Dell provides faster, more personalized customer support with clips

In the modern, digital-first workplace, teams often work asynchronously. An engineer in New York might be on call to troubleshoot incidents into the wee hours and sign off just as colleagues in California are booting up their computers for the day. Teammates distributed across global hubs might frequently message one another, but only occasionally collaborate in real time.

Looking at data from Slack’s Future Forum study of 10,000 knowledge workers, the hybrid workplace is here to stay in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Clips, a new way to easily create and share audio, video and screen recordings within a Slack channel or direct message, is another feature teams can use to stay connected.

Maybe you have an update to share with your team that has too many details to include in a Slack message or email, but not enough to warrant a full meeting. Sharing information through clips is an easy way to present the specifics in a video that teammates can watch at their convenience. Or, perhaps you lead a customer service team and clips could help agents troubleshoot support issues. Teams can also use clips to request feedback, demo products and so much more.

Here’s why Dell turned to clips for speedier, seamless and personalized communication.

Swift and seamless customer support at Dell

David Felt is a technical marketing engineer at Dell Technologies. As a key member of Dell’s storage division, Felt ensures that Dell’s virtual, hands-on lab—a space where customers can test out digital versions of Dell hardware and products—is running like clockwork.

Felt says clips have been a game changer for providing faster customer support. Before adopting this feature, customers would do their best to describe technical issues through either written or verbal tickets. Agents often had follow-up questions, and sometimes this back-and-forth led to resolution delays.

With clips, service agents can get a comprehensive, tactile view of the issue via a video recording. “Clips allow us to capture everything from lights to sound,” Felt says. “And that helps us understand better what’s going on.”

One common use case is helping IT administrators manage a Dell storage appliance or server network while they’re filling in for a colleague who’s on vacation or leave.

“Admins filling in for a temporary role may not be up to speed on terminology,” Felt says. “But with clips, they can be in the data center and quickly, via their smartphone, share a short video to explain what they’re working on or ask for help on a task.”

Felt’s team relies on private Slack channels to communicate with specific customers with long-term contracts. If one of these customers encounters a technical roadblock, they can create a clip to record the error and upload that into their private channel—all from their smartphone. From there, Dell’s support team can upload the video into the service ticket along with any photos and descriptions they’ve sent along.

“With clips, we can see exactly what the customer is looking at via video, which helps us provide support and resolve any issues much faster,” Felt says.

Read more:

• Working aloud: Why Dell, TIBCO and Cookpad are turning to lightweight audio chats in Slack
• Introducing new tools to help you work from anywhere

• The ultimate guide to digital meetings

The above information is intended for INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, and not as a binding commitment. 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.