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6 Innovative Ways to Transform Work with Slack’s Partner Ecosystem

By 10.21.22
Reading time: 6 minutes

The easiest way to maximize business outcomes with Slack? Tap into the expertise and apps across the Slack partner ecosystem. At Dreamforce 2022, the sessions were rife with stories about the fresh ways Slack partners and customers are using the technology to boost productivity and improve knowledge-sharing.

With access to the Slack partner ecosystem, Slack customers are empowered to build a digital HQ that suits their unique needs, sparking new and creative ways to work together by connecting conversations, automation, and apps in one space. And thanks to Slack’s partner ecosystem, the journey to building a digital HQ is smoother and delivers results faster. After implementing Slack, customers reported an average 29% increase in time savings from automation, and 91% positive ROI in 10 months or less.

“The world’s largest and most influential consultancies have recognized that every customer needs a digital HQ,” says Richard Hasslacher, VP, Slack Enterprise and GTM Alliances. 

New Slack innovations announced at Dreamforce

The successful outcomes and innovative solutions Slack partners help drive for customers will only accelerate, following the exciting new solutions and features announced at Dreamforce:

  • The new Slack platform is available to developers in open beta, with modular, reusable building blocks that are easy to customize and share across Slack. 
  • Slack canvas, coming in 2023, offers a new surface for the digital HQ where teams can curate, organize, and share mission-critical resources, as well as use time-saving automations.
  • The enhanced version of Slack huddles, available to all Slack users over the next few weeks, powers spontaneous discussions and live coworking sessions in the digital HQ through video, lightweight audio, multi-person screen sharing and message threads. 

We’ve re-engineered the Slack platform from the ground up to help you achieve better results faster. Now it’s easier than ever to build automations that move work forward in Slack during the moments that count most, whether it’s closing deals, swarming incidents, or launching campaigns. — Steve Wood, SVP of Product and Platform, Slack

That’s not all: The first wave of Slack Partner Industry Solutions—for industries such as financial services, manufacturing, communications, retail, media, technology and more—have launched so partners can help you customize Slack exactly as needed for your business.

Six inspiring stories that reveal how you can revolutionize work with Slack integrations

Interested in boosting productivity, accelerating incident response times, and closing sales deals faster? Slack partners with thousands of apps and integrations and hundreds of certified consulting experts who are ready to help you build your digital HQ. 

Now, we’re sharing some of their best practices, creative solutions, and successful outcomes from Dreamforce to help you transform the way your business works in a digital-first world.

1. Adopt best practices to build a transformational digital HQ

One of the largest IT service companies in the world, and consulting partner of both Slack and Salesforce, IBM exemplifies the transformational value of a digital HQ. Using Slack as its digital HQ, IBM innovatively leverages the platform to transform its operations, automate the future of work, and stay on the cutting edge of technology. 

“We all have a ton of applications at our disposal to collaborate and get work done,” says Noah Stern, associate partner with the Slack practice at IBM Consulting. “It’s really important for companies to define best practices and guide employees on how to collaborate with each other using this huge array of tools.” In the Dreamforce session How to Create Your Own Digital HQ: Tips and Tricks from IBM, Stern offered these suggestions:

  • Define a workspace strategy: Either lock down workspace creation or create a workspace approval process. 
  • Establish channel naming conventions: “A user should be able to move between workspaces and feel consistency to the way the workspace is organized,” Stern says. “Consistent naming conventions will also improve search relevance and sidebar organization.”
  • Partner closely with internal comms and leadership: Comms and leadership teams typically know how people consume information or have defined ways that they do it.
  • Teach Slack etiquette: Document your own rules that can be enforced across the company. 

Get all the tips by watching on Salesforce+.

2. Improve agility with incident response directly in Slack

As Slack’s preferred cloud provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the foundation for many digital HQs. As Abhijit Barde, principal product manager at AWS, explained at the Dreamforce session Simplify AWS Admin, Support and Security with Slack and AWS, engineering and operations teams are choosing AWS Chatbot and AWS Support Apps from Slack channels. This way they can easily monitor, interact with Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and collaborate with teams including AWS Support from their team’s channels.

