Salesforce bought Slack for a whopping $27.7 billion in December 2020. It remains Salesforce's largest-ever acquisition. The purchase price was at a 60% premium on the stock price of Slack and Salesforce does not seem to be finished.

Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, has suggested that Salesforce is going to rebuild all of its technology to be Slack-first. 

Now, you might be wondering, Salesforce already has a collaboration/conversation tool called Chatter. If Chatter already exists, what is the big deal about Slack? Why is everyone so excited about the Slack acquisition?

Let’s demystify how Slack is helping Salesforce Customers and what's in store for the future. 

Slack is for everyone

Chatter is tightly coupled with Salesforce. It was primarily developed to help sales, support, marketing and project teams, etc to collaborate. Furthermore, Chatter limits itself to Salesforce users. 

Slack, on the other hand, is open to everyone. You do not have to be a Salesforce user to take advantage of Slack. This means, your cross-functional teams, unfamiliar with the Salesforce ecosystem can easily collaborate with people in your organization. Slack also allows all parties (vendors, customers, Salesforce Users) to retain the data relevant to their conversations.

A win-win for everyone.

Manage Sales pipeline more efficiently

Did I mention Slack helps in collaboration? I did, didn't I? It’s worth mentioning again. 

Sales Cloud 360 and Slack help your sales team to sell faster and drive growth. 

• Slack help drive Sales in multiple ways such as:
  
• Allows Sales reps to move conversations with customers, partners, and vendors out of email and into Slack.
• Less back and forth during the deal cycle allows every aspect of the sales process to run more efficiently.
• Slack supports apps to easily book meetings, share documents (where permissions can be granted instantly) and allows Zoom calls within a shared channel. The best part about in-channel meetings? It can send a transcript of the meeting to the channel and can track follow-ups.
• Sales reps are always on the go and the Slack app is super easy and intuitive to use on the go. Access to documents, meetings, and conversations helps Sales reps to close deals.
  

According to a survey done by IDC, Sales teams using Slack have experienced a 13% shorter overall sales cycle and a 21% jump to response times to a sales lead.

Say Goodbye to wait times

If you run a business and have a steady stream of customers, chances are they have contacted you for support. Chances are also high that almost all of them have experienced or are likely to experience “eternal hold” when they call you for support. 

Now, imagine a world where the wait time is non-existent. This is the potential of a Slack-first Support service. A set of new features were recently introduced to the Service cloud to streamline experiences between customer service agents and consumers. 

Salesforce has redefined the traditional, tiered model of customer handoff and instead have now proposed “swarm” pods i.e. expertise from a pool of support engineers. At the heart of this change, however, is Collaboration. 

Find the right expert

In a traditional model, if a Support engineer encounters an issue outside of his/her expertise area, they will usually open a case on the next tier or escalate the case to the next tier. This leads to increased resolution time for the customer. 

In the new collaborative model, if an engineer needs help on a case, the pod’s lead pushes a swarm request into the appropriate Slack channels asking other cross-functional subject matter experts. This helps in getting answers quickly and the end customer is not required to be bounced off from one expert to another.

Evolving Knowledge base

Slack messages are “Permanent” and therefore can be used to build historical knowledge and context. Chances are most of your customers face similar kinds of issues or as companies grow, support reps end up having similar conversations with different sets of people. The power of Slack is that all those conversations are persisted and are searchable. Slack can therefore surface relevant content and prior conversations to service agents helping them solve customer queries quickly.

A recent study found Slack integrations in Service Cloud lead to an 11% improvement in customer satisfaction scores.

Ship with Slack

Slack is a master tool for Collaboration. In today’s world of Remote working and geographically dispersed teams, an area that needs the most collaboration is Development teams. Salesforce IT projects have grown more and more complex over the years and remote working brings its own set of challenges.

However, fear not, Slack has tools to help mitigate project management risks.

Slack supports configurable workflows which can automate everyday tasks. It integrates automated tools into a single place enabling engineers to focus on product development and design.

• Some of the ways Workflow help the development teams are:
• Integrate with Jira and notify a specific channel about a new JIRA ticket or when the ticket state is changed. 
• Integrate with GitHub and notify a specific channel about each build and issues encountered if any.
• Slack is an extensible platform so new functionality or integration can be implemented to suit any future requirements. 
  

Further, just like for support cases, Slack centralizes feedback, persists them, and makes them searchable. This creates a historical contextual record for a bug which can be revisited in the future if a similar issue is observed. 

QA’s and development teams can work in tandem on bugs and releases. Slack centralises communication enabling Release or bug-specific channels. 

Technical designs can be instantly shared, zoom meetings can be set up to clear any doubts and daily scrum meetings can also be scheduled to keep the project on track. 

Best of all, since Slack isn’t tied to Salesforce, Customers can also be invited to certain channels to provide feedback on the product/service helping development teams give instant feedback on their work.

In Conclusion

Post-Pandemic, everything has changed. The way we sell, work, live, and enjoy. 

At work, teams are diverse and want to work in a hybrid model. The office cubicle is no longer fixed. 

In this unprecedented time, Collaboration is the new buzzword and Slack is at its forefront. An extensible platform that connects employees, customers, partners, and vendors and helps them collaborate seamlessly. No wonder, people love to use Slack. 

No wonder Marc Benioff is so excited for Slack. So am I. So should you.