Slack Workflow Builder: The Ultimate Tool for Team Productivity

What Is a Slack Workflow?

Don’t you wish you could sometimes automate the boring parts of your day-to-day activities? This can’t be any more accurate when you are managing customer service teams, IT departments, or simply running any organization that has to handle customer requests.

Copy-pasting template replies and endlessly searching outdated databases isn’t anyone’s favorite activity, but there’s a solution—Slack workflows.

Slack workflows are automated sequences of actions in the Slack platform that streamline repetitive tasks or processes. Users can set specific Slack workflow triggers, like a message in a channel or a form submission, which then initiate predefined actions, such as sending notifications or creating tasks. These workflows eliminate the monotony of mundane tasks and allow your team to focus on more valuable activities.

With Slack workflows, your team can reach the “flow state,” the so-called heavy sense of concentration. This means no time gets wasted doing redundant tasks.

Benefits of Slack Workflows

There are lots of different Slack workflow examples. The beauty of these workflows is that you can design them to suit your organization’s unique needs. Regardless of the design, every workflow has the potential to enhance productivity.

Here are some other advantages of using Slack workflows:

• Keep Your Projects on Track: With the help of Slack workflows, you can create daily check-in forms to assess your organization's and your teams' health. While meetings and calls can be great, automated forms serve the purpose better when your team is already juggling too much. Your scheduled forms can include anything from assessing blockers, project updates, team capacity, employee morale, etc.
• Set Up Automated Reminders: Reminders are undoubtedly one of the greatest tools in Slack. There is a wide range of uses for them, such as giving a nudge to your employees to take breaks, reminding team members to turn up to a meeting or switch on their cameras, and prompting a team member to respond to the customer.
• Effectively Assign Tasks: Keeping a close eye on your projects is crucial to running smooth operations. Slack workflows can create a streamlined process to help your teams stay on top of their tasks. Workflow automation can assign tasks to team members based on their ability, track progress through Kanban boards, and set up alerts when jobs are overdue.
• Onboard Customers or Team Members: Sending out individual communications to new joiners can be a lengthy and frustrating process that even your best employee will resent. Utilizing Slack workflows, new joiners can receive automated messages with guidelines, SLAs, pinned resources, and key contacts. Through smart templates, you can even create onboarding forms to collect crucial information such as contact details and other relevant documentation.

Refining Customer Request Management: When using Slack for customer support, efficiently monitoring multiple channels and workspaces can be challenging. However, with Slack's workflow automation, you can seamlessly capture customer inquiries from various channels, generate support tickets, and guarantee that no request slips through the cracks.

Why Slack Workflows Matter in Modern Business Communication

Slack can easily transform into a customer communication powerhouse when managed effectively. Integrating workflows into Slack channels and workspaces can up your game even more and help you save time and increase efficiency for your teams, creating a smoother customer experience.

With 73% of customers suggesting that they would switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences, inefficient workflows can cost you significantly. If your processes are messy, you’re just giving them more reasons to leave.

But with automated workflows, you can cut down on those silly mistakes that happen when you’re doing the same tasks over and over. Plus, your team can then focus on the high-value work, instead of getting bogged down in the small details.

Yet, it's not just about enhancing efficiency; it's also about employee well-being. 74% of customer service center employees are on the brink of burnout. This underscores the urgency for organizations to explore solutions to help their teams be more efficient, remove stress factors, and allow them access to up-to-date information quickly. 

With the help of Slack workflows, business leaders can create better communication between teams, set up standardized processes, and help their staff keep track of essential processes to avoid potential problems. 

Bottom line: workflow automation can improve business processes by 60%, resulting in a significant boost in productivity and efficiency. In turn, improved work processes lead to faster resolution times, improved scalability, and enhanced visibility across teams.

Building Slack Workflows with Thena is Easy

Although Slack’s built-in workflow capabilities are great, they can still be limited to specific use cases or organizations. Thena fills the gap, helping you streamline business processes, and enhancing productivity with ease.

Furthermore, with our automated workflows and conversational ticketing system, Thena’s solutions can reduce response times by 95%, keeping your customers happy around the clock without leaving Slack.

But that's not all. Thena is also your secret weapon for marketing campaigns right within Slack. We empower you to roll out engaging newsletters and timely product updates directly in Slack. And, with built-in analytics, you can effortlessly pinpoint your top-performing content, putting you in a prime position to optimize growth.

Lastly, Thena is designed to integrate flawlessly with Slack and your preferred team collaboration apps, centralizing tools and resources. This not only nurtures inter-team collaboration but also significantly boosts operational efficiency. With Thena, you're not just working differently; you're working smarter.

