations using Salesforce Starter Suite will be able to use Salesforce channels to keep teams nimble while they swarm on customer requests.

'Salesforce channels bring customer data closer to decision points', said Stephanie Sadowski, Senior Managing Director and Lead of Accenture Salesforce Business Group. 'Our Salesforce account teams can now access Salesforce customer data across deals, cases and projects at their fingertips – streamlining their workflow, improving efficiency and helping our distributed teams deliver for our clients more effectively'.

Managing CRM tasks is fast and simple with Salesforce channels. You can edit and update Salesforce data right in Slack, eliminating the need to duplicate information in multiple tools and manage various logins. Data management is also secure: only people with the right permissions in Salesforce can see and edit customer information in Slack.

'The ability for teams to work together efficiently, with conversations grounded in customer data, is a game changer and an incredible advantage for our business', said Ariel Sakin, VP of Corporate Information Systems at Snyk. 'By being able to stay better aligned around the customer, our teams can deliver more value for customers'.

Use Salesforce channels in Slack and in Salesforce seamlessly

Different types of work require different ways of working together. Sometimes you need to share a quick update with your team while running between meetings. Other times, you need some additional answers to the data you’re seeing in your reporting dashboard.

Salesforce channels are available in Slack, and soon they’ll be integrated into the Salesforce user interface. This flexibility will allow team members to engage in the same conversations and access the same customer data, whether they are working in Salesforce or Slack, on their desktop or mobile device.

A service agent working in Salesforce won’t need to context switch to talk to a product expert working in Slack. Everyone can simply jump into a discussion right where they’re working, with the entire conversation tied to the record.

'Collaboration is seamlessly synchronised across both Slack and Salesforce, ensuring that everyone stays up to date while operating in the place that works best for them', said Parker Harris, CTO of Slack and co-founder of Salesforce.

Get richer customer insights with AI capabilities

A Gartner survey revealed that 47% of knowledge workers struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs. What if teams could use AI to get up to speed on all of the decisions that were made to close a deal by tapping into a year’s worth of conversations – in seconds? That can happen when AI pulls data from CRM records and team conversations.

 

With Slack AI, our AI add-on experience, you can use conversation summaries to quickly catch up on key highlights from discussions about your customer that are happening in the related Salesforce channels you have access to across the company’s Slack workplace.

Every summary generates citations, and in just a click an account executive can dive deeper into a discussion about post-sale strategies for their customer, or a business leader can jump into a conversation about a deal at risk to help steer the team to success. The whole team can fully keep track of what’s happening across the entire customer journey.

'Team selling is part of our secret sauce at Salesforce', said Scott Barghaan, SVP of Global Selling Experience at Salesforce. 'It’s how we form a point of view around solving our customers’ most challenging problems. Salesforce channels and Slack AI together are crucial to making team selling happen. They keep the team in lockstep and focus attention on the problems at hand, making Slack an invaluable tool for our seller experience'.

In the coming months, Salesforce channels will enable our customers using Agentforce, the conversational AI for CRM, to generate more thorough and useful responses. With conversational data from Salesforce channels combined with structured customer data from Salesforce, teams will get a complete picture of the information they need to strategise on how to support their customers.

Want to learn more about how your team can benefit from using Salesforce channels? Check out this webinar and contact sales today.

The above is intended for informational purposes. Please do not rely on this information in making your purchasing decisions. The development, release and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack and are subject to change.