UC Today’s Tom Wright hosts Stuart Templeton, Head of UK, Slack.
In this session we discuss the following:
1) How Slack’s integration with Salesforce is progressing
2) Recently-launched Slack innovations
3) What we can expect to see from Slack next year
The copy below is an edited transcription of the video interview
It’s great to have you particularly during what’s been such a busy few months for Slack. could talk us through how things are looking with Salesforce in terms of bringing the two companies together?
Yeah, of course. So on the one hand, I think our mission remains intact. My job is to continue to deliver success to our customers, of course, and the vision of Slack of taking communication out of silos, and into channels to deliver on agility, speed, all those sorts of things, remains the core focus. So I think it’s great to see that we’re all aligned to the fact that we’re on the right track. However, there is a huge opportunity to deliver on what we’re now calling the Slack First Customer 360.
The Customer 360 are the suite of Salesforce products in the world’s number one CRM platform, of course. But there’s a huge opportunity, and we’ll maybe talk a little bit about this later, to accelerate the way that sales teams work, to help sales teams delight their customers to close tickets faster through better integrations to service cloud and, therefore there’s an enormous amount of excitement in our customer base and the Salesforce customer base around us bringing that message to them and helping them realise their future of integrating the Slack way of working into the Slack First Customer 360.
Can you give us an idea of what the kind of response has been from customers and partners in the UK?
That’s been really thoroughly exciting, as you would expect. And one of the great things, of course, is we’re part of a bigger organisation with a great deal of mindshare, and hence, they’re opening up all sorts of customer opportunities for us.
I think if we think about the reason that this time is so exciting, we’ve all become experts at working from home. To a large extent, I certainly feel like I’ve made big strides. We all had to do it at a real pace and I think we should be proud of not just how we’ve survived in a business context, but how we’ve really thrived, right? Yeah, organising this type of session would have taken a little bit more logistics than the way we’re doing it right now, the same with customer meetings and hence organisations have been much more productive. But we’re now embarking on a journey into a hybrid way of working and none of us had ever done that before. And frankly, I think it’s a little bit more thought-provoking.
How do we run meetings like this, if six of us are in the same room together? You know, how do we not have proximity bias when our teams are going to be distributed all over the country, all over the world. So I think 70% of employees believe that the pandemic has forever changed the way that we work. And hence, not only are we in a time where Salesforce customers are very excited about the future of Slack, First Customer 360, but they also recognise that to be productive in the future, we need to enable our employees to be successful from anywhere. To do that we need a digital HQ to really empower that success. So I think we are fueled by some really big kind of macro trends, which are very exciting from our point of view, which is somewhat supplemented by the Slack First Customer 360. And hence, it’s a vibrant set of discussions for us right now.
My final question for you Stuart, can you give us some clues about what you expect to see some of the big trends next year, and also what we can expect to see from Slack?
Our job is of course to continue to make our customers really successful. That’s what we’re doing in the UK and I think we’re lucky to have such a breadth of customers in all sorts of areas, from financial services like HSBC, from central government organisations and forward-thinking tech organisations like Ocado, Deliveroo, etc. That’s our job.
But I think where we’re going to start to put more emphasis is, of course, delivering on the announcements and Dreamforce around the kind of executing more and more or delivering deeper and deeper capability around the Slack First Customer 360.
How do we enable sales teams to close deals faster with more integrations? How do we enable sales organisations to delight their customers with Slack Connect and actually we launched something at Dreamforce so that you can now invite customers to Slack Connect who are not already paying Slack customers, which is really exciting. How can we enable service teams to connect to experts more quickly, to take case swarming to a new level? That’s really I think going to be my primary focus bringing that to our customers, to help customers that are using Slack and Salesforce, deliver greater agility speed around how they sell service market and those sorts of things Tom.
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