How to Support your Customers in Slack in 2024?

A company's ability to provide outstanding customer service has become crucial in today's business environment. Customers expect fast, personalized, and effective service, which forces businesses to reconsider their traditional approaches to customer care. Amidst this evolving paradigm, using Slack for customer support has emerged as a powerful solution. Slack’s adaptability goes well beyond internal processes; it provides a modern method of customer service that is sure to improve the user experience in its entirety. 

Traditionally the customer support help desk involves customer logging into a portal and finding the category of their request, filing it and then waiting for a response. Customers usually log in to see if there are any updates after a few hours or days. A recent Microsoft study states that 58% of customers have higher expectations for customer support now than they did a year ago. Another survey by Khoros states that 83% of customers would feel more loyal to brands that respond and resolve their complaints. Your loyal customers deserve better. Incorporating Slack into your customer support processes may open up a world of possibilities. This will enable your team to provide unmatched customer service and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

With Enjo, you can deliver a premium customer support experience directly to your Slack channels with automated resolutions and fully automated request tracking inside Slack.

In this guide we'll learn everything about using Slack for customer support, its benefits, implementation strategies, and best practices. 

Why to Use Slack as a Customer Support Platform?

Slack, the most popular collaboration platform that  has transformed the way teams communicate and work together- is used by 750,000 organizations around the world. Slack is particularly popular for its vast array of integrations with almost any app you use at work. Slack engagement is much higher compared to any other chat platform.  Report states that users spend 9 hours per work day on Slack. So essentially Slack is where your team is. It is a hub for all communication and it helps to have one place where you can reliably find and communicate with your entire team and customers. 

According to Slack, companies that invest in Slack for customer support have reported a 36% faster resolution of support cases and a 12% increase in customer satisfaction.This means, using Slack for customer support service helps organizations to provide highly tailored customer interactions, which is critical. Because 70% of B2B SaaS customers prefer a seamless transition between departments. Thus, integrating Slack with your existing tools like CRM systems or ticketing tools helps create a more personalized support experience​. 

Key Advantages of Using Slack

• Real-time Communication and Collaboration
  Slack's primary messaging and collaboration tools have transformed customer support from a segmented, disconnected operation to a smooth, team-based approach. Support agents may now communicate with customers in real-time, share information, and collaborate with subject matter experts, providing rapid and accurate responses to even the most complicated requests.

• Centralized Support Hub
  Organizations may streamline their support operations by integrating all customer contacts, support tickets, and relevant information into a single Slack workspace. This eliminates the need for support agents to navigate various applications and platforms. This centralized approach reduces the risk of missing questions and promotes accessibility within the support team.

• Automation and Integration Capabilities
  Slack's vast integration ecosystem and robust automation tools enable enterprises to streamline customer support processes. Slack helps enterprises provide efficient, personalized, and consistent support experiences by automating ticket creation and assignment, employing AI-powered chatbots, and integrating with knowledge bases.

• Self-service Options and Empowered Customers
  Customers may find relevant information and troubleshoot issues autonomously by integrating knowledge bases and self-service portals directly into Slack conversations, decreasing support teams' efforts and instilling a sense of ownership and control over the support experience.

How Can Slack Revolutionize Customer Support in 2024? 

Undoubtedly, customer service has traditionally been challenging, with high demands and an ongoing fight to meet ever-changing customer demands. Over the decades, the area has undergone constant development, fast responding to the most recent trends, technology, and changes in customer behavior. Today, organizations are willing to spend up to 30% more to provide excellent customer service, demonstrating the industry's competitiveness and relentless pursuit of excellence. Recent changes in how people leverage digital tools and interact with organizations have driven Slack into the spotlight, establishing it as one of the world's most widely adopted and game-changing customer service systems.

Slack's incredible rise in customer support demonstrates its capacity to meet the pressing demands of both modern enterprises and customers.  Indeed, Slack has transformed the way customer support teams operate by seamlessly integrating real-time communication, collaboration, and automation capabilities, allowing them to provide exceptional experiences that appeal to today's tech-savvy consumers.

As customer expectations continue to evolve and the demand for seamless, personalized experiences grows, Slack's impact on the customer support landscape is only set to intensify. By using Slack for customer support and service, businesses can future-proof their support operations, foster a customer-centric culture, and deliver exceptional experiences that drive loyalty, satisfaction, and long-term success.  Adopting Slack for customer support also helps agents to collaborate effectively, encourage teamwork and synergy and deliver exceptional service to customers.

Unlock Seamless Customer Support on Slack with Enjo.ai

When you add GenAI-enabled support automation solutions like Enjo, you can automate frequent actions into micro-interactions that perform the same action in a fraction of time. A simple example is updating the status of a request.- you no longer have to wait for a web page to load, search for the specific issue you want to update and then perform the action. The issue that needs your attention comes to you in an actionable compact message format and all you need to do is push a button.

