Slack and Salesforce have given the first glimpse of their combined offering during a virtual event.
The pair showcased the Slack-First Customer 360 platform – bringing Slack’s collaboration capabilities together with Salesforce’s suite of CRM tools.
Brett Taylor, COO at Salesforce, said: “For me when I say Slack-First Customer 360 it means digital-first. The whole economy is digital – the employee experience, the experience with your partners, your supply chain.
“Customer 360 is about digital sales, digital customer services, digital marketing, digital commerce.
“Slack is just the perfect tool to engage with every stakeholder, whether you’re a sales team getting approval for a discount or a customer services team trying to find the right person to answer your customer’s question as quickly as possible”
The acquisition of Slack by Salesforce was completed at the end of last month.
Salesforce has given glimpses of four specific use cases for Slack on its website which will be available in pilot towards the end of this year: sales, service, marketing, and IT support/app development.
The firm gave some early examples of how the integrations between the two companies will look for the use cases:
Sales
- Digital deal rooms will let sales teams collaborate with customers in one place, particularly for complex deals that can take time to complete. All files and conversations can be stored in one place
- Automated briefs will give salespeople daily reminders of what they need to focus on
Service
- Swarming will create a Slack channel for service teams to collaborate on urgent cases
- Expert finder will automatically identify the right experts and bring them into a swarm channel based on their availability and skillset
Marketing
- Insights from Salesforce’s marketing cloud will be shared directly in Slack so teams can act quickly – around low engagement concerns, for example
- Workflow notifications will automatically update Slack channels when other users have made changes to a marketing campaign, so tweaks can be reviewed and approved
Slack will also be integrated with data visualisation platform Tableau to make Tableau analytics available from within Slack. This is expanded to be generally available towards the end of 2021.
You can view our recent interview with the Head of UK at Slack here:
The Rationale
The Slack-Salesforce event included case studies from two high-profile Slack and Salesforce customers – IBM and T-Mobile – who demonstrated how they use Slack’s channels and workflows to conduct business, specifically with integrations of Salesforce tools and tools from third-party providers.
A key focus of the event was that users can also communicate with people outside of their organisation using Slack Connect, as well as Slack’s focus on becoming the “digital HQ” for businesses with dispersed workforces.
Slack CEO, Stewart Butterfield, said that part of the rationale behind the acquisition was to be able to integrate systems across organisations.
“We had a mission to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive.
“The reason I like that is because there’s a humility to it and it is [about] being of service to people.
“It’s also profoundly ambitious because if we’re able to raise the productivity of the entire working world that has an inflection of GDP and the lives that people leave.”
Asynchronous Communication
Asynchronous communication has emerged as a theme this year to help combat the often-endless string of video meetings that some employees can feel suffocated by.
Slack recently launched a set of features around this, with Taylor and Butterfield explaining that async communication will play a key role in the Slack-First Customer 360
platform.
“Being on camera isn’t easy but it’s also about being really over schedules, like 9-9:30,” Butterfield said.
“I remember at Slack we decided we were going to start all minutes at five-past and people were [relieved] that they could go to the toilet and get a coffee; things that they weren’t able to do.
“At some point, we just sat down and asked what we were synchronously… that could be asynchronous. There are some meetings that are better in-person but, honestly, there are some that are better with people doing things on their own time, sharing in the meantime, and then having a chance to review everyone else’s work.
“[They can] move to either more recorded videos or written communication; in any case, it’s been a lifesaver.”
