10 Ways to Engage with Your Customer on Slack

How to Engage Customers and Partners on Slack?

1. Introduce Your Customers to Slack Connect

First and foremost, you need to bring your customers on board by sending an invitation to a Slack Connect Channel. Once they join, you can start collaborating and getting the work flowing.

2. Be Strategic About Your Channels 

Stop and think about the projects and the work you’re going to do with a particular client. You will need more than one channel if you work on multiple projects simultaneously. So, don’t throw your customers and partners into one space, as it will quickly become confusing having to distinguish between different projects, responsibilities, and tasks.

3. Send an Introductory Channel Message to Communicate Expectations

Now that your consumers are on the channel, they are just as eager to get started as you are. But Slack Connect could be a new concept to them, so you’ll need to do some explaining to fully engage them and ensure that they understand how to maximize their value using the platform.

Creating and pinning to the top an introductory message will allow you to set the ground rules, such as the best ways to reach you and your team, the standard turnaround time for attending queries, ways to escalate pressing matters, and so on.

4. Establish Workflows With Emojis

Emojis are a powerful tool in Slack, as they can help effectively streamline workflows and bring visibility to customer requests. You can use emojis to indicate that you saw your customer's request and are working on a solution or to alert them that the request has been addressed.

Utilizing emojis will benefit you and your customers as they reduce unnecessary back-and-forth and clutter while providing easy status updates that your customer will appreciate.

5. Tap into Slack Integrations for Enhanced Engagement

It’s only natural that messages don’t always suffice when speaking to your customers. You might want to jump on a conference call via Zoom or Microsoft Teams to explain the new features of your product or share a bunch of documents via Google Drive—third-party integrations can help focus work in one place.

In addition, integrations remove friction and make it easier for your customers to engage with your team.

6. Triage Issues and Address Customer Feedback Using Conversational Ticketing

Customers dislike submitting a support ticket when they encounter an issue with your product or service. The dread that fills them when they have to explain all the ins and outs of the problem, when and how it occurs, and who it affects—it all causes a great deal of frustration.

However, Slack can be used as a positive channel for your customers to communicate issues and get them swiftly resolved without needing to provide additional context.

With solutions like Thena, it has never been easier to transform discussions into actionable tasks and route them toward the right people to be addressed. 

Thena features conversational ticketing that allows you to streamline Slack channels with your customers by recognizing customer asks in the messages and converting them into Thena requests. Think about it as a productive way to engage your customers when they need you the most, removing the necessity to follow up while giving complete visibility into the requests’ status.

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7. Create a Customer Community on Slack

One study found that on a 5-point scale, B2B buyers rate the importance of self-service tools at 4.41—an aspect you should capitalize on when engaging your customers in Slack. 

Slack has robust search capabilities, which can be utilized as a knowledge base. 

You simply need to create a Slack-based customer community channel where your clients can quickly use the "search" option to discover if their questions have already been raised and addressed. They can even look up essential files or dig up some context on a decision made a few weeks ago.

8. Encourage Your Customers to Use Slack’s Mobile App

People are constantly on the go, so it’s critical to find effective ways to engage with them via their preferred channels and devices. The good news is that your team and your customer can tap into the full potential of Slack’s Mobile App and keep the communications flowing no matter where.

9. Avoid Communication Overload

Keeping your customers in the loop is a good idea, but overloading them with all the nitty-gritty details can put them off. Constant alerts and status updates can make it hard to distinguish between what’s truly important and what messages are sent simply for the context.

Engaging your customer via Slack is about being concise and to the point. Your customers are busy, and so are you; thus, respect their time and watch their appreciation grow.