How apps for Slack make your whole organization more productive

From file-sharing and videoconferencing, to managing projects and scheduling meetings, there’s almost certainly an app that makes each of your everyday work tasks more efficient.

But that roster of apps comes with a catch: When people use a ton of different software, friction builds. Valuable time gets lost in switching and toggling, copying and pasting, opening and closing, logging in and logging out. And it’s not just time spent on these micro-actions that’s the problem; creativity and focus get lost when your workflow is interrupted. A study by the Federal Aviation Administration and the University of Michigan found that “even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.”

With Slack, you and your teams can take that time back. Slack integrates with more than 1,500 apps, which enable your people to use their favorite productivity tools right in Slack. That means simplified workflows, far fewer distractions and a whole lot more productivity. Here are four ways your organization can take advantage of apps for Slack:

1. Ship code with confidence

The DevOps movement has made it faster and safer to ship code, but it’s also spawned a lot of new tools—and toggling between them slows work down.

Whichever combo your developers prefer—whether it includes JIRA, GitHub, Jenkins, Asana, SubVersion, Trello, BitBucket, PagerDuty or many others—they can work in them all without leaving Slack.

For example, here’s how a developer can use JIRA to create and assign tickets in Slack:

2. Share and collaborate on documents

The latest status report arrives, and you need to discuss it with your project lead as soon as possible. With Slack, you don’t have to waste time looking for the attachment in a lengthy email chain, forwarding it and setting up a call to discuss it.

Using OneDrive (or Google Drive, Box or most other popular file-management apps) and Webex, each of these steps can take place in Slack. Plus, you can manage recordings and follow-up tasks too. Here’s how:

3. Give your customers quicker support

Support desks are notoriously prone to time-consuming context switching. Agents spend countless hours toggling between apps to find the right information to resolve a customer’s issue. It’s frustrating for agents, and frustrating for the customer who just wants a quick answer.

But when all the apps your customer service team relies on are integrated with Slack, finding those answers is much easier, and service quality soars.

Slack integrates with lots of different help desk and support apps, but here’s how it works with Zendesk, Salesforce and your knowledge base of choice:

4. Manage important emails

We’ve all been there: You’re so busy focusing on a critical task that you forget to check your email—and suddenly you’ve missed an important meeting request from a client.

With Slack, that’s not going to happen. When you integrate Slack with your email and calendar tool of choice, important emails and meeting requests land right alongside the rest of your work. Plus, you can share and discuss them with your teams in a channel, where you’ll get a prompt response and everyone has visibility.

Here’s an example using Outlook and Outlook Calendar:

And there are many, many more …

When you make the most of the ecosystem of apps that integrate with Slack, it can transform the way your whole organization works—and give everyone a boost in productivity.

Today, Slack integrates with more than 1,500 apps, and we’re adding new integrations all the time. With Slack as your collaboration hub, you can remove friction, save time, deliver better service and free your people to do their best work.

To see which of your organization’s go-to apps are supported today, visit the Slack App Directory.