Email is dead. Slack did to email, what email did to physical mail—at least in the business world. The pandemic put some nails in that coffin when it forced most businesses to move their offices to the cloud.
This 10-minute read will give you:
- An overview of what Slack is, and why it’s as exciting as it is.
- 10 reasons why your business can benefit from the Salesforce Slack synergy.
- 7 tangible benefits that integrating Slack with Salesforce will bring for you.
- Confidence that Slack can handle your business case perfectly.
What is Slack?
You’ve seen the slogans: ‘Slack is where work happens’; ‘Slack is where the future works’. It simplifies and streamlines the foundation of every single business in the world—communication. It’s the heart and brain of the workplace, a digital HQ for all messaging, tools and files.
Is that it? Just a messenger for direct messaging and group chats? Why was Slack bought for $27.7bn? Is a sleek, intuitive UI with a vibrant color scheme and emojis everywhere really worth that much?
Maybe, maybe not—but having something that Microsoft, Apple, IBM or Sun didn’t have—could be worth that much. None of the older players in the market had anything comparable, in functionality, in design and in general, really.
Salesforce Slack Combo: The #1 CRM & #1 Digital HQ combined
Salesforce lets your marketing, sales, commerce, service, IT and other miscellaneous teams work together from anywhere—it’s already the best solution to create a single source of truth for your business.
Now, integrating Slack adds a single platform to inter-connect everyone and communicate effectively—not just be managed from above by you in the CRM. Let’s see why companies like IBM choose to use Slack instead of something like Microsoft Teams, for all of their 350 thousand employees.
10 Reasons To Integrate Slack and Salesforce
The resulting ecosystem creates the most modern workplace possible, creating a community and effective collaboration in teams that could be scattered all over the world. So, what are the benefits?
1. Slack and Service Cloud connect seamlessly
The Salesforce for Slack app supports custom objects in both Sales & Service clouds. A quick ‘/salesforce’ search allows quick browsing of all Salesforce objects, both standard and custom, without flicking and clicking back and forward.
The employees are connected right to the brain—right from the app that they will use to communicate what they’ve just found out.
2. Simplify the working day
Jumping between systems and trying to share records across, copy, paste—all that clicking adds up. Lack of integration steals productivity, few seconds at a time, as well as being annoying in its repetitive and sub-optimal nature.
The ability to access the whole Salesforce brain right from Slack commands liberates that productivity, a few seconds at a time. With time, accessing and sharing Salesforce records is second nature.
3. Slack Salesforce back—the two way street
It works the other way, too. Slack conversations can be attached to a Salesforce record, so any significant developments or important conversations can be viewed along with every account in Salesforce. No need for sending status updates by email or otherwise, it’s already there-and never gets lost.
The instant integration of Slack with Salesforce allows for faster queries and collaboration in reference to existing Salesforce entries, and then, when the case is solved, updating the Salesforce record afterwards.
4. Reduce email use
Emails are too formal for today’s dynamic work environment. Leave email to the stiffs in corporations that pretend to work more than they actually work. Skip the feigned politeness, and get right to the point of what needs to be done with a quick message.
Once again, those seconds and minutes add up. ‘Quick questions’ become really quick. An issue that needs to be elevated to a higher level doesn’t have to be an email starting and ending with needless formalities. It doesn’t get lost between the Whole Foods newsletter and your UberEats receipt.
The whole conversation history is instantly available, instead of 30 different chains of forwarded, CC’d and replies to emails.
5. Push notifications, instead of pushing paper
A fast push notification with the gist of the message will appear across any device your addressee uses Slack on. Images, attachments—just like any other social media. By moving workplace communication closer towards the informal model of social media—engagement grows.
The instinctive modern nature of endless chatting, constant notifications and conversation threads is captured entirely by Slack, and using it is already second nature to the employees in your teams. And now it’s integrated right into Salesforce—The distance between the brain of the company and the employee is cut down more than ever before.
6. Easy and fast file access
The fast and permanent nature of sending files with Slack makes it easy to share with some or all teammates, and makes it easy if you need to come back and refer to it again. If you shared it once, there is no need to ever send it again—just @ the new recipient—done.
7. Increase interconnectedness while controlling access levels
The ability to split all workflows and teams into channels allows for building a multiverse of custom approaches to specific situations. Channels could be allocated to a task, a team, a category, or any other criteria. Channels can be public or private, making access levels easy to manage.
