With more than 9 million active weekly users, Slack is increasingly becoming the de-facto communication tool at organizations worldwide, replacing the traditional email. It is important to align your support processes with your communication tool, for instant collaboration and quick resolution. Working with multiple teams in Slack means valuable customer feedback and insights are easily shared with the people building, designing, and selling your company’s products or services. Modern companies have already started building their entire customer support workflows around Slack.
If you’ve landed on this blog post, there is a fairly high probability that you’re using slack for your team collaboration. Let’s deep dive into 6 tips that can help optimize your support workflows using integrations/features inside Slack:
1. Connect with your Helpdesk Software
The benefit of connecting your helpdesk with Slack is that your team can push instant notifications about new tickets, ticket closure, SLA breaches, etc. This can drastically reduce your first response time. The Slack App Directory has a plethora of help desk integrations that support teams can use to ensure their customers are well taken care of. HappyFox is a front-runner.
- HappyFox’s Slack integration lets you post conditional notifications to different slack channels of your choice for ticketing activities. Here’s how:
- By creating dedicated channels with team members, you can route tickets to the appropriate team automatically – so that they get the best possible resolution.
- Support agents can then respond directly to tickets or modify ticket properties, without having to leave the Slack interface.
- If you’re using slack for internal support, your employees can quickly fire up the new ticket form to create tickets instantly.
- If you have external solution articles, your employees can quickly reference them by using a slash command.
2. Integrate with your Live Chat Software
By using a Live Chat software integration, you can instantly get notified on new/completed live chats from your website visitors directly within Slack. Your live chat support team can provide information about products and services to help customers make decisions and quickly address any problems or complaints. Popular Live Chat integrations with Slack, like HappyFox Chat, enable you to:
- Post notifications to channels on any chat related activity.
- Access hot links to chat conversations inside the Chat tool.
- View offline chat messages and act on them instantly.
3. Integrate with your CRM, Project Management & Telephony Tools
Slack’s ability to help teams stay organized is rooted in its connectivity. With over a hundred integrations in CRM/Project management/Telephony space, it has evolved into a full-fledged collaboration tool. If you’re using Salesforce or Wrike or Aircall to manage your leads, product roadmap, or inbound calls, you can leverage their slack integration to bring contextual information inside slack channels. Many of them have provisions to perform actions on notifications so that you can always stay up-to-date.
4. Build a public-facing Slack Community
Companies can create public-facing slack communities for free. Dedicated communities are a great way for customers to help each other or for your team to jump in and help with critical cases. The fundamental notion is simple: every new customer gets invited to join a Slack community that includes company representatives and customers discussing the product.
There are many benefits of creating a Slack community:
- Ticket Deflection: The main benefit of using a Slack-based customer community is that your customers can easily use the “search” function to see whether their questions had been asked and answered before.
- Double up as a Forum: While Slack is great for team collaboration, you can also use it with individual consumers, but as a community tool that can replace the forums on your website. Customers can themselves help other customers or post their feedback for your product team to work upon.
- Boost Customer Loyalty: Experienced users can dive in and help new users get the most out of your product. They become advocates for your product and also help bring the community together.
- Lightning Fast Response Rates: Since this is a public-facing channel, chances are people are always available for help. Better yet, your support agents can also quickly jump-in for a quick resolution.
Create Dedicated Support Channels:
- #product-announcements: Use this channel to post release-notes or company-wide announcements. This is a great way to keep your customers in sync with your latest updates.
- #technical-help: For intricate customer support queries that require developer support, you can create a channel dedicated to this purpose. Your development team can also pitch in when necessary on this channel.
- #feedback: Use this channel for gathering general feedback around your product and for your community to interact with each other.
⭐️ Bonus Tip:
You can use Slack’s Workflow builder to automate repetitive processes, so that your Slack users can self-service themselves.
5. Invite Single or Multi-Channel Guests
You can invite external customers or contributors to your existing slack channels in your company’s workspace. By doing so, your internal teams can directly liaison with your customers and ask for direct feedback on your feature or service.
- Multi-channel guests have access to only the channels that you specify. They’re billed as regular members and can be added to an unlimited number of channels.
- Single-channel guests are free and can only access one channel. For every paid active member in your company’s workspace, you can add up to five guests!
There are many benefits of inviting single/multi-channel guests:
- By listening to your critics, you transform them into brand ambassadors.
- If you have an important customer, you can bring them closer to your internal teams for quick and easy development of new features.
- If you’re running a beta release, you can get first-hand feedback from your customer base.
- You can communicate with them directly through Slack voice/video calls and keep them in the loop.
The downside is that, if you have a large customer base, inviting a majority of them into your official workspace can get a bit overwhelming.
6. Create Shared Channels
Shared channels let two separate organizations work together in a Slack channel, each from within their own Slack workspace. If your customers are inherently other companies, you can bring employees of both companies together and help solve mutual issues.
Benefits of using shared channels:
- Bring Everyone on the same page: With access to chat history, everyone in your team and your partner organization can get up-to-date with the latest happenings.
- Streamlined Communication: Reduce context switching between different teams. With a single unified tool for collaboration, teams of different companies can communicate through posts, calls, and meetings.
- Easier Information Sharing: With powerful file sharing capabilities within Slack, searching, and managing files are a breeze.
- Build Trust: Develop a deeper relationship with your concerned partners by making collaboration much simpler, more direct, and more formal. Both sides can easily see what’s happening and who’s responsible for what.
HappyFox is an omnichannel helpdesk, with integrations with popular chat collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. Want to know more? Then Schedule a demo with us to see things in action!
