9 Tricks on how to use Slack for Customer Support

published on 27 May 2022

Introduction

As technology has progressed, so has the means teams communicate at work. From email groups to Skype conversations, teams have been attempting to interact with one another to complete projects and provide support to their clients. It is essential to link your support operations with your communication platform for close collaboration and resolution. 

Modern businesses have already begun to use Slack for customer support. Working with various teams on Slack facilitates sharing vital feedback from customers with those responsible for planning, developing, and marketing your organization's products or services. 

Slack is intended to link teams and organize the entire business to provide excellent customer service. As a result, faster ticket resolutions, better agent productivity, higher client satisfaction scores, and an improved customer experience are achieved.

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The surge in the popularity of Slack

Slack is a cloud-based collaboration and communication tool taking the business world by storm. According to Slack's usage stats, the influx of new clients caused Slack's demand to soar to almost one billion usage minutes every day.

It integrates with the service cloud to bring customer support teams a collaboration solution where they can access important customer information, critical data, and cross-functional partners for faster resolutions.

Tips and tools for customer support on Slack

Communication tools for support teams must meet a distinct set of requirements. They collect and keep information about the client and the product to assist customers. They are most likely to be working 24/7. Thus they must also be able to communicate with other shifts efficiently.

The tips below will expand your Slack approach beyond a single channel and make it more effective. Know how to identify information more quickly, record knowledge more effectively, and collaborate with the Slack techniques for support teams.

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1. Integrate with your CRM and Project Management Solutions

Connectivity is the foundation of Slack's capacity to facilitate team organization. It has transformed into a comprehensive collaboration platform with more than a hundred integrations in the Customer Relationship Management and Project Management space. 

Using tools to manage your customers, product roadmap, or incoming calls, you can integrate Slack to bring relevant information into Slack channels. Many tools allow you to act on alerts to always be up to date.

2. Incorporate the Help Desk

Incorporating your contact center with Slack is your best bet if you need to trace and resolve issues in a very particular manner. The help desk allows for improved issue tracking, management, and reporting because it is developed for customer assistance. With Slack, your team members are alerted of new tickets and may update them within the platform.

By integrating some examples of customer support software with Slack, your team may send fast notifications regarding new tickets, closure, SLA violations, etc. This can significantly shorten your response time. The Slack App Directory contains a multitude of help desk connections that support teams may use to provide excellent customer service.

3. Embed Live Chat

According to the research The State of Chat in Retail 2021 by Forrester, over 30% of users expect live chat on a company's website. To disregard live chat is to ignore a significant percentage of your consumers' expectations, resulting in a subpar eCommerce shopping experience and, eventually, less revenue.

The good news is numerous prominent live chat platforms integrate with Slack, allowing you to manage customer inquiries on the platform. Consider a specialized Slack live chat solution, such as SignalZen, Social Intents, or Chatlio, to take advantage of Slack's benefits to your support employees.

Once Slack live chat integration works, choose a channel to deliver requests to. Choose a private channel for the customer support team if possible. With this, other team members will not be compelled to interrupt your support and prevent them from performing their duties.

4. Include Live Chat Widget

You must guarantee that your live chat snippet is shown on the website. This is how your clients will communicate with you. Embed Slack into a website by using SignalZen, Chatlio, or Social Intents, by utilizing the Bigcommerce, WordPress, Shopify, or Wix-specific plugins.

5. Integrate Messaging Tools

Integrating customer support software into Slack may save time whenever customers ask for assistance or provide feedback through your organization's social media accounts, website contact forms, emails, phone calls, and voicemails from your voice-over IP. This eliminates the requirement to switch between applications without leaving Slack. 

Customer messaging applications and chatbots may be routed through Slack and managed on a single platform. Depending on the app's functionality, you will not have to sacrifice care quality. It maintains the capacity to communicate directly with customers.

6. Assist clients with an AI-driven knowledge base

According to the article AI in a Post-COVID-19 World released by The AI Journal, 74% of executives predict that artificial intelligence will help make business operations more efficient.

With Slack, the customer service team can access a shared knowledge base without switching between several windows. Work on Slack occurs in channels that house all messages and data associated with a particular team or topic. As teams collaborate to address difficult situations, a searchable knowledge base build.

The predictive search feature uses AI to display the most pertinent and valuable content for resolving issues, such as knowledge base entries, recorded files, and previously resolved Slack support ticket. Over time, machine learning and AI learn the kinds of queries your service team conducts to deliver the most useful information.

7. Create a Slack Community

Companies can develop free Slack communities for the public. Dedicated communities are an excellent way for consumers to assist one another or your team to assist those with urgent issues. The basic concept is straightforward: every new customer is encouraged to join a Slack community where corporate reps and other customers discuss the product.

8. Generate Shared Channels

Shared channels permit two distinct organizations to collaborate in a Slack channel from their workspaces. If your clients are from other businesses, you can bring representatives from both businesses together to help address problems.

With access to the conversation history, everyone on your team and your partner company may stay abreast of the most recent developments. Additionally, Slack channels help reduce context shifts between teams. Teams from different firms can communicate via posts, phone calls, and meetings using a unified collaboration solution.

Many of the most progressive B2B organizations use a superior strategy to assist their VIP clients. Using Slack Connect, they are engaging with valuable clients through shared channels, where they can deliver white-glove customer care by fostering more genuine relationships, obtaining feedback on the product, and resolving issues. These businesses experience higher customer growth and reduced churn, resulting in a quantifiable organization-wide increase.

9. A platform for Feedback and Reward Systems

Excellent internal support is insufficient without feedback and recognition. Slack can interface with survey platforms to send survey replies to a selected Slack channel. By rewarding support agents using integrations, a culture of appreciation is established.

Delivering Excellent Customer Support Through Slack Integration

Embracing all of Slack's powerful capabilities, including the value of Slack live chat, enables your customer service team to be even more effective. By using Slack for customer support and carefully organizing conversations, information may be preserved and more readily accessible by the entire organization.

Slack for customer support increases the value of your support products by filling the gap between services and the rest of your organization. Instead of switching between systems and searching for a suitable specialist, the customer support team concentrates on what truly matters: your customers.

We hope this blog post gives you a clear idea of why it is worth using Slack for Customer Support. Find more in-depth instructions on how to setup this solution here.

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