Real-World Examples of Businesses Leveraging Thena’s Workflows

There's no greater testament to the effectiveness of our solutions than the success of our customers. 

WorkRamp grappled with the challenges of managing high demand across various channels. This complexity led to disruptions in their support teams and diminished customer satisfaction. But with Thena's assistance, Workramp boosted its support productivity by 30%, optimizing team performance and enhancing the quality of customer interactions.

Similarly, Spotdraft faced difficulties managing their rapid growth and streamlining their support processes. However, after integrating Thena, they slashed their response times in half, paving the way for better collaboration and heightened customer satisfaction.

And, if you’re still not convinced, G2 has rated Thena as the #1 solution in Ticket Collaboration, praising its effortless integration, user-friendly design, and intelligent ticket management workflows.

How to Measure Slack Workflow Productivity

Keeping track of your Slack metrics is a challenging task. Thena can provide in-depth analytics on customer communication, identifying gaps in your processes and helping you to bring out the most value from your Slack workflow automation.

Thena helps you track a range of data in Slack:

• Customer Trends Over Time: You can keep an eye on the changes to your KPIs over a selected time period and analyze customer sentiment.
• Channel-Specific Insights: By diving deep into your channel metrics, you can identify opportunities, spot patterns and collect valuable data to improve your workflows.

Customer Request Data: With the help of Thena, you can monitor response times, escalation issues, and the number of customer requests resolved in time to ensure that customer success rates remain at an all-time high.

Four Slack Workflow Examples to Make Your Team Productive

Slack Workflow Example 1: Task Assignment and Tracking

Assigning tasks and tracking progress is critical for effective team management. Slack workflows can automate this process, making it easier for team members to stay on top of their tasks and deadlines.

 Configuring the Task Assignment Workflow

 Start by creating a form that team members can use to request tasks. The form should include space for the task description, the desired due date, and other relevant information.

 Next, set up a workflow that automatically assigns tasks to team members based on their availability and workload. Once a task is assigned, team members can track their progress by updating the task status in Slack. You can set up  notifications to alert team members when tasks are overdue or when there is an update on a task.

 Enhancing Team Efficiency with Task Tracking

 By automating task assignments and tracking in Slack, team members can be more productive and efficient. Everyone knows what tasks they need to complete and when they are due, which reduces the likelihood of missed deadlines or  added confusion.

 Tracking task progress also allows team members to identify roadblocks early on, giving them time to address issues before they become problems.

Slack Workflow Example 2: Streamlining the Approval Process

 Approvals can be a bottleneck in any workflow, whether we talk about marketing content creation or product development. Setting up a Slack workflow for approvals can streamline the process and save time for everyone involved.

 Implementing the Approval Workflow

 Create a form that team members can use to request approval. The form should include relevant information, such as the reason for the approval, the person or team responsible for the approval, and any required documentation.

 Set up a workflow that routes the approval request to the appropriate team member or manager. The workflow should include notifications to keep everyone informed of the approval status and any related updates.

 How This Workflow Speeds Up Decision-Making

 By automating the approval process, you can reduce delays and improve the speed of decision-making. Everyone involved knows who is accountable for which actions and what documentation is required, reducing confusion and  miscommunication. Notifications keep team members informed about the status of requests, allowing them to plan their workload accordingly.

Slack Workflow Example 3: Onboarding New Team Members

 Onboarding new team members can be a taxing process. By setting up a Slack workflow for onboarding, you can streamline the process and ensure that new team members get started on the right foot. Here’s how.

 Creating the Onboarding Workflow

 Create a form that new team members can use to provide their critical information, such as their contact details, employment history, and other relevant documentation. Using this information, you can set up a sequence of automated tasks  and reminders that guide new team members through onboarding.

 The tasks may include setting up a company email account, providing access to company software, and attending orientation sessions. You can set up notifications to ensure new team members know about upcoming tasks and deadlines.

Slack Workflow Example 4: Providing Customer Support

 If you’re using Slack for client communication and customer support, you know how messy your Slack Connect channels can get, right? However, thanks to tools like Thena, you can easily stay on top of all incoming customer requests.

 Thena Automates Customer Request Management in Slack Channels

 Thena has several helpful features that make customer service easier. Firstly, it alerts you whenever a new customer request is detected in a conversation, allowing you to respond promptly. It also simplifies the process of assigning  requests to specific team members.

 In addition, if you accidentally forget to reply to a customer message, Thena has a First Response Service Level Agreement (SLA) that will remind you to take action. Moreover, the platform includes an escalation feature that enables  customers or internal team members to raise a ticket and ensure that it receives appropriate attention.

