One of my friends who is a teacher told me that his students will find ways to turn any application into a chat app. One that impressed him was using a shared Google Sheet to write messages back and forth. This desire for communication reveals a lot about the future of work and why Salesforce® was willing to splash out $27.7 billion to acquire Slack.
This year we have self-implemented Slack, deeply integrated with Salesforce and Google Workspace, and have used the experience to start advising and delivering Slack to our clients. Today I’m going to share how it has revolutionised the way we sell, support and market our services, enabling us to get more done and raise our data quality.
On the surface, Slack might look like a carbon copy of the plethora of other business messaging apps like Skype, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat and kin. You can create group chats (channels) for teams, projects or internal activities and you can send private messages as well as use new features like clips and Slack Connect.
However, while Slack can be used as just another group chat app for work, its integration and recent enhancements from Salesforce are transforming Slack from a place to collaborate into the central hub of the business, glueing together data, processes and people efficiently to power working at pace and scale.
Here are a few examples:
In our pre-sales process, quickly assigning the right consultants into the bid team maximises our chance of winning.
We configured a quick action to auto-create a pre-sales case from the opportunity and then auto-create a dedicated Slack channel for the bid team to collaborate and receive updates on changes to the Google Workspace estimate sheets and proposal slides.
Once the deal is closed, the channel is auto-archived keeping everything clean, with the history intact ready to be leveraged for the next one.
Swarming also works brilliantly in Service Cloud to ensure speedy, efficient case resolution to keep customers happy.
Ever been stuck waiting for that key stakeholder to approve your proposal and worried that a delay from them not checking their email till the end of the day (like they always do!) could cause you to miss your sales quota for the month? Or worse still, it results in the customer choosing a competitor! Fear no more.
Slack can be configured with your proposal and approval processes and notify anyone who needs to sign off on a deal with all the details they need to see. If the stakeholder notices something that needs to be changed, they just enter the details and send it straight back for revision. All with a few clicks inside their messaging app. Connecting Salesforce and Slack speeds up data capture and dissemination.
Anyone who’s used a chat app for a while will know the frustration of channel overlap!
Often there are multiple channels for almost the same purpose, and yet creating a new channel for big deals or specific support issues can really help move things forward.
We have already covered the channel creation and archiving power of Slack using trigger points from business processes, but this is only half the battle.
Configuring Slack with a clear structure and channel naming conventions to visually differentiate processes, teams, regions or customer/partner activity is essential to maintaining a healthy, well-governed system at the heart of the organisation.
When we first announced our internal Slack pilot, a few people voiced their scepticism. Why did we need a new messaging service when we already had one? And what about Salesforce Chatter? Now, three months in and those voices of concern are gone. Some are even Slack’s biggest advocates. By moving to Slack we’ve made it easier to focus on the really valuable and rewarding tasks and streamlined workflows across the company.
If you are interested in removing friction and inefficiencies from your work, then get in touch. We’d be happy to find out about your organisation and identify the ways combining Salesforce and Slack can transform your organisation
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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