Internal Account Collaboration Via Slack
If you don’t have a Slack channel set up for every customer… you’re missing out on a key collaboration opportunity.
Keeping an account team rowing in the same direction is a bit like herding cats.
You have to think about the Account Executive, the Professional Services Consultant, the Support Agent, the Customer Success Manager, the Product Manager, the Finance team and more…. There are a lot of hands in making a customer successful.
That begs the questions…
How do you keep the account team up to date?
How do you prep before a meeting?
How do you escalate to the entirety of the account team?
How do you access content relevant to the customer’s day-to-day?
This issue is exacerbated with tooling across teams. While your CSMs might be in Totango, your Sales reps in Salesforce, your Support Agents in Zendesk, your Professional Services folks in FinancialForce, your product team in Jira, etc… Turning to a department-specific tool for “collaboration” has never worked (Does anyone actually use SFDC Chatter?).
You need a business application that brings all of these siloed applications together for quick communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. I’ve found tremendous collaborative success with Slack. Creating a dedicated Slack channel for every customer can greatly improve the collaboration of any account team. While this approach is relatively new, this will be the norm in 2 years time. Guarantee it. If you’re a SaaS business, you can’t afford not to.
Here are the answers to common questions I receive when others hear about this Customer Success approach.
“What about lower ACV customers? You’d make a Slack channel for them?”
Having a single channel dedicated to each of your customers can make a lot of sense when quickly trying to align work streams across departments, and tools. This needs to fit into your broader segmentation strategy. Setting up a customer slack channel for a $1,000 ARR customer might just not make sense. However, for anyone who’s spending in your Mid-Market or Enterprise Segment, a dedicated slack channel is warranted. Another rule of thumb to consider is how many people need to see the information about that customer. If the answer is >2 you should consider creating a dedicated channel.
“How do you keep customer channels differentiated from internal company channels?”
It’s all about the naming convention! We keep our customer channels organized with a consistent naming convention. Append something to the beginning of the channel. That way everyone in the company knows that a channel with “CS” or an “Account” appended to the front of the channel is a customer focused channel.
example: #account-hooli or #cs-hooli
“Having a slack channel per customer seems like it would be messy?”
That’s where proper channel organization comes into play. Leveraging stars, and hiding channels is one of the Slack features that makes this possible. I also recommend archiving channels when you are done using them (IE - if a customer churns).
“You would include customers in these Slack channels?”
Slack offers the ability to include external guests to channels, but I’d caution leveraging this approach. I’ve seen this model work for top tier, strategic customers where real-time collaboration is critical to a customer’s success, but these are some items to consider if you’re going to leverage this approach:
Security and privacy compliance
Response time SLAs
CSM bandwidth for slack message response
Inability to track customer slack messages when compared to your CRM or support tool (Zendesk, for example)
If expectations aren't managed appropriately, the CSM is pigeon-holed as a purely support function
If you’re evaluating adding customers directly into your slack instance, be sure to consider the items above and make sure the collaboration model works for you, your customers, and your security and privacy teams.
“Manually creating Slack channels seems like a lot of work, how do you create hundreds or thousands of Customer slack channels programmatically?”
That’s where tools like Tray or Zapier come in. A bit of systems integration can create create a new channel when a certain trigger is reached (Like a Salesforce opportunity stage being move to “Closed, won”)
“What about all the content about that customer?
Slack has a great feature that helps with content organization — the ability to Pin Content to a slack channel. Think about your pinned content as the “Bookmarks” for the channel’s focus — which is your customer. I’ve seen the following typically pinned in customer Slack Channels:
Customer Notes Document
Customer Success Plan
Relevant Dashboards
CRM Account Page
The above is a sample list, and we’ve seen many more critical elements pinned to channels with the intent of serving customers.
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If we missed a question you have about leveraging Slack for Customer Success, Let us know!
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