Slack Unveils New Platform Features to Assist Partners

Slack has unveiled a host of new features to its platform intended to accelerate customer growth and retention for its partners.

The vendor has revealed the updates ahead of its Slack Frontiers EMEA conference this week. The new features – including acquiring users through link shares, message metadata, and notification customisations – were developed to accommodate the “rapid evolution” of workplace technologies and are expected to be released by summer 2022.

One of the new features allows partners to reach potential users who haven’t installed their app. Slack’s own data indicates that “tens of millions” of links are shared on the platform daily, providing opportunities to introduce a product to new users. The new feature works by prompting users to sign in to their existing account or register a new one for the partner’s product whenever a link gets shared or clicked in Slack.  This process is powered by Slack links.

Early partners for the feature include Atlassian, Loom, and Miro, with one partner creating 54,000 new user accounts and connecting 130,000 existing accounts to Slack with one-click access to its product in just one month.

Notification Customisation

Subscribe in Slack is billed as the vendor’s next generation of notifications.

It allows users to opt into third-party tools and configure notifications by clicking a button on the platform. Notifications then occur in channels without having to install an app or invite it into the channel.

This new feature offers partners a quick and easy way to set up notifications and granular controls that allow users to only receive alerts that interest them, as well as exposing apps to more users by sharing notifications in public channels.

Increase Engagement with Metadata

Message metadata enables app builders to send data alongside notifications, making it easier for other systems to process and react to that information. For example, if an app’s message declares an incident’s priority as ‘urgent’, a customer can then automatically trigger a process that escalates the incident and ensures it gets resolved quickly.

This data allows customers to quickly integrate a partner’s product into the internal apps and workflows they’ve built using Slack API or Workflow Builder.

“Today, apps are shrink-wrapped; they don’t work with other apps,” Steve Wood, VP of Product, Developer Platform at Slack told UC Today.

“For example, if you’ve built the Zoom app and you’ve built the Salesforce app, those apps don’t talk to each other. As a result, to reach a business outcome, you become the integration layer to bring those things together.

“By making them embeddable within customers’ workflows, the apps become stickier… and that becomes really awesomely productive for you, and also for third parties”

“Our apps are being embedded to help partners be more productive in Slack and the apps can all talk to each other, so we’re all part of helping you get to your business outcome.”