While the digital landscape is moving on from emails, it’s undeniable that many customers are still actively using them. Salesforce research shows that 93% of customers still engage with companies via email.
While you can’t entirely eliminate them, you can undoubtedly evolve your email management processes as part of your customer service journey. Email to Slack integration can help you create a handy, centralized hub to view all of your incoming messages across multiple channels.
In this article, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about email to Slack integrations. Let’s begin.
Streamlining your email management system can carry many significant benefits to your team and your organization as a whole. Here are the main upsides of integrating email with Slack:
Distraction is one of the biggest concerns in the modern workplace, with 68% of employees citing email as their top workplace distraction. Keeping track of the constant barrage of notifications from Slack and your email can be taxing and take you out of your focused state.
Integrating emails with Slack can help you view all of your incoming engagements simultaneously, limiting interruptions.
If you work in teams where collaboration is critical, you often find yourself copy-pasting information between different platforms to loop relevant team members in or to discuss certain requests.
The average employee does over 1000 copy-pastes weekly, adding up to an astonishing 52,000 annually. This can take a significant amount of time and effort! Directing your email communication to relevant Slack channels can improve collaboration with your team and streamline triage processes.
Customer support teams often have to navigate complex shared inboxes that are notoriously hard to keep organized. Shared inboxes can cause significant issues in request management processes, as most of them lack a straightforward categorization system.
Tracking can also be difficult if a specific issue is being already investigated by another team member, potentially doubling the workload and wasting valuable time. Directing emails to particular Slack channels can help teams identify a straightforward course of action, designate relevant team members, and address issues quickly.
Lastly, as 39% of emails go unread every year, status updates and alerts can easily get lost in busy inboxes. Business leaders can ensure this content reaches their audiences efficiently by redirecting important emails to dedicated support or announcement channels.
If you are ready to streamline your email management process, there are four ways to send emails to Slack channels. Let’s look at each one of them in more detail.
If you have a paid membership to Slack, you can set up a unique email address for a Slack channel or DM. Once the email address is generated, all channel members can forward emails to Slack easily from their email applications.
Unique email addresses for the selected channel or DM can be generated by clicking on the channel or member name in the conversation header and selecting 'Integrations'. These addresses can also be customized with a name and image, allowing users to quickly recognize them.
Another way to enable email to Slack integration is via an email add-on. Browsing through Slack’s app directory, you can find many applications, such as Slack for Gmail, that were created to integrate into your native email tool and speed up the process of sending emails to Slack.
These applications can be added to your workspace with a single click on 'Add to Slack,' followed by some basic configuration. Once installed, a Slack icon will appear in Gmail’s right sidebar, allowing users to forward emails to Slack channels or DMs.
If you are a free user of Slack, forwarding emails to Slack is an excellent way to transfer information between your different tools. You can create a Slackbot forwarding address from your desktop by clicking on your profile and selecting 'Preferences'.
Navigate to the 'Messages & Media' section, where you'll find the option 'Bring emails into Slack.' Here, you can easily generate a forwarding email address with a single click. Remember, for this feature to work, you must have incoming emails enabled in your Slack workspace or organization.
That said, this method might not be the best option if you’re dealing with a high email volume.
Thena’s two-way email integration system offers a practical solution to direct emails seamlessly into your Slack channels. With the help of our award-winning solution, emails can be automatically routed into relevant support channels where service agents can respond to requests directly from Slack. Thena’s smart integration removes the need for service agents to switch between applications, enhancing productivity and saving time.
The email to Slack integration can automatically identify specific customers and clients, directing their messages to dedicated customer channels. The best part about our tool is that it supports rich media, such as hyperlinks, attachments, and rich text.
Thena’s email to Slack feature nestles within our comprehensive suite that is designed to transform your organization into a customer communication powerhouse. Thena’s solutions include conversational request detection, categorization, smart workflows, analytics, and more.
Once an email is shared into your dedicated Slack channel, support teams can effectively collaborate to resolve the issue with integrated Kanban boards, auto-assigning features, and ticket lifecycle tracking.
Thena can help you create a centralized hub for your customer support team, eliminating the risk of missed messages, enhancing productivity, and providing comprehensive analytics about your customer interactions. Thena’s email to Slack solution will delight your customers and help your service teams achieve maximum efficiency and customer satisfaction.
While emails can be considered old-fashioned, they are still a significant element of the customer communication journey.
With the help of integrated email to Slack solutions like Thena, you can utilize innovative tools to forward emails to Slack and create a centralized place for all your communications.
Thena can help you to eliminate context switching and boost your productivity. Ready to give us a try? Add Thena to Slack now.