3 new Slack features for essential five-star customer support

In today’s distributed, hybrid workplace, we all value connection. Organizations must go the distance to help employees feel connected to their teams. And for customers investing in a product or service, that sense of connection via fast, seamless support is essential to satisfaction and loyalty.

The widespread shift to remote and distributed work has affected service teams especially. According to a recent study from Gartner®, before the Covid-19 pandemic, 72% of customer service and support functions operated almost exclusively in-office, with fewer than 10% of employees working from home. Now 76% of customer service and support functions have 80% to 100% of their staff working from home.

Many of our customers have found success using Slack to reimagine both the agent and customer experience. A study by Forrester Consulting, “The Total Economic Impact of Slack for Service Teams,” found that Slack can boost agent efficiency by reducing the cost to serve, resulting in faster resolutions and happier customers.

Service teams have found several ways to resolve issues faster and invest in long-term customer loyalty with Slack. Now we’ve released three new features that can help teams take customer support to the next level. Take a peek and try them out with your team today.

Slack Huddles

Start a live audio conversation with the right experts to quickly resolve customer support tickets

Before, you could swivel your chair and tap a colleague or supervisor for help if a customer support ticket had you particularly stumped. But in the remote and hybrid workplace, tracking down the right person for help can become an unexpected time sink. Slack Huddles, a lightweight audio-first way to start live conversations, re-creates the quick, informal chats you’d have in the office, right in Slack.

If you need help resolving a customer support ticket, you can fire up a huddle with the right product expert or stakeholder in any DM or Slack channel, a digital space to share messages, tools and files. You can also start a huddle in the channels you share with partners outside your company.

From a triage, escalation or swarm channel, you can move from an asynchronous conversation to a live audio discussion in seconds. Bring together the right people at the right time in a single huddle, and even share your screen to talk through a specific case in detail.

Slack Huddles offer agents immediate access to the cross-functional support they need. As a result, agents are able to maintain ownership of their cases, which positively impacts the customer experience by limiting handoffs. With Slack, service teams experience an overall 17.4% average reduction in escalations and 11% average increase in customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).

Split view

Reduce context switching in Slack and speed up resolution time

Resolving customer support tickets often means toggling between screens, channels, messages and tools. Slack’s split view feature for desktop minimizes context switching by letting users view information from different parts of Slack, side by side. Open two conversations or pages and view them both at the same time, without having to move back and forth between them.

By allowing agents to message experts while viewing work-critical conversations simultaneously, split view is a boon for customer service teams. Agents can respond to a running DM with their call center trainer, or manage a triage channel, while searching in Slack for specific documentation or knowledge. And with more organized, streamlined work in Slack, service teams see a 9.3% average reduction in resolution time.

Atlas

Support new hires with an onboarding process that nurtures long-term success

For a customer success agent, the first 30 days on the job are critical. According to research from tech marketplace G2, 20% of new hires quit within their first 45 days on the job.

With the shift to hybrid work, agents are disconnected not only from the camaraderie that adds levity to the workday but also from the team members they need for support. Slack Atlas is here to help agents succeed throughout the onboarding process and beyond.

This add-on product connects people in your organization through enhanced profiles and dynamic org charts. Slack Atlas makes it easy for agents to navigate a new organization—from the HR and IT teams they need to know to get up to speed on internal processes, to the subject-matter experts needed to resolve complex cases.

Overall, service teams using Slack enjoy a 5.9% average increase in employee satisfaction, and 24% reported faster onboarding time to reach full productivity.

Build true customer loyalty with a little help from Slack

Behind every beloved brand is a robust customer support squad. These new Slack features can help make agents’ jobs easier by facilitating speedy ticket resolution and personalized care. It’s benefits like these that go a long way toward building lasting customer loyalty.