Using Slack for Customer Support

If you are using Slack for work, you are probably already familiar with the immediacy of communication where everything happens through channels with access to all your other useful tools and services without leaving the platform. Tools and services like thousands of apps to help you with meaningful work and collaboration, ranging from video conferencing to coding to sales to… customer support. That’s right if you deal with resolving customer issues on a regular basis, Slack is up to the task. According to the website, using Slack for customer support can solve customer issues more quickly. Moreover, you can have tickets routed and resolved with fewer errors. Let’s explore using Slack for customer support.

Customer Experience Is King

As we know, one key indicator of success in any business is impeccable customer experience. When a problem arises, it’s always best to have it solved quickly. For this, consider using Slack itself as the main platform to resolve customer issues. Cut resolution time significantly by allowing the power of teamwork problem-solving via Slack. With Slack, workers get to interact more often with other internal teams on specific customer issues where it wouldn’t be otherwise possible. The platform enables tackling the full issue lifecycle of customer issues from start to finish, meaning from creating a customer ticket to a ticket marked ‘resolved’.

By way of well-defined channels, each customer issue can be addressed by the team from start to finish. For any ticket that requires collaboration, create a triage channel to sort out and solve the issue. Create a new channel for any challenging incident that requires an urgent and heavy response from the team. In turn, teammates can organize their work and reply accordingly using emoji reactions, like the pair of eyes to indicate someone is looking into the customer issue, and a check reaction to let everybody know the issue has been resolved.

Customer Messaging Apps Abound

Another effective use of Slack for customer support is to centralize all means of communication that directly deal with customers. Having everything related to customer support in one place presents a big picture and better context to solve arising issues. Whenever they ask for help or give feedback either through your organization’s social media accounts or contact forms from the organization’s website or emails or phone calls and voicemails from your voice-over IP, save time by integrating customer support-related apps into Slack. Doing so eliminates the need for switching between applications without having to leave Slack. Depending on certain app features, you won’t have to compromise on quality care. In fact, it still preserves the ability to respond directly to clients.

Customer messaging apps and chatbots such as Twitter, Zendesk, or Hubspot can all be funneled through Slack and dealt with from a single platform. If you are looking for relevant applications available for integration, consult the Slack directory for customer support. The Twitter app in Slack is a good example of monitoring customer feedback. Any mentions of your organization can be captured through a newly created channel dedicated to incoming tweets in real-time. This keeps your team in the loop about what customers are experiencing and how they reach out to your organization.

A Great Way to Strengthen The Customer Relationship

Shared channels in Slack for customer support are also incredibly rewarding. Opening up Slack channels between an organization and its most highly valued clients will better customer service and strengthen customer relationships. Why? For one, you give them direct and personalized access to you. This removes the formalities and barriers of a generic ‘contact us’ form. Furthermore, it encourages them to be more vocal about their feedback, which in turn provides valuable insight not only on user experience and improving interactions with consumers but also potential solutions for better products and services. This gathers the knowledge of exactly where the ticket is at in real-time while including customers with vested interests to positively influence the process of problem-solving. In turn, this provides you with a proper context for assigning the right people and departments for dispatch.

Cultivate A Customer Community

For more customer engagement, cultivate a customer community on Slack. Create a channel where customers can hang together among themselves, helping each other out through questions and tips. A search function is also available for them to easily look for answers. This gives another exclusive access to specific topics and problems being discussed and a closer look at the most recurring issues. Feedback from such space can serve as a resource to update your FAQs. You can restrict the channel to a limited number of customers. This could help avoid the community discussion growing out of control. Another purpose of the customer community is to test marketing campaign ideas or strategies and ask for customer feedback.

Net Promoter Scores: What Are They?

To keep the organization up to date with customer satisfaction and loyalty, Slack for customer support is also valuable for NPS. Net promoter score measures a customer’s likeliness to recommend a company’s products or services to others. The index typically ranges on a scale from -100 to +100, with the highest number being the most desirable. A score between 0 to 6 means that your customers are dissatisfied and unlikely to return; a score of 7 or 8 means you have satisfied customers; and a 9 or 10 means your customers are promoters, most likely to recommend your stuff to others.

If your company already deals with it to get a pulse on customer satisfaction, many NPS applications designed for Slack can be integrated into the platform. By keeping track of the changing scores in a dedicated channel, say, ‘nps-response’, your team is kept in the loop to review, adjust and respond.

The Icing On The Cake: Reviews

Keeping an eye on review sites is also worth exploring in order to address customer support. We are all aware of how popular reviews have a great influence on consumers’ purchasing decisions. But scanning through every source of review is so time-consuming! Slack offers apps to fetch and check your review accounts. This is also a neat way to target specific and technical issues of the product’s unique strengths and issues to improve from a more specialized perspective.

Shirley Tran

Shirley is a Vacation Tracker occasional contributor. She’s held a few positions in communications, marketing and copywriting. When she’s not at her laptop, you can find her daydreaming about her laptop and chasing the sun while people watching.