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Unleash Customer Support Excellence with Enjo.ai on Slack. Book a Demo Today

Benefits of Using Slack as Customer Support Helpdesk 

By embracing Slack customer support and setting up a Slack-based helpdesk, organizations can unlock a world of possibilities, revolutionizing the way they manage customer inquiries, collaborate with teams, and gain valuable insights. 

Here are the key benefits of this game-changing approach:

1. Friction-free Ticketing

• Streamlined Ticket Creation
  Using Slack for customer support allows you to easily turn Slack conversations into tickets in your preferred ticketing system, such as Jira, by simply adding an emoji or a command. This automated method reduces the need for manual data entry, lowering the likelihood of errors and increasing productivity.
  
• Automatic capture of Slack discussions
  Slack chats about client inquiries can be automatically recorded and attached to the appropriate tickets, preserving all context and facts. This eliminates the need for manual note-taking and ensures no information is lost during translation.‍
• Automatic Request Handling
  You may use Slack's automation capabilities and integrations to create rules that automatically respond to repetitive requests or redirect them to the right team or resource. This minimizes the pressure on your support agents and improves response times.‍
• Instant Feedback Collection
  Slack support allows you to collect feedback from customers directly on the platform, providing real-time insights into their satisfaction levels and areas for improvement.
• ‍Automatic Ticket Updates
  Keep your customers updated by automatically publishing ticket updates and status changes in the right Slack channels, which promotes transparency and improves the overall customer experience.‍
• Centralized Request Visibility
  Slack customer support allows you to simply list all open requests and their statuses in a separate channel, providing a thorough picture of your support operation and ensuring that no request slips through the cracks. 

2. Unified Triaging

• Centralized Triage Channel
  Create a dedicated Slack channel for triaging all incoming customer queries, expediting the process and ensuring that each question is treated immediately.‍
• Collaborative Troubleshooting
  Use Slack's collaboration tools to discuss and troubleshoot complicated issues with team members, subject matter experts, or stakeholders. This ensures customers receive thorough and correct solutions.
  

3. Insights in Slack

• Ticket Metrics and Customer Satisfaction
  Share key performance indicators (KPIs), such as ticket metrics and customer satisfaction scores, right within Slack channels to gain real-time visibility into your support team's performance and make data-driven decisions.‍
• Streamlined Approval Workflows
  Integrating Slack with your approval procedures allows for seamless communication and faster approvals, ensuring customer requests are handled quickly and efficiently.‍
• Enhanced Request Visibility
  Slack customer support gives clients more visibility into the status of their requests, promoting transparency and trust in your support operations.‍
• Conversational Ticketing
  Conversational ticketing in Slack provides:
  - A more visible and easy-to-track approach than traditional ticketing systems
  - Improving collaboration
  - Decreasing context switching
  - Increasing overall productivity
  

Establishing a Slack-based helpdesk and embracing it for customer support can benefit organizations in various ways. These benefits include streamlining support operations, improving team collaboration, and providing outstanding customer experiences.

Four Powerful Ways to Support Customers in Slack with Enjo.ai

‍1. Dedicated Slack Channel for Customers

The idea here is to create a dedicated channel for each customer and declare ownerships of the channels at different times of the day. Some companies like Fastly provide this model as a perk for their premium enterprise customers. Slack channels make life easier for your customers and your team. Instead of splitting the team across various platforms like email and phone calls, everyone can see every ongoing issue immediately. 

If a different team member from the product, engineering or other teams needs to help out, they can jump in right away and the customers can see that the whole team is working towards solving their issue.

2. Common Slack Channel for All Customers

This common Slack channel is created to solve all the customers requests and to update the latest information or discount about the products or services. In this channel all the customers and team members of different specializations have to be added to solve all kinds of customer requests. Customers get better visibility of their requests progress in the Slack channel.

3. Direct Message Channel with Enjo

Slack Connect allows you to securely chat with anyone, regardless of organizational affiliation, by inviting them via email. Enjo interfaces easily with Slack, allowing for automated responses from connected knowledge sources, resulting in swift and accurate information delivery.

Create Jira requests directly from customer Slack conversations, streamlining the support process. After fulfilling a request, Enjo helps gather vital customer feedback, driving continuous improvement and satisfaction. 

4. Use Slack Customer Support in a Community Workspace

You can create a dedicated workspace inviting your customers and support team to join and collaborate with each other. Slack opens doors for complete transparency, direct customer interaction and feedback, the ability for the customers to give feedback on the new releases. Customers with concerns and questions could get responses from other customers. You can also create a community for insights and tips, where you can add links to blog posts and product pages to turn prospects into customers. ‍

5. Use Slack as a Triage Channel Support

Enjo's Triage Channel Support is a streamlined solution that consolidates incoming customer support requests from various sources, such as websites, emails, or ticketing systems like Salesforce, into a dedicated Slack channel. This centralized approach ensures efficient collaboration among support team members and stakeholders while addressing and resolving customer inquiries promptly.