There are no needs for separate email threads with different combinations of colleagues. A channel will handle that from now, forever. Those discussions can be further organized into threads, so that the overall chat view isn’t cluttered. Users can follow or unfollow threads to stay up-to-date with new events, or to de-clutter their communication stream.
Salesforce Slack integration allows for attaching any conversation instantly to a Salesforce record, allowing issues to be resolved efficiently and with haste.
8. Automate, automate, automate
Slack has the ability to build customized bots to converse and service through the chat feature. What’s more, the robots can be set to submit automatic updates, monitor metrics such as expenditure, and find issues and inconsistencies automatically. Apart from a million other things.
Your Salesforce and Slack combo can benefit greatly—a customer or a fresh hire can work with a bot to try and find a common solution—the details of which are automatically attached to your Salesforce records. Salesforce’s AI platform Einstein can intelligently troubleshoot and forward cases.
9. Building workflow approvals
Approvals for all kinds of matters: holiday time, expenses, as well as all kinds of operations and projects—are now built in Slack and automatically updated in the Salesforce Record. Just another process simplified and streamlined by Slack and Salesforce integration.
10. Quote management
When you send a big proposal, you may end up on the edge of your seat, checking over and over if it has been approved or needs amendments. Now, it comes automatically to your Slack inbox—if it’s not there, nothing has happened yet—no need to waste time checking.
Thanks to the Slack Salesforce integration, after receiving these alerts, you can right away respond, and update the relevant CRM records to reflect the new situation.
Get started with Salesforce for Slack.
5 Benefits of Slack Salesforce Integration for Your Company
That seems like a lot of features, optimizations, and corners cut. But what does it mean for your company at large? What are the actually tangible benefits of using this solution?
1. Salesforce and Slack increases real-time collaboration among employees
Community and camaraderie organically sprout when a progress update can be confirmed with an emoji, or when everyone is on home office and someone shares a picture of their cat sitting on their keyboard.
Slack relaxes the atmosphere. At the same time, it’s still connected to the Salesforce brain. Work seems more intuitive and fun, and collaboration is easier, faster and more productive. Pieces gel, and cogs become oiled when Slack is working.
2. Slack and Salesforce increase flexibility dramatically
Now, the work is ready and at the fingertips at all times. Launching up Slack is all you need to do. That gives the employees the flexibility to work how they work best—in their own way or time. By giving more leeway to the employees, productivity and effectiveness increase.
3. As Salesforce and Slack increase productivity, customer satisfaction does too
The increased engagement and ease of work for your employees translates directly to an improved customer experience. The well-gelled team is quicker in responding to customer queries, they access better information faster and can respond to customers appropriately.
The issues and cases are solved and closed promptly, the waits are short, and the atmosphere is less stiff and more welcoming.
4. Reduce unnecessary work—Salesforce and Slack integration simply saves money
All those seconds add up. If in a company of 1,000, every employee saved 1 MINUTE every working day for a year, 4350 hours are saved. You can multiply that by the average rate at your company yourself. You can imagine the benefits IBM is getting by rolling out Slack to 350,000 employees.
5. The saved time can be productively spent
Of course, the example 4350 hours is just a saving. That time can now be allocated more fruitfully. What can your company do with 4350 hours? How many leads can you chase up, how many sales can you close? How many projects can be completed in that time?
How integrating Slack and Salesforce usually works
DTCForce is constantly tasked with making sure the Slack Salesforce instance works perfectly and seamlessly—after all, most of our clients use it now. We create the connections and objects exactly to the customers’ brief using the Slack API.
We usually configure a basic VF page to construct an authentication page, so a new user can register and configure their instance in the Slack channel. Then the work moves onto synchronizing Contacts, Tasks, and other objects, and sharing them amongst the specific Slack channels.
After making sure all fields link and work seamlessly and can be accessed by the users with the right permissions, the Slack Salesforce integration is set up to maximize the potential of your business.
It’s a quick job and a negligible cost for the sheer amount and volume of benefits it brings.
Do you still have questions about Salesforce Slack integration? If you’d like to find out how quickly and easily we can set up Slack and Salesforce to work for your business case, get in touch for a quick chat.
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