5 Ways Slack Can Help You Have a Better Relationship With Your Customer

There's an old adage that still rings true in business: be where your customers are. When it comes to customer support, phone calls and emails have been the "professional" ways to go about it. But this is 2022 and remote work has changed things drastically. Email tickets are not effective support channels anymore because that's not how customers want to communicate with businesses today.

Both B2B and B2C conversations have moved to instant messaging platforms where things move faster, conversations feel real and queries are solved sooner. Here are five ways Slack makes it better to communicate with customers than email:

Instant gratification

Thanks to social media and texts, we want to achieve things now rather than later. Slack taps into the familiar pattern of communication and makes people feel comfortable using it. Customers can quickly reach support agents instead of waiting in chat queues or worse, getting an email reply 24 hours later. Since things move faster within the message interface of Slack, customers have a better overall perception of the brand. A strong brand image leads to brand loyalty, which reduces churn. 

Faster resolution time

According to Salesforce, 63% of support agents struggle to balance quality with speed. From the CS team's point of view, Slack is a markedly different solution from email. Team members are not only empowered to reach customers sooner but also get into the meat of the issues faster. Thanks to Slack's rich media support, file upload, and sharing, teams can address queries easily. Faster resolutions prevent prospects from developing cold feet and loyal customers from evaluating other options. 

Devoid of bells and whistles 

Slack champions ease of use, for both customers and support teams. Conversations can be pulled easily and it has one of the most powerful search functions among SaaS messaging products. Both parties don't have to go through long threads of conversations that span days and weeks, which is quite common with email.

Slack also feels more social because it sheds the corporate etiquette of emails. Everyone can just focus on the core conversation when they don't have to reply to "hope you're doing well" messages ten times a day. 

Scalable

Today's business conversations are not just text snippets that are forgotten once the goals are met. They're processed, analyzed, and turned into reports with integrated tools. If you want to turn customer interactions into powerful insights, Slack is the way to go. 

With Slack integrations, you can customize your workflow and dictate how conversations are moved within the channels. Thena, for instance, allows you to recognize and tag customer queries as tasks, automate follow-up sequences and integrate requests with existing tools, all within one platform. 

Truly supports distributed teams 

Slack's scalability allows remote teams to collaborate without any communication breakdown. For example, Thena integrates Slack texts with your CRM to improve upsell strategies and marketing communications. Marketing, sales, and CS teams can take that data and create huddles to find takeaways. For more personalized services for B2B customers, Slack Connect can help cross-functional teams to work towards a solution, also known as case swarming or incident swarming.

Customer support creates all the difference in an oversaturated market and Slack helps you maintain that edge. To know how Thena is automating customer support in Slack, get invited by our team today!