As in most companies, Slack’s sales team spends as much time as they can working directly with customers. Once a deal is official, our professional services team will share a channel through Slack Connect to help the customer move their work into Slack. This is often the same channel where their dedicated customer success manager (CSM) continues to lend guidance and resources as the customer’s team and usage grow.
Slack Connect allow teams in different organizations to use Slack together as easily and productively as they do internally, without anyone having to leave the tool they use most often. When you use shared a Slack channel to connect with customers, you can seamlessly relay updates, give easy access to support, and keep lines of feedback open. Here’s how we do it at Slack.
Work hand in hand, in real time
Using a Slack channel together with customers can be asynchronous, where it might take a few hours to get a firm answer to a specific question, but it can also happen in real time when required. In either case, those conversations take place in a singular space rather than unconnected emails and phone calls.
Like any other channel in your Slack workspace, if the channel is public, anyone in the company can join or leave it. If it’s private, anyone can be invited in. Each side is able to select the setting (public or private) that works best for them.
“With Slack Connect, I can invite a teammate in before I’m headed out-of-office so the customer has continuity of coverage from a CSM who instantaneously has access to our full history.”
This ability to pull in others with a quick @mention means that when a customer wants to discuss a new integration or transition a business workflow into Slack, the account team can add someone from our technical team to walk them through it. Similarly, when large annual contracts are being negotiated, leadership can join in to help broker deals and then leave the channel once contracts are signed.
All along the way, the people coming and going are also seeing the entire history of the business relationship, by simply scrolling back through the channel’s previous discussions and decisions before they joined.
Roll out the red carpet for new features
Our customer success team uses shared channels to give customers a heads-up whenever major new features in Slack are about to come out. CSMs will post about upcoming changes along with previews of the feature to make sure the customer’s IT team knows ahead of time any settings they’ll need to adjust. Anyone from the customer company can start a discussion thread to ask detailed questions and get advice on how to deploy new features in their workspace.
“I’d have more meetings if we relied strictly on email. Every set of new features would also be a presentation I’d have to give each customer individually—instead, it all happens in the channel.”
Encourage, collect and distribute feedback
Many of the improvements we make to Slack come from customer feedback, and we use Workflow Builder, a tool for automating routine processes in Slack, to gather this valuable input from customers via Slack Connect. Customers can submit descriptions of their biggest pain points, and our sales team takes that intel back to our engineering team, who in turn use it to inform their future roadmaps.
We also use Workflow Builder to capture customer use cases, which detail how Slack made a process more efficient or is having another positive effect on their business. Once submitted, these are shared inside Slack’s sales organization.
Channels shared with external organizations also support using other apps, even those that the other side doesn’t have installed. For example, if your customer relies on the Outlook app for Slack to import emails into a channel, and your employees tend to use Google Drive to share their documents, spreadsheets and presentations, neither side needs to change its workflow, and all those documents end up in the same channel.
“Workflow Builder lets us set up things similar to autoresponders in a channel. Whenever someone from either side joins the channel, they get an automatic message that mentions that Slack employees are in this channel and how to contact us.”
Tips for getting started
When our sales team spins up a channel with a customer, the first message (which also gets pinned to the channel) sets expectations, including:
- Who from Slack is in the channel
- How best to contact them, e.g., in the channel or by direct message
- The typical turnaround time for answering questions
- Ways to escalate urgent matters
We keep a series of introductory message templates based on company size and details of the purchased plan, so that every representative can tailor them specifically to their customer accounts.
Slack’s own sales team genuinely can’t imagine doing their jobs without Slack Connect. Our customers have seen the benefits as well, so much so that they’re increasingly adopting them to work directly with their own agencies, contractors and firms.
Is your team using Slack Connect? We’d love to hear your story. Drop us a note at feedback@slack.com or tweet us @SlackHQ.
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