Email vs Slack: which platform works better for customer support?

Email vs Slack has been a raging debate ever since Slack was introduced to the world. In recent years Slack has evolved into the preferred internal communication tool for most businesses and it has strengthened its customer support mechanism which was traditionally dominated by email. 

With the rise of Slack’s conversational ticketing functionalities, we're compelled to ask: is email losing its ground as a communication channel? The answer is a resounding yes.

The fault in our emails

Email in itself is not ineffective, it's just too limited to support modern customers. The asynchronous nature doesn't help in real-time support resolution, and its ubiquity is threatened, with almost 80% of Fortune 100 companies exclusively using Slack Connect. 

Email also lacks the scalability and flexible integrations that make Slack such a natural choice and despite its claim of organized threads, a CNBC report shows that the average employee spends almost 40% of their work hours checking emails. 

Email also fails to offer conversational ticketing, which has been a staple of modern business communications.

Slack makes conversational ticketing possible

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Conversational ticketing is the practice of real-time support in chats that trade in the formalities of emails for quick resolutions. It's organic, personalized, and has a higher customer satisfaction rate. 

Conversational ticketing via Slack feels like second nature because businesses already use Slack to communicate with teams. According to Gartner, low-effort interactions such as Slack ticketing save operational costs by decreasing repeat calls by 40% and escalations by 50%. This improves employee productivity by allowing them to focus on critical tasks. On top of that, Slack support is conducive to customer experience automation (CXA) which focuses on the holistic improvement of customer journeys by using automation and human touch. 

The key reason why Slack works great as a fast and organic support channel is because of Slack Connect. It's a collaborative feature that allows support agents to onboard customers from other companies and work with them in separate channels. According to the company, Slack Connect reduces backlog support tickets by 64%. Gone are the days of CC and BCC tags in emails, Slack Connect breaks down the silos in teams by creating a trackable, organized, and scalable communication channel within one platform. 

The challenges of conversational ticketing and what can you do about it?

Conversational ticketing, despite being spontaneous and holistic, comes with certain challenges. By design, it's fast-moving and can get really messy if you're not on top of queries and ticket statuses. Without proper integrations, it might become difficult to process customer data, making it harder for non-technical users to use Slack Connect. 

What you need is a conversation intelligence tool that can identify, organize and escalate Slack requests according to predefined rules. And that's what Thena does for you. 

It starts by integrating with your favorite ticketing tools, and then creates, escalates, and tracks requests to offer complete transparency over support journeys. With Thena, it's easy for support agents to stay organized and when you're ready to scale, it can automate marketing to help you track engagement KPIs. 

Ready to implement a frictionless omnichannel UX across Slack support? See how Thena can help you.