Providing exceptional customer support is vital for driving customer satisfaction and loyalty - and for today's land and expand business models - growing revenues and NRR. The right tools can make all the difference, and one platform that has revolutionized communication and collaboration is Slack. Slack customer support and communication are rapidly taking off as an alternative to Email. Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, Slack offers a range of features and integrations that can help you centralize your customer support and success operations and enhance team collaboration. In this step-by-step guide, we will explore how you can harness the power of Slack to elevate your customer support.

Why Are Organizations Using Slack for Customer Support & Engagement?

There are many reasons why conversational support is gaining ground - but most importantly - it provides a sense of community and a personal connection that traditional solutions like Ticketing, Email, and Phone don’t provide. Some advantages of chat rooms over traditional customer support channels include:

Direct and fast communication with key personnel.

Informal nature allows customers feel free to discuss all kinds of topics - and not just support queries.

Ability to pull in multiple stakeholders as and when required.

Ability to review all customer communication easily in one place.

Easy search functionality and file sharing within channels.

Effortless integration with business processes and applications.

Built-in voice and video conferencing.

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Challenges in Scaling Slack for Support

However, while there are many benefits, there are also many challenges in scaling Slack as the customer count increases:

Hard to keep track of requests: There are too many conversations and it's easy to lose track of the open ones. Handling a lot of clients over chat can become overwhelming.

Overlap of Slack with Customer Support platforms: confusion over the appropriate role of each and lack of great integration between the two.

Managing Customer expectations: Customers on Slack may expect immediate responses - unlike with email or support tickets.

High volume of queries: The ease of accessing Slack sometimes also means that customers submit many more queries than via other Support channels.

Lack of Analytics: In the absence of metrics it becomes impossible to measure performance and plan capacity.

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How are some companies able to handle hundreds of customers on Slack? At ClearFeed, we have been working with many companies to help them scale their chat-based customer support and engagement and have seen certain common patterns in these hyper-scalers. The first step is, of course, to use the cool features in Slack to manage communication and knowledge sharing better. We also find that Slack Connect can be difficult to understand - and users should spend some time understanding how to manage security, applications and the invitation process in Slack Connect channels. The best practices beyond that are summarized in the following sections.

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1. Establish Ownership

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One of the primary problems that most companies face when using these platforms is the expectation of instant gratification. Customers expect immediate responses and resolutions to their problems or questions. And there is no clear direction on the channel response time and SLAs. Not only do lack of timely responses lead to unhappy customers - they also lead to customers sending direct messages to their contacts - which further results in lost information and overworked responders.

To ensure timely responses - one of the primary best practices is to have clear ownership of issues reported in any customer chat room. Here are some best practices we suggest:

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Appoint an owner: Every customer channel should have an owner - who is also often the first responder for the same. This is often the customer success manager responsible for the specific customer (or during onboarding - the Solutions Engineer primarily responsible for onboarding the customer).

On-Call Support: As an alternative (or in addition to the above) - on-call support can be set up for responding to queries on customer Slack channels. This is useful because CSMs are often busy and multi-tasking multiple responsibilities - and thus having a small number of personnel dedicated to responding to customer requests on chat provides more reliable coverage.

24/7 coverage: If your customers & users are spread across geographies, it is best to setup shifts across various time zones so as to be able to resolve queries 24/7. This is easiest with an on-call support team, but can also be done by appointing multiple CSM owners in different time-zones in larger teams.

In case 24/7 coverage is not possible - it is important to set expectations on working hours with the customer. Pinning information to a Slack channel is a great way to share such information. For example - information on business hours, the first responder, the standard turn-around time, an escalation matrix, and protocols will offer both members and customers a better idea of how things work.

We strongly recommend adding solutions like ClearFeed to your customer chat rooms to provide a comprehensive solution to respond to customers in a timely manner and close requests out. Using ClearFeed for example, you can:

Keep track of status of every customer request centrally, mark it resolved when completed - and lookup unresolved requests easily.

Setup SLA alerts for new/unanswered customer queries - and route them appropriately.

Define business hours and setup automated responses when no one is available to respond to requests.

We use our own software to manage 100+ customer Slack rooms and to make sure we respond to customers and prospects in a timely manner - and companies like testRigor, BigEye and many others are now doing the same on their customer channels.

Read more : https://clearfeed.ai/blogs/slack-for-customer-support-definitive-guide