Key Takeaways
Slack is more than just a place to talk: it’s a place to connect your service teams to your customers. If you haven’t tried Slack for your small business service team, now is the time. And with the right customer relationship management (CRM) tool, like Salesforce, and a centralized collaboration tool like Slack, you have a powerful customer experience (CX) booster for smaller teams, unifying service, sales, marketing, and commerce in one beautiful business hub.
Let’s see what else Slack can do for your customers.
Slack for customer service: What’s the connection?
For small and medium businesses (SMBs), Slack is the center of productivity, helping teams stay organized, save time, and get more done. As part of the Salesforce family, Slack helps growing businesses efficiently bring together people, information, and tools. “Slack is really the spine of our team,” says Cloudfit CEO and Co-Founder Kristian Phillips. His team onboarded Slack and Starter Suite to organize team communications – read the full customer story here.
Centralize your support
Slack uses channels to organize work by topic, providing instant context for new teammates. Businesses can manage customer relationships and track updates directly within Slack, structuring data without messy spreadsheets or switching tabs. Teams can also organize key information in channels and DMs using a canvas, and artificial intelligence (AI) search helps find past conversations and answers quickly.
Work smarter with automation and AI
Businesses can automate busywork using no-code workflows, using existing templates or creating their own from scratch, saving valuable time. For customer service, this might be an automated approval from a higher-up or a request for subject matter expertise. This centralization means Slack effectively replaces emails and integrates with other tools, as one shared productivity platform.
Boost team productivity with Salesforce
Delivering five-star customer service
Service solutions help small businesses scale, fuel service efficiency, and keep customers happy by ensuring support is available whenever and wherever they need it. Salesforce is designed as a simple CRM suite offering seamless customer service for small teams.
Accelerate issue resolution
To keep customers happy and resolve cases faster, businesses must unify their teams to support customers across every channel. By having a 360-degree view of every customer, agents can see every interaction in a chronological timeline, regardless of the channel, allowing for faster and more personalized support.
Intelligent automation, including AI agents, plays a key role in driving service efficiency. Chatbots can automate routine requests, guide customers through next steps, or route them to the appropriate agent, thereby speeding up issue resolution. Insights about customer service issues can be shared and added to a knowledge base, which shortens case resolution time and contributes to agent happiness.
Boost team productivity with Slack
Bring together your team, your customers, and your tools to help take your business to the next level with Slack — it’s where business gets done.
Encourage customers and agents to self-serve
One powerful way to reduce costs is by helping customers help themselves. Slack and service teams together allow businesses to easily embed knowledge articles and give customers access to important data through a branded Help Center. A service portal showcases the knowledge base and offers case management so customers can get answers anytime, allowing agents to focus on solving more complex issues. Help articles and free online learning platforms, like Trailhead, can provide real-time answers to deflect cases and cut operational costs.
Businesses can also monitor service metrics and track key performance indicators (KPIs) using customizable reports and dashboards, which provide high-level visibility and detailed information on the performance of the customer engagement center.
Build a loyal customer base with smarter, faster service solutions.
Unifying your business with Slack
Slack and service solutions operate best when integrated with a core CRM that covers the entire business portfolio. Starter Suite includes sales, marketing, service, commerce, and Slack, designed as the simple CRM suite for small business. For companies looking to scale, Pro Suite offers a flexible CRM suite with advanced capabilities across sales, marketing, service, commerce, and team collaboration.
How Slack can help across all customer service touch points:
- Seamlessly share customer context (like case history or lead status) with sales teams via dedicated Slack channels for faster follow-up and personalized outreach. Automate alerts in Slack when a service case is closed, prompting Sales to check in with the customer.
- Create a dedicated Slack channel to rapidly share customer feedback and service trends with the marketing team to inform campaigns and content strategy. Use Slack to collaborate instantly on responding to service issues posted on social media managed through the CRM, ensuring a consistent brand voice.
- Use Slack Connect channels to bring in experts like product managers and engineers for high-priority or complex cases, accelerating resolution time. Quickly search for and share knowledge articles from the service knowledge base directly within Slack channels to enable agents and deflect cases.
- Instantly alert fulfillment or inventory teams in Slack when a customer service issue involves an order or refund, coordinating cross-departmental resolution. Share real-time customer feedback about the online store’s performance directly in a commerce-focused Slack channel.
Kickstart your SMB with Starter Suite
See results from day one with a CRM designed for SMBs — the all-in-one suite for productivity. It all starts with Starter Suite.
Ready to boost customer experience for your growing team?
Slack is already powerful, imagine what it can do for your service teams. Scaling with service means bringing your teams together in one collaborative, safe space. Show your customers what they really need, with a powerful combination of CRM and Slack. We can’t wait to see you grow.
Start your journey with the Free or Starter Suite today. Looking for more customization? Explore Pro Suite. Already a Salesforce customer? Activate Foundations to try out Agentforce 360 today.
AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Slack is critical in helping small businesses stay organized, save time, and get more done. It brings together people, information, and tools into one space, allowing for easier collaboration, centralization of information, and more efficient work through automation and AI. Teams that use Slack are 47% more productive, according to our research.
Service solutions can help reduce costs by allowing customers to help themselves through self-service options. This includes easily embedding knowledge articles into a branded help center or service portal, and enabling chatbots to handle common questions and deflect cases.
Slack facilitates cross-departmental collaboration by allowing teams to create dedicated channels for sharing customer context (like case history, feedback, or status updates) with sales, marketing, and commerce teams instantly. This ensures consistency and allows sales to follow up quickly after a service issue is resolved, creating a seamless customer experience across the entire business.
A 360-degree view means having a complete, chronological timeline of every customer interaction — regardless of whether it occurred in sales, marketing, service, or commerce. When using a unified CRM suite (like Starter Suite or Pro Suite), this view allows service agents to provide faster, more personalized support because they see the full context of the customer’s journey in one place.
