Slack for Customer Support
Slack for Customer Support
Emily Rivers
Marketing & Product
May 10, 2024
8m
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TL;DR: Slack facilitates real-time communication, better collaboration, and higher customer engagement. It enables gathering customer insights, integrates with various channels, and offers customizability. By using Slack for support, businesses can achieve faster response times, personalized interactions, increased customer control, and ease of use. Strategies include integrating Slack with CRM, live chat support, automated workflows, self-service knowledge base, and essential app integration. Successful adoption requires defining roles, setting communication guidelines, and empowering the support team.
What is Slack?
Slack is a cloud-based communication tool that provides teams with a platform to collaborate in real time, whether they're at home, in the office, or both. 'Slack' stands for 'Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge'. The idea behind Slack is that all team members can access shared files and conversations within one Slack workspace.
Slack has changed over the years, and it now goes beyond a team collaboration tool. It can be used to communicate with partners, vendors, or customers through their Slack Connect facility and other integrations.
Benefits of Using Slack for Customer Support
There are so many ways that using Slack for customer support benefits support teams and customers:
Real-time communication: With Slack channels, support teams can communicate in real time with customers and deal with their requests quickly. You can create dedicated channels for things like product feedback, account issues, or general inquiries, allowing a support agent to tag the relevant team members in a channel to help resolve the customer's request promptly.
Better collaboration: Similarly, there's better collaboration when you use Slack for customer support. Teams can work together more efficiently to solve complex issues, share expertise, and generally provide more efficient customer support.
Higher customer engagement: Slack is a great customer relationship management tool because it allows support teams to speak to customers in a much more relaxed way. Support agents can use emojis and other visual tools to ensure customers get a unique experience that leaves them happy that their query has been resolved.
Gather customer insights: Use Slack to collect and analyze customer feedback to help you understand where your customers experience pain points and identify areas for improvement. Productlane integrates with Slack to allow you to add customer feedback directly into Linear and assign to issues. Plus, you'll also gain valuable insights into your support team's performance, with data such as response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction levels. Integrate with other tools to help you spot trends and common customer support issues.
Integrates with multiple channels: Slack integrates with so many other tools, such as social media, CRM systems, ticketing systems, and video calling. Being able to manage customer inquiries from various channels in one platform will save your support team time and ultimately help them offer better customer support.
Customizable: You can configure Slack so it works for your unique business situation. You can create different Slack channels for different kinds of customer inquiries, automate repetitive tasks such as initial responses, and use it to prioritize important tasks.
How Slack Can Improve Customer Satisfaction
Faster response times: Support agents can deal with customer inquiries much quicker using Slack since they can respond in real time. With support teams able to share knowledge and collaborate on one support ticket together, customers should have their requests resolved quicker than using traditional customer support methods.
Personalized interactions: It's much easier to adopt a friendly tone on Slack. Using your customer's name and things like emojis and GIFs will help create a personalized experience that will make them feel valued.
Offers more control: Customers have more control over their support requests using Slack. They'll have a record of their conversation to refer back to if necessary, can ask for updates whenever they want, and get direct access to a knowledge base to self-serve.
Easier to use: Slack is much easier to use than some customer support platforms, and since many B2B customers will already use it for their work, they know their way around. They won't have to comb through their inboxes to find old support requests or get distracted by a web page with pop-ups or irrelevant information.
Ways to Use Slack for Customer Support
Once you know how to use Slack for customer support, you won't go back. There are so many ways to leverage Slack for customer support - here are our top choices:
Integrate Slack with your CRM
If your CRM has Slack integration, you should connect them now. Your CRM should have all the information your customer support team needs to help them make customer interactions as easy as possible. Your CRM should have records of all previous conversations, relevant customer information, and other useful data. With Slack integration, your support agents can get direct access to this information without having to switch between platforms.
Add live chat support to Slack
Lots of live chat solutions offer Slack integration, which is great for your support team as they can deal with customer requests straight from the workspace. The best thing to do is to set up Slack channels that you want to direct live chats to so your team can deal with them.
It's a good idea to make these private channels so only support team members can access them, to prevent other colleagues from getting tempted to reply.
Set up automated workflows
Setting up automated workflows in your Slack workspace helps free up your support agents' time. It can also help you reduce customer complaints if you set up automated responses for certain tasks. For example, if a customer submits a support ticket outside of business hours, you could set up an automated workflow that lets them know that their ticket has been received and will be responded to during your customer support team's working hours.
Create a self-service knowledge base
Slack is perfect for setting up a self-service knowledge base for your customers. In fact, it's one of the reasons that Slack was created in the first place! While we're mostly used to knowledge bases being used for internal teams, there's no reason why you can't set one up on Slack for customers too.
Upload all the files that might be useful to your customers, for example, troubleshooting guides, how-to videos, and useful contacts. Create a central hub where customers can answer some queries themselves, leaving your support agents free to deal with more complex issues.
Integrate Slack with your essential apps and tools
Slack for customer support will work best when you use all your apps and tools within it. Integrate as many as you can to make life easier for your support team. Integrating it with things like your ticketing system and social media platforms means your team will be able to see outstanding support tickets and deal with inquiries from various sources more easily, streamlining your support processes and improving customer experience.
Set up a conversational ticketing system
While you may already have a ticket system in place, a conversational one is ideal when you're working with Slack. A conversational ticketing system can pick up issues in Slack messages and automatically convert them into support tickets, ensuring no customer requests get forgotten about.
Productlane goes one step further and allows you to create Linear issues from Slack channels. Simply connect a #feedback channel and every message will add a new note for your product team and developers.
Getting Your Customer Support Team on Board With Slack for Customer Support
If you want your support team to embrace using Slack for customer support, you need to ensure it makes their job easier. There are a few ways you can do this:
Define clear roles and responsibilities
Make sure every support agent knows what's expected of them and assign any additional responsibilities based on skills and experience. Ensure the whole team understands the chain of command when dealing with support requests so all tickets are addressed promptly.
Create communication guidelines based on your company values
Since Slack is still a relatively new way of offering customer support, it's a good idea to create communication guidelines. Base them on your company values and any existing tone of voice guidelines you have so your support teams understand how you expect them to speak to customers. These guidelines are ideal for giving your agents a focus and helping them understand how you want to delight your customers.
Empower your support team
Above all, you should empower your team to offer great customer support. Ensure your agents have all the information they need to answer queries effectively and provide regular training to keep them up to date with the latest changes in your product. Make sure you give feedback too, and regularly celebrate wins to keep morale high. Best of all, you can use a Slack channel to do this - create a dedicated channel for sharing agents' great work.
FAQ on using Slack for customer support
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