How To Use Slack For Customer Support

Slack may not be the first thing you think about when you think of customer support software. And while there are some detractors out there that question its usefulness for support purposes, we believe that if used in the right ways, Slack can become a fundamental part of your proactive support arsenal.  

Today, we’ll go into greater detail about the best ways to make sure of Slack in customer support. 

How to use Slack for customer support

While Slack may not be the ideal way to talk to customers, owing mostly to the fact that it is made for team collaboration, it can be used in other ways to make sure that you are covering all your support bases. 

You probably shouldn’t be conducting actual customer conversations on Slack, because that can get messy quick and spawn far too many Slack channels which all lack the necessary context, you should seriously consider using it in the following ways:

Use Slack for technical support

One of the benefits of Slack is that you probably frequently check in with it throughout the course of the day. Why not harness that for technical support? 

But given that you shouldn’t conduct conversations in Slack, how can you even use it for technical support? 

With an integration like this one, which automatically sends errors and key events from user sessions directly to a channel of your choosing on Slack! 

You can also customize this to only be alerted about specific instances. Do you want to be notified every time a user encounters a bug or error in your app? You can turn notifications on for that. Do you want to know immediately when a user is experiencing friction – turn notifications for rage clicks on!

By having notifications like this directly in Slack, you can ensure that you don’t miss a beat and can reach out to users immediately after they encounter a problem — rather than waiting for them to become frustrated and reach out themselves. 

Remember: only 1 in 24 users actually reach out with an issue. The rest just churn. So proactively identifying issues without waiting for users to reach out can go a long way towards ensuring that users never have a reason to leave. 

Use Slack to build community

Again, it isn’t a good idea to solve individual support tickets on Slack, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it in other creative ways to solve user issues. 

Slack is great for building community! Starting a Slack workspace for all your users and populating it with channels where they can introduce themselves, talk about what they do, swap ideas about their industry or the niche your software caters to, and help each other get the most out of your product is a very good idea. 

It may take some time to cultivate this community and grow your numbers, but something like this will pay long-term dividends by fostering a sense of brand loyalty. 

It may even save your agents some valuable time by leveraging community content to help educate users or solve issues. 

Use Slack to get notified about new support tickets — stat!

Most of the major help desk solutions on the market feature integrations with Slack. Upon installing the integration, you should get notified every time a support ticket is opened on whichever platform you use. 

The main benefits are speed and visibility: you’ll immediately know when a ticket comes in and all your team members will also have access to this information, so everyone’s kept in the loop. 

This can help you delegate tickets and reduce resolution times. 

Use Slack to keep up with your CX metrics

If you use platforms like InMoment to collect CSAT, CES and NPS scores, you can integrate with Slack to be informed each time someone gives you a rating. 

The InMoment integration even allows you to set up rules to route feedback to different channels. For example, you can send negative feedback directly to your customer support channel on Slack so an agent or team member can immediately follow up with whichever user left you a bad grade. 

Use Slack to get notified about user behavior in your app.

With an integration like customer.io, you can configure notifications to be sent to a Slack channel anytime a user performs some particular action in your app. You can configure those actions yourself, so you’re only informed about events you want notifications for. 

Some of the events you can set up notifications for are when you receive a new user signup, when a user displays signs of churn – for example, when they abandon an onboarding flow, or when a customer upgrades or downgrades their plan. 

Notifications like this can help you proactively fend off issues that are best dealt with immediately. They can also keep your entire team in the loop about user behavior in your app. 

Wrapping things up

So there you have it: turns out, Slack is for so much more than internal team conversations.

By leveraging Slack’s enormous marketplace of integrations, you can make it work for customer support too.