Shared Slack/Teams channels with your customers

Unmukt Unmukt

Hi All,

Wanted your opinion on whether your companies use shared slack/teams channels with your customers in order to interact and collaborate together?
In particular, I was interested in the below:
- Do you use shared slack / teams with your customers?
- What % of your customers are on shared slack/teams?
- What are the advantages of shared slack/teams wrt CS?
- What are the disadvantages of shared slack with your customer?
- Overall stance.

Thank you in advance - I am just beginning in this journey, and your inputs are worth their weight in gold.

Patrick Ruster

- Do you use shared slack / teams with your customers? YES

- What % of your customers are on shared slack/teams? 30%

- What are the advantages of shared slack/teams wrt CS? Direct line of communication between customer and team. For quick updates/fixes/requests, slack is superior to email and phone (since no one answers anyway). Being able to chat with a customer in slack can deepen the relationship. 

- What are the disadvantages of shared slack with your customer? Direct line of communication between customer and team. It can create the expectation of the team being always on/immediate availability. Being able to chat directly with a customer can inject a strange component into the relationship, a sort of casual-ness... I'm ALL ABOUT relating to customers above and beyond just the topic of work, but this opens the door for some possible issues. 

- Overall stance. Eh. If slack is the preferred medium for the customer, and I suspect they aren't going to be psychos blowing the team up with all manner of URGENT requests, I'm ok with it. I realize that was a roller coaster of an answer, but I think it sums up my thoughts... Its a fine tool if not abused. 

Has anyone written a guide to Slack Connect etiquette? How to/not to communicate with clients on Slack? Would be interesting to see if anyone has put any parameters in place around their teams use of the tool. I

Piyush Wason

In particular we at Condeco do not use private slack channels with the customers, but I have heard from other community leaders that they are putting this in practice to have the customer engaged regularly. 

Mostly top tier customers are given that benefit and privilege and if I say, there's hardly 15% of the total customer base who gets to communicate with our CS teams.

Advantages:

Customer engagement is one of the most important aspect to have the customer in your closest proximity and giving them ability to reach out quickly in need.
White Glove service - Your top tier customers would not want to send long emails or log cases and they want quick responses, slack is the way to communicate with them.
Slack is a powerful tool if used correctly and automations in slack can help the CS teams and the customer both with documentation and self help.

Disadvantages:

Customer Expectations: If you do not have guidelines on slack, your CS team would be running with headless chickens as the customer would not stop the queries and CS team should not be giving support to the customers.

It also depends on how you leverage the customer support team on slack with the customers. Its super efficient, but again your teams should be on toes if the expectations are set to have the response been given promptly. Otherwise, there are chat bots and other mediums which you should use.

As a customer, I would be super thrilled to get someone doing all the dirty work for me via slack, but as a CS leader, I know my team would be at its wits end if the expectations are not set correctly. 

It is very important to prepare the guidelines, and use automations to help the customer, so you do not have to line up your support or success teams resolving queries. 

Doug Havlik

We have used it during a feature beta with about 5 of our 80 customer companies. I would say it worked fine.

Shankar Ganapathy

We have seen high adoption of our slack connect integration for our customer collaboration platform. Our Product adoption by customer's customer along with our customers' average time to resolution on issues, questions, and other things have been drastically reduced.

Shankar Ganapathy
Cofounder
BuyerAssist.io