The process begins with Enjo's AI-powered copilot, which is trained on relevant knowledge documents and integrated with ticketing systems. Once deployed onto Slack channels, the copilot can automatically respond to requests and collect inquiries, funneling them into the Triage channel. This approach not only promotes efficient collaboration among support agents but also ensures prompt resolution of customer inquiries. It offers numerous benefits, including centralized communication, efficient workflow management, enhanced customer experience through seamless engagement across preferred channels, real-time collaboration facilitated by Slack's features, improved productivity through reduced context-switching, scalability to accommodate increasing workloads, and actionable analytics for continuous improvement

Customers can seamlessly interact with the support team through embedded webchat interfaces on connected websites, ensuring a consistent and unified experience. These requests are then channeled into the same Triage channel, enabling a cohesive and coordinated approach to customer support.

How To Get Started with Slack Connect 

Here are the step by step processes to getting started with the Slack connect. 

1. Create the channel- Click on the + button next to channels in your sidebar. Name the channel and click create.

2. Send an invitation to customers- Send your customer an email invitation right from Slack, or copy the link provided and share it with your customer.

3. Wait for customers to accept the invitation- When your customer clicks on the link, they’ll be taken to Slack, where they can accept the invitation and set up the channel at their end.

4. Get admin’s approval- Get the Slack admins’ approval from both sides.

Benefits of Slack Connect to Customer Support Teams 

• Provide a direct line of support to your customers
• Enables cross-functional collaboration by bringing the right experts in the loop on both sides
• Maintain all the customers’ context in one place letting the team members working on the next shift take over the work
• Embracing the conversation features of Slack Connect means your customers' interactions feel more natural
• Reduces time to detect, triage, and declare tickets.
• Improves  resolution time post-incident evaluation and application to future incidents. 
• Elevates support agent’s productivity

How to Set Up Slack for Customer Support? ‍

1. Connecting Slack to your ticketing system - it's free!

‍If you are a service desk agent and tired of redirecting your users to Jira service management, then Enjo is for you. Enjo helps you easily integrate Slack with Jira service management. After onboarding Enjo in Slack channels, customers can create Jira requests with a single click. Support agents no longer need to login in the complex and tedious Jira help desk to pick the requests. They can also pick requests from the Slack channels itself; any update in Jira requests in the Slack channel will automatically update into Jira service management.

2. Connecting Slack to your knowledge base - it's free!

If you are a support agent, HR or senior professional your time is extremely precious. Answering repetitive questions in Slack channels would take your valuable time away from working on more important tasks. Onboard Enjo to easily integrate Slack and other knowledge sources. When employees or customers have questions, it's likely that the answers exist somewhere in your knowledge base but they may not know where to look. Having a Slack knowledge base integration is a powerful way to put knowledge in place where questions are asked repeatedly. This removes the need for human intervention for simple tasks like responding to repeated/common questions.

3. Inviting your customers

Invite your customers to a dedicated or common Slack channel through the Slack connect feature, where Enjo is onboarded.

How Enjo.ai Enhances Customer Support Experience?

1. Answering requests with knowledge base articles

Confluence is a popular Atlassian team wiki tool to manage information around your business in one place. It is easy to add content to Confluence, however accessing and surfacing knowledge from Confluence can be a challenge. This is unfortunate as this results in Confluence being underutilized and lowering ROI. With Slack becoming the center of communication for modern workspaces, it makes sense that this platform should play a key role in knowledge collaboration. Similarly, you can connect to other knowledge sources like SharePoint and also upload documents from computers or websites. 

2. Automatic suggestions

For every message in the Slack channel, Enjo automatically answers from connected knowledge sources. It ensures that your employee queries are answered immediately.

3. On-demand support

When Enjo answers does not resolve the request, you can trigger a search on the request on-demand and share the appropriate result as an answer in the channel.

4. Filter support requests

Enjo has a feature to filter Confluence articles This can be done by :

• Matching type
  
• Matching scope
• Matching type
  Use loose matching to find articles where any of the keywords or phrases in the message match or use tight matching to match articles only when all keywords or phrases match.‍
• Matching scope
  Confluence pages will be found based on matches found in selected fields of the page.
  

5. Tracking request

Customers do not need to visit JSM again and again to check whether their request is resolved or not. Enjo sends them an immediate notification when their request is resolved.

Advanced Enjo Setup Options

1. Customizable Emojis

With emoji actions, Enjo.ai lets people in your Slack workspace use multiple emojis to create or update Jira requests from Slack. These emojis are customizable.

