Capital One is one of the largest retail banks in the United States, serving more than 100 million customers across a diverse set of businesses. But this institution offers more than banking products; it is driving innovation and digital transformation in the financial sector. In 2020, Capital One became the first U.S. bank to exit its data centers and go all in on the cloud.
Behind the scenes, Slack is Capital One’s platform for work. More than 50,000 employees use Slack each week to collaborate, automate work, and promote a culture of transformation across every department, including tech, human resources, corporate and global finance, risk management, cyber, legal, and more.
In 2022, Capital One earned our Innovation in Slack Award for its novel use of Slack to deliver exceptional experiences for its customers. Here’s a closer look at how the company uses Slack to simplify teamwork, boost productivity with time-saving automations and make the workday more pleasant and productive.
Unlocking secure and speedy communication
For teams at Capital One, fast and organized communication begins in Slack channels. Each channel is a single unified, searchable place for teammates to share messages, files, and key decisions on dedicated projects, topics, and processes.
Unlike email or messaging apps, which isolate conversations to the recipients, everyone in a channel sees the same conversations. That means anyone in the group can quickly check out the progress of a project, approval or incident. The content of these channels is also accessible to others across Capital One if the channel is public.
Meet Raj, the director of software engineering at Capital One. Raj’s team is distributed, with some employees working remotely while others commute to the office. No matter where they are, teammates can share status updates, ask questions, and celebrate wins in their team channel. Conversations stay organized with the threads feature, which allows teammates to discuss a topic in detail without adding clutter to a channel or direct message.
Channels are a great way to keep work organized within Raj’s team and facilitate fast and efficient cross-functional collaboration too. Teammates across Capital One’s unified communications organization regularly communicate and collaborate with cyber security, enterprise supplier management, facilities, and the incident management teams in channels. By utilizing Slack channels, they establish a comprehensive record of past conversations and decisions, so everyone can access and contribute to institutional knowledge.
These records are put to good use during retrospectives. “Slack makes it easy to find all the information we need to learn and grow,” Raj, the director of software engineering at Capital One said.
Raj especially appreciates how Huddles re-creates the kind of fast, informal discussions you might have in an office hallway or at your colleague’s desk. When Raj has a quick question or idea to explore, he can seamlessly transition a discussion in a channel—which has all of the context and team members needed—into a huddle for live coworking.
“The switch to huddles is seamless,” says Raj. “There is no context switching. We’re seeing productivity gains because we’re reducing context switching and working in one platform.
Capital One also communicates with many partners, contractors and vendors in Slack channels with Slack Connect. When everyone works in channels, teams receive messages and files only from verified members.
Automating away routine, time-consuming tasks
James, senior platform engineer at Capital One, says Slack’s platform is the tool he uses the most each day. His team saves hundreds of hours a year by automating administrative tasks with Workflow Builder. This visual, code-free tool allows any Slack user to streamline team processes by creating custom workflows for any task or process.
Slack workflow connectors let you include data and event triggers from other essential apps connected to Slack, like Jira, Salesforce and Google Sheets. Meanwhile, Slack has integrations with over 2,600 software tools and with Slack API, customers can create custom apps, which cuts out having to log in to various applications to get the information you need. Capital One also uses Slack bots throughout the company to do things like automate and integrate processes and answer FAQs using machine learning and natural language processing.
Teams across Capital One have built over 600 custom apps with Slack APIs, use several different types of no-code workflows and run over 160,000 workflows each month. Because automations and integrations reduce context switching, James, a member of the Platform Engineering team, says Capital One’s support team is saving significant time, and the IT team is getting the most value from its tech stack.
One of these automations helps Capital One secure its data. James created a script that automatically deactivates inactive users and reactives active accounts if the employee returns to Capital One. This used to be a manual, back-end process so James created a system to automate all the steps.
James created a workflow that allows any employee to submit a reactivate request entering their email address. That workflow sends a command back to a Slack channel to automatically reactivate the account within minutes. Any user that should not have been reactivated is then caught by the deactivation script within the hour. This automation streamlines and improves the efficiency of data security measures at Capital One.
“Slack made it easy to create automation that both keeps our organization secure and saves our support teams significant time.”
Driving success with a collaborative company culture
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Capital One’s call center employees worked onsite. Now that these teams are remote, Slack is the platform for work that call center agents rely on to create community and stay aligned. But delivering faster service is just one benefit to using Slack.
“Our call centers really do rely on Slack, both from the standpoint of supporting our customers, but also nurturing cohesion, culture and connectedness in an organization that’s 100% remote.”
Emojis play an essential role in Capital One’s company culture. Emojis are fun, light-hearted and bring levity to the workday. They also allow teammates to quickly respond to messages, for example :thumbsup: means “I agree” or “got it!”
Custom emojis are especially popular at Capital One. James and his team field requests for custom emojis with Workflow Builder. When someone requests a custom emoji in the designated Slack channel, a bot is triggered that sends a message with all the image requirements. Then, the employee fills out a workflow and provides James with everything his team needs to create the emoji.
Because the emoji request channel is a public channel, all employees can enjoy seeing which new emojis get created.
By using Slack as its work platform, Capital One has transformed the way its teams collaborate and drive work forward. When employees are empowered to automate routine tasks, communicate more efficiently and embrace a positive company culture, they can deliver the best possible services to customers.
