In June, Salesforce Channels launched, enabling businesses to set up Slack channels that connect real-time conversations with CRM records.
As such, teams can collaborate with full visibility into CRM data, no matter if they’re working in Slack or Salesforce.
The move flew under the radar, given all the major Agentforce announcements, including the launch of Agentforce 3. Yet, it’s a significant step in converging CRM and UCaaS solutions and enabling a more customer-centric enterprise.
Indeed, with Salesforce Channels being bi-directional and fully accessible in both Slack and Salesforce, teams can break down silos and stay aligned without switching apps.
As Alana Cutler, Snr. Director of Product Management at Salesforce, summarized during a webinar:
Salesforce Channels let teams work where they’re most productive, in Slack or Salesforce, without losing context or momentum.
Here are three examples of how Salesforce and Slack customers could benefit from Channels.
1. Ensuring Sales and Billing Alignment
Consider a scenario where a major deal expansion has stalled due to a billing issue. The finance team doesn’t use Salesforce but needs to get involved. In this case, the business could set up an “opportunity channel” where sales, service, and finance collaborate in one Slack thread linked directly to the CRM record. That’s possible, even if finance doesn’t have Salesforce licenses.
2. Marketing Campaign Troubleshooting
Imagine an email campaign that isn’t converting, and the marketing team suspects a technical error. They reach out to engineering for help. Instead of switching tools, they can reach out from within Salesforce and loop in colleagues working on Slack. Engineers can even feed updates from other tools into the channel using automations, keeping everyone aligned and solving problems faster.
3. Contact Center Swarming
One final use case to consider is in customer service. Consider a case that still needs a resolution, but the support agent doesn’t have the knowledge to solve it. In these scenarios, they could tag an employee in a different department in a Slack thread, through Service Cloud, and loop them in. From there, they can view the case and help resolve the issue without leaving Slack.
The Next Step: Building a Customer Engagement Center
“Customer Engagement Center” is a term that gets banded around a lot. However, to deliver a true Customer Engagement Center, everything needs to work together: CRM, CCaaS, and UCaaS.
When this happens, businesses can put customers at the center and wrap technology around them to create seamless experiences. However, “seamless” is still very hard to achieve.
Salesforce Channels take businesses one step closer, breaking down silos that obscure customer-facing functions from the broader business.
Yet, there’s still work to be done, especially from a CCaaS-CRM perspective.
Thankfully, Salesforce is making moves here, launching a “Bring Your Own CCaaS” program late last year, which allows its contact center partners to embed channels within Service Cloud.
AWS, Genesys, and Five9 are key CCaaS partners. Yet, others, like NiCE, Google, and UJET, are taking a different approach. Instead, they’re accepting Service Cloud – and alternative CRM systems – as the single source of truth, pushing everything back into the system. That includes call details, transcripts, recordings, and more.
Nevertheless, regardless of the approach, both tactics take Salesforce Service Cloud from a leading customer support CRM to a true Customer Engagement Center.
