Eight months after Salesforce and Slack closed Salesforce’s $28 billion acquisition of the collaborative workspace, Salesforce has announced their first product offering involving its acquisition. The Salesforce and Slack integration has resulted in a new service called the Slack-First Customer 360 Product Suite. It includes Slack-First Sales, Slack-First Marketing, Slack-First Service and Slack-First Analytics.
According to Salesforce’s Bret Taylor, president and chief operating officer at Salesforce, this new platform is “…just the beginning for the Slack-First Customer 360 – which will fundamentally reshape how work gets done by connecting employees, customers, and partners and the apps they use on a single platform.”
If that theme sounds familiar, just look to Microsoft’s approach to its productivity and collaboration platform Teams, which has also become a centralized hub for all things Microsoft 365.
Pushing everything to a single collaborative workspace where employees can do all their work is the new approach to the emerging hybrid workplace model for enterprise work.
How the Slack Integration Boosts Salesforce’s Products
Salesforce and Slack are focusing on maximum communication opportunities and information sharing as core parts of customer relationship management. By providing tools to automate work processes and robust options for connecting with external customers using Slack Connect, the customer relationship from start to finish is accessible to all interested parties.
Slack-First Sales
According to Salesforce, sales reps who use Slack close their deals 15% faster which results in time for building customer relationships and subsequently gaining more sales.
- Digital Deal Rooms: These secure spaces in Slack allow sales reps and customers to discuss and negotiate at all points in the sales cycle. Participants have access to all existing files, conversations, and data related to this relationship.
- Automated Daily Briefs: Salespeople can receive these personalized daily lists of tasks, upcoming meetings, and priority deals that can be acted upon.
Slack-First Service
Once the deal is made, service is extremely important for a customer relationship. This Salesforce and Slack integration provides real-time customer support options. Access by customer service reps to all pertinent customer relationship data is right there and accessible during support sessions. Among one of the new features focusing on using the collaborative space to foster communications and tap into company information: the Swarm Channel. When there is a complex or high-priority customer resolution issue, customer service agents can deploy this focused channel to bring in extra employees or external partners to help via the “Expert Finder” feature in the Swarm Channel.
Slack-First Marketing
This module in Slack-First Customer 360 is intended to facilitate interactions with customers in real time. According to Salesforce and Slack, this tool will allow marketing teams and partners to share a workspace for their digital brainstorming and creation for customers.
- Intelligent and AI-drive Insights: These data points from services such as Marketing Cloud and Datorama provide data directly in Slack so that all team members can adjust keep the customer relationships needs moving forward.
- Workflow Notifications: These will automatically update Slack channels when changes are made at every step on a marketing journey, such as changing images in emails or a subject line.
Slack-First Analytics
Analytics that help organizations understand the data aspect of customer relationships are critical to the success of any business. Easy and real-time access to that data is the key feature of this module of the Salesforce and Slack integration, which utilizes the Tableau analytics service.
- Automated Notifications: By providing data trend notifications to employees in Slack, those employees can take quick action to respond to any critical situations that data trends are indicating.
- Watchlist Digests: Slack will also be home to daily updates rounding up selected metrics and data.
Slack-First Customer 360 Availability
Slack-First Sales, Service and Marketing are expected to be available as a pilot program in fall 2021. Slack-First Analytics is expected to become generally available in fall 2021.
The Intelligent and Collaborative Insights from Datorama are already available to Salesforce and Slack customers.
