You might have started using Slack as your first channel to support your customers to give a timely response. As the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. Your users expect you to respond to them promptly. In the initial stages with fewer customers, you might find this easier to support. Is this a scalable model?
Well, you could have multiple support team members who engage with respective accounts or have an operations person take care of initial routing based on the request. The dependency is mostly on humans, and there might be several errors and inconsistencies.
In today’s business landscape, customer support is of utmost importance and would be a differentiator among organizations. Building a customer-centric organization requires a streamlined communication channel, keeping track of the work being done, and the most important aspect of supporting the end user to solve their problems as soon as possible.
Slack as a customer support channel
As a complementary support channel, Slack can be your best bet to provide your customers with a personalized experience. We have generally seen use cases where customers are added to the Slack channel to assist with onboarding and then for operational support based on requirements.
Customer engagement is crucial at every stage of the journey, and addressing their challenges with the right information and timelines will go a long way in building stickiness to using the tool. Using Slack can be an unconventional way of supporting your users; weigh the few benefits and drawbacks before considering adopting the solution.
What are the benefits of using Slack for support?
Real-time support
An easy-to-use platform as users might already be using Slack as their messaging channel for internal purposes. Having support at the tip of their fingertips makes them empowered to achieve more without the need for additional training or resources.
Personalized customer support
Using Slack as the customer support channel makes it feel more personalized to the customer. This makes them feel more connected, and are ensured about using the platform knowing that their support is just a Slack message away. This combined with the power of ticketing solutions can help you personalize the experience better.
Increased Customer Engagement
Higher customer engagement can be achieved by having them on Slack. You could be sharing updates related to the product, and personalized stats as this acts as an open communication channel. The right amount of engagement helps with retention, and having a conversation on Slack does not make it look like a transactional action item.
Enhanced collaboration and structured communication
As Slack might be the internal communication channel for your teams, bringing in the right person to solve the problem or give enough context on the challenge being faced becomes smoother. Coupled with the use of ticketing solutions there is increased visibility of the work being done and how a particular problem is being prioritized.
What are the drawbacks of using Slack for support?
Not a scalable solution
In the early stages, it might be easier and quicker for you to support using Slack, but as you grow and your customer base increases using Slack as a support channel might be chaotic. A lot of information if not synced rightly with a different knowledge base solution can be lost and the desired level of support cannot be achieved.
Data scattering
You might be in touch with your users in several different channels, and bringing them on a unified platform becomes a challenge without the right tool. When your users are facing a challenge when working on your platform, ideally they should be finding support in-app rather than switching windows and adding screenshots of the problems they are experiencing on a different tool.
Increased complexity
For solving complex issues, you might require several team members to actively work together, and having customer conversations siloed in a Slack environment is not the best solution. From agent hand-offs to assigning the right technical team using Slack becomes operational heavy with mundane repetitive tasks.
Streamline Support with Slack and DevRev Integration
Providing excellent customer service is crucial for business growth and success these days. However, juggling conversations across multiple channels like email, chat, and tickets makes it challenging for support teams to stay focused. Agents struggle with constantly switching contexts and tracking the progress of issues.
This integration enables users to create, monitor, and collaborate on support tickets directly within Slack. You choose to provide support to your customers on channels that you find suitable, and DevRev provides you with the platform to manage them on a single workspace.
Here’s how the capabilities of this integration help streamline customer conversations:
Tracking customer conversations
Customer conversations either on Slack or DevRev are always kept on track and in sync. The ability to link Slack conversations to DevRev tickets ensures that important customer information is not lost. Agents get full context from past messages as they pick up ongoing tickets. They could even summarize the entire conversation with the click of a button.
Create tickets automatically
Support staff can open new tickets right from active Slack channel conversations through the actions menu without switching windows. While the ticket is created, the conversation on Slack is automatically linked to the ticket to provide complete context regarding the challenge faced by your user.
Preview of the ticket on Slack
Whenever a DevRev ticket link gets shared on Slack, users see a snippet previewing key ticket details like title, status, owner, etc. that gives a single view of the ticket details so that there is no information lost during the chat and customers know if the right problem is being solved and who to get in touch with for the next steps.
Automatic information sync
Bidirectional sync allows any update from the DevRev side like status changes, assignee changes, etc. to be automatically updated on Slack so that there is information symmetry across the platforms as this becomes a challenge in a few cases.
Private and Public Views on Slack channel
Within Slack users can use the slash command to get more information about a particular ticket for a personal use case within the channel as well as create a view for others on the channel as well.
By allowing teams to manage conversations across the two platforms seamlessly, this integration eliminates the need for constant context-switching. It prevents duplication of efforts while keeping both customers and team members up-to-date through the communication channel they each prefer. This smart collaboration empowers agents to provide timely and consistent support.
While you get started on using Slack after considering the pros and cons highlighted above, bringing in the voice of your customers on a single platform for everyone on the team becomes crucial. At DevRev, helping you build customer-centric companies where your users suggest the direction you take based on relevant data is of utmost importance.
Get started on using the platform by integrating Slack with DevRev to see the magic happen. If you are looking for installation support you could refer to the Slack Documentation or feel free to get in touch with our team for further assistance here.
