The surprising tool that’s transforming IT at Salesforce

The backbone of any enterprise company is its tech stack and the IT teams that help keep everything running smoothly. But using clunky, outdated systems and processes drains IT’s productivity, leaving little time for the high-priority tasks of helping teams innovate quickly and securely.

Take the help desk experience, for example. IT workers regularly receive multiple sources of information and requests. When requests pop up in disparate places—email, ticketing systems and other ad hoc communication channels—there’s a decrease in end-user productivity. IT teams often miss incidents and have to manually manage repetitive tasks and recurring issues, and time gets wasted when employees log in and out of various apps that don’t integrate with each other. The solution is optimizing your tech stack with a productivity platform: Slack.

With more than 2,600 app integrations, no-code workflows, and bi-directional API integrations, Slack has become a powerful platform for IT leaders. According to Salesforce’s FY24 Customer Success Metrics, IT teams saw 38% faster decision-making and a 36% increase in time saved due to process automation after implementing Slack.

After talking with a number of IT leaders at Salesforce, we discovered there’s one often overlooked yet transformational Slack tool that helps drive alignment, higher engagement levels and improved productivity for IT teams: Slack clips—five-minute audio and video recordings that can be created and shared within Slack channels and direct messages. Learn how clips have become a game changer when it comes to efficiently delivering strategic IT projects and providing better context and clarity on the purpose of high-priority work.

Clips save you time and money (that you would’ve spent on meetings)

Meetings have long been a crucial aspect of collaboration, but they can be expensive and time-consuming. In a recent study, Otter.ai revealed that enterprises could save up to $100 million annually by eliminating inefficient meetings. However, the rise of remote and hybrid work models has made in-person meetings less feasible.

Clips can help reduce team meetings. In fact, our data reveals that teams that use clips report a 32% decrease in scheduled meetings (source: Slack, FY2023 Customer Tracking Survey, January 2023). Employees can watch or listen to company announcements and updates on projects and share feedback in the thread. Listeners can speed clips up, slow them down, follow along with captions or quickly skim the transcript—at their desk or on the go. And because everyone can watch and create clips on their own time, teams can get updates without waiting to find time on the calendar, no matter their time zone.

Robbie Birbeck, a senior director of engineering at Salesforce, says clips have helped his team showcase their continuous advancement and replaced lengthy biweekly stakeholder review meetings.

“We used to all get together in a room for a couple of hours and share the progress we’d made during the last sprint,” he says. “It was an expansive meeting, and not all of the demos applied to all the different stakeholders in the room, which wasn’t ideal. Now, when work is completed at the end of a sprint, the developer records a five-minute clip and shares it in a channel.”

Clips help leaders quickly give updates from anywhere

Slack clips—which can also be shared effortlessly from mobile phones—have emerged as a powerful tool for leaders to deliver timely updates to their teams from conferences, meetings and even while in transit. And with Slack’s searchable platform, teams can find clips relevant to them that help catch them up to speed so they can move work forward.

The magic of clips is that they provide transparency by giving colleagues a more complete picture of what leaders are trying to communicate. Nonverbal signals conveyed through clips are essential for clear communication—and the fact that they are accessible to everyone drives accountability, because everyone gets the same information.

Andy White, a senior vice president of business technology at Salesforce, uses clips as an efficient way to report back to his team about customer demos. He can share a clip from on-site with a recap of what the customer thinks of their products and thank the team for their hard work.

After recording the clip, he can look at the comments in the thread and the instant engagement employees shared using emoji to react to specific sections of the video. White can go back and look at what got the most reactions, getting valuable feedback on what resonates the most with his colleagues.

“Slack does more than break down collaboration barriers; it offers new ways of working,” White says. “The more we can move lightweight work into Slack, the more we can improve, automate and simplify the flow of work.”

Clips help employees step into the spotlight

Historically, leaders of organizations have been the face of IT projects because it’s impossible to send everyone to meetings and conferences. Slack clips give Salesforce employees center stage, allowing them to showcase their work companywide and build personal recognition.

Salesforce leaders say clips provide the opportunity for those less comfortable in the spotlight to work on their presentation skills and executive presence, too. Because video clips capture the same body language and subtleties observed in face-to-face interactions, managers can provide constructive feedback and coaching on presentation style to enhance their skills.

Clips are just one of the many tools that Slack offers to elevate productivity for enterprise IT teams. By reducing meeting times, fostering collaboration and empowering individuals to showcase their work, IT teams deliver services faster and more efficiently to their organization while lowering costs. As Slack continues to evolve and innovate, the potential for IT departments to reach new productivity levels becomes limitless.

Discover how Slack can be your productivity platform for IT and contact our sales team today.