2. Setting Up Agent Channel for Help Desk Team

It goes without saying that IT support agents often find themselves bogged down with the tedious task of manually copying and pasting customer requests or tickets from Slack to Jira.

This time-consuming and repetitive process not only drains their valuable resources but also limits their capacity to focus on resolving more critical issues. This is where Enjo comes in. 

Enjo takes care of this tedious work by automatically updating customer Slack requests in Jira service management. Any updates or changes made in Jira service management will trigger an immediate notification in Slack. 

3. Collecting Customer Feedback 

With Enjo HelpDesk, support teams can collect customer feedback instantly in a Slack thread after solving a Jira request.

4. Updating FAQs from Slack

In the world of customer support, repetitive questions are unavoidable. Addressing each issue individually across several Slack channels can soon become a daunting yet necessary task for support teams. 

For example- ‘How can I create tickets in Slack?’

This is one of the most frequently asked questions by customers. Instead of replying to them manually, most of the organizations save answers for this question in Confluence or other knowledge bases and instruct customers to search there, which can be a time consuming task. This calls for the need of a game- changing support automation platform like Enjo.ai.  

Enjo automatically suggests matching articles for every FAQ in the Slack channel from connected knowledge sources, reducing work for both support agents and customers. With Enjo, both support teams and customers may benefit from a more streamlined experience, ensuring that common and repetitive questions are answered quickly and efficiently without manual involvement or lengthy searches.

 5. Seamless Requests Tracking

Enjo's integration with Slack and Jira Service Management goes beyond simply creating requests. Once a Slack conversation is turned into a Jira request, customers gain the ability to effortlessly track the progress of their issues without ever leaving the familiar Slack interface. Users can receive real-time updates on important details like the assigned agent, priority level, and current status by simply typing the issue key connected with their request in a Slack conversation. This visible and accessible tracking system reduces the need for customers to browse various platforms or channels, resulting in a smooth and streamlined experience. 

Best Practices for Using Slack for Customer Support

‍Following best practices for using Slack for customer support simplifies the support process, streamlines workflow management, and improves the effectiveness of customer support tools.

1. Regularly Monitor and Update Slack's Settings and Integrations

Monitoring and updating Slack's settings and integrations is critical for maintaining high customer support response satisfaction and improving service delivery.

This technique enables organizations to respond to changing client demands and preferences, resulting in a more personalized and efficient support experience. Teams may improve response times and customer satisfaction by improving Slack settings and integrations. Staying up to date on Slack's features and integrations allows customer support teams to fully utilize the platform and provide the best level of service and support.

2. Setting Up Customer Support Helpdesk in JSM

Setting up a customer's support help desk in Jira Service Management  (JSM) has many advantages when compared to traditional supporting methods . In Jira service management all Jira requests are aligned properly with all information such as priority of the request, created date, request type, reporter, assignee and time to resolve. which makes it easy for the support teams to get better visibility of the request. Support teams can easily assign requests to different teams depending on the type of requests. JSM allows users to monitor the workload given to the team members and customer feedback can also be known in JSM with average rating and user reviews. With JSM, support teams can filter Jira requests by their status.

3. Setting Up Knowledge Base in Confluence

Doubts in the progress of the project have to be cleared only by the senior employees of the project or by the search engines. Both of these methods are time consuming. Senior employees are usually busy working on projects, solving someone’s query reduces their work efficiency, and it takes a long time to find the right answer in search engine pages. 

Enjo answers the queries and employees or customers get the convenient access to read the answers without having to leave Slack. This removes the need for human intervention for simple tasks like responding to repeated or common questions.

Conclusion

Using Slack for customer support can revolutionize how businesses interact with their customers. By integrating Slack with powerful support automation platforms like Enjo.ai, organizations can streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, and provide personalized, real-time support across various channels, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

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See How Enjo.ai Revolutionizes Customer Support on Slack - Book Your Free Demo Now!

FAQs

1. Why is Slack ideal for customer support?

By combining Slack with your core service solution, agents can instantly engage with experts without switching between applications. This helps them handle client issues more quickly and provide seamless customer experiences. 

2. Can Slack replace traditional customer service channels?

Slack may complement traditional support channels such as email and phone, but it should not fully replace them. A multi-channel approach is recommended to meet customers' diverse demands and interests. 

3. Can Slack work with other customer support tools? 

Yes, Slack has multiple connectivity options with various customer care platforms, knowledge bases, and CRMs, allowing for seamless workflows and data synchronization. 

4. How can I evaluate the efficacy of using Slack for customer support?

Examine indicators like response times, resolution rates, customer satisfaction scores, and feedback. Continuously improve processes in response to insights and consumer feedback.