The rise of Slack for customer support & customer success

Slack, along with messaging apps such as WhatsApp, have catalyzed a huge transition in the way people interact. Email now feels slow, inflexible and less collaborative than products like Slack and the majority of companies have now transitioned to using a chat based messaging platform such as Slack, Teams or Discord for internal communication.

But Slack isn’t just a tool for internal communication. In 2020, Slack launched Slack Connect, which allows a shared Slack channel between two companies. This allows for an ongoing, secure conversation between two teams which can be a huge asset during onboarding, for providing customer support and for customer success. Over 80% of fortune 500 companies now use Slack Connect.

Benefits of using Slack for customer support and customer success

There are a number of advantages of using Slack Connect with prospects and clients, such as: 

• 4x faster deal cycles for sales teams: keeping up momentum, having the right team members in the chat and an open channel of communication can dramatically improve deal cycles.
• 2x faster close in company acquisition for a business development team: continuous chat allows for quicker rapport building and more engaged prospects.
• 64% reduction in support tickets: support requests that previously would have been sent in via different chats, calls, emails and support tickets can now easily be addressed straight to the right team member in Slack. 
• Improved customer satisfaction: tools such as Slack enable your team to have a more personal and engaged dialog with customers. Customers also know exactly how to get hold of you, reducing the effort they need to exert. 
• Faster response times: since teams use Slack for internal communication, all team members are in Slack all day, which means faster response times for customers.  
• Improved visibility: team leads and management across departments have visibility across client communications, opposed to having questions and information scattered across multiple platforms or support tickets.
• Improved collaboration: it’s simple to loop the right team member into the conversation in real-time with Slack Connect.
• Higher response rates: customers using Slack Connect are much more likely to see and engage with your company communications vs email. 

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“Today’s fastest growing companies are using tools like Slack Connect for customer support and success to stay closer to their customers, reduce onboarding times and the number of support tickets”

Challenges of using Slack for customer support and success

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Despite the many benefits of using Slack to onboard, support and scale customers it’s really hard to scale! This is often the reason why, as companies grow, they start forcing their customers to use an old-school ticketing system like Zendesk. 

So why are these companies having to force their customers to change behaviour, if engagement over Slack has so many benefits for a company and customers?

• Noisy and unmanageable: once teams need to manage more than around 10-20 Slack Connect channels it becomes difficult to keep up to date with what’s going on. Things easily start to fall through the cracks and it’s hard to remember to follow up with customers. 
• Lack of analytics: platforms like Slack, don’t have SLA tracking, tagging, resolution times or feedback scores that companies need when managing their customer support and engagement operations.
• Inefficiency: unless you’re keeping and eye on each channel and staying up to date with messages it’s very easy to waste a huge amount of time trying to get up to speed on the context of a user’s question/request. 
• No automations: customer support teams benefit hugely from automations such as template answers, AI suggestions and automatic triaging that isn’t possible natively in Slack.
• Limited and fragmented integrations: No integrations into other workflow tools or a companies database - support, sales, product, marketing, dev and success teams all rely on different tools such as workflow management (E.g. Jira, Linear or Github) or CRMs (e.g. Hubspot) to get their work done. They are integral to any success and support system to provide customer context, log interactions and streamline workflows but these tools are expensive and time consuming to integrate.
• No bulk messaging: there’s no easy way to automatically message users about an outage or a new feature or to see any analytics around these actions. 

How to easily scale customer support and customer success on Slack

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Introducing Mava. Mava is a support and success tool that natively integrates with all of your customer communication channels (Slack, email, web chat, Discord & Telegram) allowing your team to scale support and success across group & private chats.

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With Mava it’s easy to close the loop with your prospects and customers, so you never forget to follow up again. Monitoring multiple channels becomes simple with all communications streamlined, auto-summarised and triaged so your team can easily prioritise. Mava enables clear accountability with user assignment and allows your team to reply either from Mava’s powerful shared inbox or directly from platforms such as Slack, with a real-time two-way sync. Leverage powerful automations and Mava’s analytics dashboard to easily track all interactions and key support metrics such as response times and SLAs.

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Mava integrates into all of your existing tools, such as your CRM or Issue trackers so you don’t need to build any custom integrations.

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Moreover, Mava enables you to automatically bulk message your users over Slack Connect improving engagement and response rates. Whether it’s a new feature launch or service announcement, Mava’s got you covered. 

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Conclusion

Providing a white glove onboarding, support and success experience is a powerful way for companies to foster brand loyalty, improve retention and customer lifetime value.  However, as companies grow, channels that work best for delivering such an experience, such as Slack, become unmanageable. The first response is often to force customers down an old fashioned ticket route, degrading the customer experience and removing that personal touch. 

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A tool like Mava empowers companies to keep a close relationship with customers at scale, across group communication channels such as Slack Connect, with a host of powerful features. It’s how modern teams should be doing support and success.

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Book a demo today to learn more about how Mava can supercharge your team's support and success via Slack.