Introducing Forrester’s new study: The Total Economic Impact of Slack for Service Teams

Exceptional customer service teams deliver fast, frictionless solutions. Behind the scenes this often requires a feat of companywide coordination. Agents must pull up account information for context, source answers from subject matter experts and quickly escalate potential issues. 

Service teams tell us that Slack enables the carefully choreographed art of five-star customer service. But we wanted to go beyond anecdotal evidence. So we turned to Forrester Consulting’s market researchers to evaluate and quantify the economic impact of Slack for service teams.

• Saw a 294% return on their investment in Slack
• Increased revenue by $967,300 due to improved customer satisfaction
• Reduced average ticket handle time by 10.7% and escalations by 17.4%
• Cut the cost per ticket by 15.1% 
• Internally, service teams improved employee satisfaction, coaching and culture

Prior to using Slack, many of the leaders and professionals surveyed relied on a mix of ticketing tools, knowledge bases and communication platforms to address customer concerns. Their teams struggled to bridge the gaps between the tools, information and experts needed to resolve issues fast. After adopting Slack, service teams gained access to the people and information they needed without the hassle of toggling between their ticketing tool and internal workstreams.  

The day-to-day benefits of using Slack translate to significant monetary gains: Forrester Consulting estimates that surveyed companies saw an additional $967,300 in revenue from improved customer satisfaction, while cutting the cost of customer service tickets by $2.6 million. 

Financial benefits aside, Slack was shown to improve employee satisfaction, coaching and work-from-home culture. The channel-based messaging platform also sped up onboarding for new employees, giving them immediate access to information and teammates via Slack channels. Slack’s personalized learning pathways for new hires enabled surveyed companies to provide a warm welcome and lay the foundation for long-term success. 

Experience matters to customers and employees alike. With Slack, the Forrester Consulting study respondents were able to improve experiences both internally and externally. Those qualitative experiences resulted in quantitative gains. When it comes to customer satisfaction, the findings show that Slack quite literally pays for itself and then some.