Blog

Salesforce rolls out Slack Integration!

08/27/2021

Salesforce introduces the "Slack-First Customer 360," its new vision for sales, service and marketing in the work-anywhere world of the Vaccine Economy, founded on its $28 billion acquisition of messaging platform Slack, which closed last month. Today's launch contains no new products as such, but there are several new pre-configured integrations, workflows and an updated Salesforce for Slack app designed to help Salesforce customers quickly get up-to-speed in their use of Slack to streamline how they work. More important is the work of persuading long-term Salesforce users to learn to work in Slack rather than the familiar Salesforce environment.

The rationale for bringing Slack and Salesforce together is that Salesforce now finds themselves in a much more digitally connected world, which demands a new approach to how sales teams work. Salesforce believes that adding Slack as a shared front-end to access Salesforce and other functionality will help teams work better. It quotes research carried out for Slack by Forrester Consulting that shows sales reps who use Slack typically experience sales cycles that are 15% faster, and that service teams using Slack achieve an 11% improvement in customer satisfaction scores. Slack's own customer tracking survey finds that three-quarters (76%) of marketers agree that Slack improves the speed of their decision making.

New capabilities for digital sales, service and marketing

The full list of pre-configured functions announced are as follows:

1) Digital deal rooms that provide a shared channel for sales teams to collaborate on a customer or deal cycle, with the ability to access and update Salesforce records and meeting information directly from Slack. External partners and customers can be invited to join the channel as needed for faster interactions.

2) Automated daily briefs in Slack that give sales reps a personalized daily list of tasks, meetings and priority deals for action.

3) Integration with Tableau to provide automated notifications when data changes, such as when a sales pipeline or average service response time dips below a specified threshold. Team channels can also subscribe to specific Tableau dashboards to bring new data and insights into Slack, or set up watchlist digests which provide a daily update on selected metrics and trends.

4) Swarming, where a dedicated Slack channel is instantly created to allow service teams to collaborate on complex and high-priority cases, bringing in the right contacts, both internal and external, to achieve rapid resolution. To quickly identify the best experts to add to a swarm channel, a new Expert Finder draws on Salesforce Einstein recommendations to automatically analyze factors such as availability, capacity, and skills and make suggestions.

5) Instant sharing of AI-driven insights from Marketing Cloud and Datorama, such as engagement being lower than expected directly in Slack, where marketing teams can take rapid action to keep campaigns on track.

Automated workflow notifications in Slack when changes are made to a marketing journey. For example a change to a headline to prompt rapid review, discussion and approval.

IdeaHelix is a Salesforce Certified Silver Partner and a vlocity partner with Certified Vlocity Technical Architects. Reach out to us for more details by following us on (Facebook) or send us a note fromideahelix.com or at info@ideahelix.com