Slack’s integration with Salesforce® is most definitely one of the biggest developments to hit the Salesforce world in recent times. As I explored in my previous article, it offers possibilities right across the entire spectrum of business areas, including marketing, sales and more. In this article, I’ll be focusing on the customer service benefits of Salesforce Service Cloud and Slack integration.
When a customer service case is raised, or an incident such as an outage occurs that interrupts your service, a coordinated response from multiple employees or teams is often required. The more effectively they work together, the more likely they can bring a satisfactory resolution. It’s an ideal area for Slack and Service Cloud to make a difference together.
By creating dedicated Slack channels, accessible to all necessary internal departments and external stakeholders, you can ensure everyone’s kept in the loop and can play their parts, working together as a swarm. All the information they need is there, along with the people they need to collaborate with to resolve a case or incident.
What’s more, you can also create workflows and automations, accessible right there in Slack. They can use these to carry out service processes, with automatic notifications to alert people to a case/incident’s status or when they need to take action. You can also automate reminder messages as part of a workflow, to make sure tasks don’t get inadvertently lost. All of this helps organisations to resolve issues in a much more timely manner — and that means happier customers.
When resolving a case or issue, it’s crucial to have the required information at your disposal. The more relevant details service agents and others can get, and the faster they can get them, the better. However, the answers, documents and content they need can be located in all sorts of different conversations and files. That can sometimes make it difficult for them to lay their hands on what they need, when they need it — but not with the help of Slack.
Thanks to Slack’s sophisticated, AI-powered search capabilities, it’s easy to find the right things, whether they’re to be found in a file, message or channel. The searcher can then use the information in resolving a problem or pass it on to colleagues, or forward helpful content on to customers.
It gets better: the details from each resolved case become added to this searchable knowledge-base. They can be quickly found by other service agents when they’re looking for useful information to solve their own cases. So, every issue or case resolved with the power of Slack and Salesforce increases your chance of resolving the next one even faster.
In account-based business-to-business (B2B) relationships, it’s particularly obvious when a business is delivering impersonal customer service. To properly nurture these accounts and provide the kind of service that meets expectations, you’ll often need a coordinated effort from a range of internal staff and external partners and/or vendors. A great way to enable this is connecting everyone so they can start swarming together in Slack.
Ordinarily, collaboration between separate organisations, and sometimes multiple departments between them, can be slow and difficult. But with Slack Connect, you can link up the whole ecosystem so everyone can come together to focus on individual accounts and their needs. Slack Connect is designed to support inter-organisational collaboration, where everyone can contribute their skills, documents and tools in one secure place.
When partnerships work better and more efficiently, and partner/vendor relationships are stronger, customer experiences improve in turn. Delivering services and products, resolving issues, answering queries, collaborating on new strategies and offerings — all of these can be expedited and boosted with Salesforce Service Cloud and Slack integration.
Finally, let’s look at another factor that has a massive impact on the effectiveness of customer service: having the latest information. The fresher the data, the better, and if service agents and others can form an up-to-date, complete picture of a customer and their situation/needs, they’ll be much more likely to give them great service.
This is where a new innovation from Salesforce comes in: Salesforce Genie. Genie is a real-time data platform that allows you to connect all your customer data from all your apps and elsewhere, and harmonise it in a single easy-to-consult customer graph. This overview, updated in real time, can be provided to service reps and others via the same Slack channels they use to collaborate and do their work.
With this kind of up-to-the-minute, 360-degree view of customers, service agents can be more informed and responsive. They can drastically speed up issue resolution and service delivery, with a new level of agility and accuracy that customers are sure to appreciate. All thanks to Slack, Salesforce Service Cloud and this great new technology unlocking the full value of your data.
If this article has made you interested in Salesforce Service Cloud and Slack integration, VRP Consulting will be glad to help you achieve them. We can help you integrate Salesforce and Slack to create a solution that fits your people, processes and business needs perfectly.
We have the specialised Slack and Salesforce Service Cloud expertise that’s necessary to bring out the best in this powerful combination. Whether your organisation has already implemented Salesforce and/or Slack, or you’ve never used either of these technologies before, our experts will get you up and running as swiftly and effectively as possible — so you can start gaining all the benefits we’ve explored here. If you’d like to find out more, just get in touch.
Rebecca Heald
Senior Consultant / Solution Architect
VRP Consulting UKI
Rebecca Heald is a Solution Architect on the UKI Architecture team. Heavily Salesforce certified, she is well-versed in the nonprofit and legal sectors. As part of the internal team responsible for implementing Slack, she has seen the opportunities and challenges involved.
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