 The best bit is that every feature is customizable to match your business requirements.

 Thena Facilitates Instant Access to Analytics

 Tracking customer service metrics on Slack can be a pain. But with Thena, reporting vital analytics and using them to drive decision-making is easy. Thena helps you unlock seemingly lost and hidden data directly in Slack and enhance your  standard Slack workflows.

 You can track critical metrics such as total shared channels, total requests, 1st response SLA alerts, average request close time, and CSAT scores, making the customer service analytics experience seamless.

Benefits of using Slack Workflow Builder

Slack Workflow Builder lets regular Slack users build various workflows around different tasks they perform on Slack. Here are the main upsides of Slack Workflow Builder:

1. Democratizes automation

Slack Workflow Builder's no-code interface empowers every team member, regardless of their technical expertise, to create and modify workflows. This democratization of automation encourages a more inclusive approach to process improvement, where insights from diverse roles can lead to innovative workflow solutions.

According to Slack’s internal data, 80% of those who build Slack workflows are non-technical users. This statistic highlights the platform's user-friendly design, demonstrating that virtually anyone can build a workflow with ease.

2. Rapid prototyping and deployment

With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Slack Workflow Builder enables teams to quickly prototype and deploy workflows. This rapid iteration cycle allows teams to test ideas and refine processes on the fly, significantly reducing the time from concept to implementation compared to traditional development methods.

3. Pre-built templates

Lastly, Slack Workflow Builder offers a selection of pre-built workflow templates, significantly simplifying the process of creating new workflows. These templates cover many common business processes and scenarios, enabling teams to quickly implement solutions without starting from scratch. These templates can be a foundation for more bespoke workflows if you want.

Is Slack Workflow Builder free?

Slack Workflow Builder isn’t free but it’s available for users on Slack Pro, Business+, and Enterprise Grid plans.

How to open Workflow Builder in Slack

To begin using the Slack Workflow Builder, you first must access it through your Slack Workspace:

1. Open Slack: Launch the Slack application on your desktop or open Slack in your web browser and log in to your workspace.
2. Access your workspace menu: In the top-left corner of the Slack interface, click on your workspace name to open the workspace menu.
3. Click on the three dots to access the additional menu.

4. Select “Automations.”
5. Lastly, click on the “Workflow Builder.”

And, here you have it.

Now, we’re going to give you a basic overview of how to start using the Workflow Builder.

How to use Slack Workflow Builder

After accessing the Slack Workflow Builder window, you'll find yourself presented with three distinct tabs to navigate through:

• Your workflows
• All published workflows
• Templates.

So, how do you actually use Slack Workflow Builder to create workflows? Follow these simple steps:

Step 1: To build your first workflow, navigate to the "Your Workflows" tab and click on the “Create” button.

Step 2: In the next screen, you’ll be asked to provide a name for your workflow.

Step 3: Then, you'll need to select a way to start this workflow, as shown in the image below.

Step 4: Once the selection has been made, click on “Next.”

Step 5: In the next steps, you need to determine the steps and triggers that will appear in your desired order.

Step 6: After completing the design of your workflow, simply click on the “Publish” button to finalize and activate it.

Bonus tip: If you’re stuck and not sure where to begin, you can always check out Slack Workflow templates. Here you can find a bunch of easy-to-customize templates to get started.

It’s not difficult at all, right?

Slack Workflow Builder examples

Now, if you need some ideas, have a look at these Slack Workflow Builder examples for different use cases:

• Onboarding checklist: Send a personalized checklist to new hires with tasks like setting up email, joining key channels, and scheduling a meet-and-greet. Track completion in a shared HR channel.
• Leave request approval: Employees submit leave requests via a form. The workflow notifies managers, who can approve or decline directly in Slack. Approved requests get sent to a shared calendar.
• Expense reimbursement process: Streamline submissions by allowing employees to upload receipts and fill out expense details in Slack. Notify the finance team for approval and track status updates in a finance channel.
  
• Team availability scheduler: Use a form for team members to input their availability or out-of-office times. Aggregate responses to a shared calendar or dashboard, aiding in meeting scheduling and workload planning.
• Content approval workflow: For content teams working on projects, a workflow where writers submit draft links through Slack. It notifies editors to review, comment, and approve content, streamlining the publication process.
• Client onboarding tracker: For client-facing teams, a workflow to track new client onboarding stages, notifying team members of their action items at each phase to ensure a smooth client experience.
  

There's a whole bunch of Slack Workflow Builder examples out there. But really, the bottom line is you can automate pretty much anything with it. Don’t be afraid to get creative!