Ever since Salesforce announced its acquisition of Slack, businesses everywhere have been looking forward to the introduction of new products from the combined brands. Salesforce is already well-known around the world for being the number one CRM solution, giving organisations the tools for better customer relationships. Similarly, Slack changed the world as we know it, by transforming the way we look at collaboration in a digital age.
The Slack-First Customer 360 offering is a new offering designed to leverage the benefits of both brands. According to the two companies, this service will make it easier than ever to connect employees, customers, and partners in a flow of seamless conversations, file-sharing, meetings, and data. Today, we’re going to be looking at what the Slack-First Customer 360 product can do.
Slack-First Customer 360: Features
Slack-first Customer 360 unifies the benefits of Slack for quick and convenient communication, with Salesforce for data and insights. The result is a simple and efficient hub where teams can connect with all the communication tools, data, and apps they need to work well anywhere.
Slack Connect Functionality built into the ecosystem means you’re not limited to communicating exclusively with your internal contacts. Teams can also securely reach out to external partners, agencies, and vendors, as well as clients, all in the Slack environment. Business leaders can automate crucial processes in Slack to make them more flexible and productive. There’s also access to a host of helpful Sales tools from Salesforce. Features include:
- Digital deal rooms: Sales teams can securely collaborate over a customer or deal in Slack. Reps can access and update records on Salesforce and meeting information within Slack, and store all files and conversations in the same place
- Automated daily briefs: Quick automated briefs in slack help reps to stay focused on what matters most to their outcomes with lists of personalised daily tasks, meetings, and priority deals
- Swarming: Users can create Swarm channels for service teams to work together on more complex and high-priority cases, bringing the right external partners and employees together to solve problems fast
- Expert finder: This service helps users automatically find the right experts to add to channels based on skills and capabilities
- Intelligent AI insights: Taken from Datorama and Marketing cloud, intelligent insights can help teams act fast and keep campaigns running smoothly
- Workflow notifications: Automatic updates sent to Slack channels when changes happen in a marketing journey
- Watchlist digests: Daily updates on selected trends and metrics. Watchlists also work alongside Subscriptions for automated dashboard updates in team channels
Slack-First Customer 360: Benefits
Slack-First Customer 360 pulls Slack and Salesforce together to build an environment specifically for sales teams to improve results. With Slack, sales teams can engage with customers and partners securely in real-time, boost rep productivity with actionable insights, and automate crucial tasks. Even better, thanks to Slack Connect, it’s easy to get the extended team involved too.
According to Salesforce, the combination of Slack and Salesforce leads to up to 15% faster sales cycles on average, and 13% more closed deals. Some of the major benefits of Slack-First Customer 360 include:
- Better team alignment: Slack-First Customer 360 combines all the data you need about your customers with crucial documents and collaborative tools. With everything in one environment, new reps can quickly join the conversation, regardless of where they might be working from. Partners, customers, and reps all have everything they need to close deals quickly. An aligned team is a more efficient one
- Improved customer experience: The Slack-First Customer 360 solution ensures business users can connect with the right people and information at the correct time, to resolve cases with speed. Service teams on Slack enable cross-company case-swarming to help with resolving problems faster. The better teams can work together to overcome customer problems and delight clients, the higher your satisfaction ratings will be
- Engaged people: Aligning apps and tools in one single pane of glass makes workforces more engaged and efficient. Slack-First Customer 360 can improve the way your teams work together, breaking down silos and improving cross-team collaboration. It’s not just beneficial to the sales team either, companies can also use Slack-First Customer 360 for marketing campaigns and customer success strategies
- Extendibility: Both Salesforce and Slack are committed to keeping their technology flexible, by offering access to various integrations and add-ons through partnerships. Salesforce Global Strategic partnerships and Slack integrations give businesses a new way to expand their team’s functionality. For instance, you can add intelligent analytics or online document signing into the Slack and Salesforce experience
- Extensive analytics: Slack-First Customer 360 helps companies to access, leverage, and use data more effectively. Tableau and Slack work together to deliver instant automated notifications to crucial members of staff during the sales journey. There’s also access to intelligent AI-driven insights from Datorama and Marketing Cloud so that you can see things like customer engagement levels at a glance
Though still in its infancy compared to other collaboration tools, the Slack-First Customer 360 ecosystem is one of the most appealing and innovative tools around for the marketing and sales teams. Whether you want to bring internal and external teams together in digital deal rooms or manage a hybrid team with automated briefs, this could be the tool for you.
Slack-First Customer 360 Review: Verdict
Salesforce and Slack are working together to give marketing teams, sales reps, and other essential professionals in the modern workforce a new level of productivity. With Slack-First Customer 360, teams can collaborate on deals in real-time, drive growth from anywhere, and achieve up to 15% faster sales cycles in the process.
Salesforce also notes that more aligned, informed, and empowered teams drive better customer experience too. Companies using access to relevant Service cloud information in Slack see an up to 11% improvement in their customer satisfaction scores. The future of Slack and Salesforce’s partnership definitely looks bright.