The AWS Chatbot and AWS Support apps let Slack users monitor, troubleshoot, and operate AWS environments natively from within chat channels—creating what’s called “ChatOps” to help remediate issues quickly. “The ChatOps-based collaboration model is key to enabling agile and high-performing teams,” Barde says. “It expedites task resolution times, reduces context switching, improves information sharing, and enhances team collaboration.”

3. Enhance a digital HQ with custom and out-of-the-box integrations

Marriott Digital Services (MDS) is an in-house digital agency for the global hotel company. When Marriott hotels request digital projects from the agency, they typically have many questions for MDS agents, who help scope and structure projects. 

“The agents have great resources like knowledge articles or their own team experience and training documentation,” explains Lori Drake, MDS senior manager of processes and systems. “But there are gaps. They get questions that they don’t know how to answer.” Drake shared her solution at the Dreamforce session Supercharge your digital HQ with custom Slack integrations.

To help agents stay focused on work that mattered and to make the most of the MDS digital HQ in Slack, technology consulting partner Slalom stepped in. Slalom helped MDS integrate Service Cloud into Slack through the out-of-the-box app and custom integrations so agents could more easily search, update, and access CRM data on hotels and their projects.

“The agents now have a button to create a Slack channel, which starts a swarm,” Drake explains. “It brings in their own team members automatically, or subject matter experts if needed. Thanks to Slack and Salesforce, agents now say, ‘Look how quickly I got answers—I wasn’t waiting on someone to see a comment in their email inbox hours later.’”

4. Automate incident response across operations and service

“The teams that drive customer experience have to be connected with the teams behind the product to create visibility into the customer journey,” says Kat Gaines, developer advocate at PagerDuty. “A great customer experience is a partnership between both sides of business.”

To drive that partnership, the PagerDuty platform triggers notifications in Slack of customer  incidents so they can be resolved more quickly. As Gaines explained in her Dreamforce session, Automate Incident Response Between Operations & Customers, using Slack for incident management reduces mean time to resolve incidents by 19%, and improves incident detection time by 17% (Slack: The Total Economic Impact Of Slack For Technical Teams, 2021).

5. Simplify the contracting cycle and close deals faster

Getting signatures can slow down deals: Who likes waiting for documents to get shuffled around by email or in person to get the final signatures?

“We want to solve a couple of different problems that slow down the quote-to-cash process,” says Prachi Mishra, Director Product Marketing at DocuSign, who shared his solutions at the Dreamforce session, Close Deals Faster with DocuSign, Slack, and AppExchange

“How can we empower everyone in platforms that they’re already using, and how can we reduce friction — namely, better facilitate conversations across departments and help automate tasks?”

The answer to getting deals “unstuck” is to add the DocuSign app into your Slack workspace. Users receive real-time notifications in Slack across the entire contract life cycle on agreement status and task assignments. They can also collaborate directly — assigning tasks, suggesting changes and providing feedback — without leaving Slack.

6. Boost productivity and create efficiencies with a digital HQ

With a quickly growing team, an investment firm needed to enhance collaboration in order to better manage pipelines and processes. More specifically, the company wanted to create a secure space for internal conversations about deal reviews and strategy planning. 

To learn best practices for merging its existing Slack workspace with Salesforce processes, the investment firm turned to Silverline, its certified Slack and Salesforce consulting partner. By combining both technologies with help from Silverline, the company was able to remove a significant amount of meetings, improve the speed of collaboration, and up-level communication across teams and business functions. The success of the investment firm’s digital HQ project was the subject of the Dreamforce session “How Investment Firms Cut Meetings by 50% with a Digital HQ”.

“When you’re looking for a response on a question, it’s immediate,” says the director of technology and operations at the investment firm, about the instant conversations his team now has with investment professionals. “You’re not having to wait for a scheduled meeting for that to happen.”

More Dreamforce to explore

Looking for more highlights from Dreamforce? Watch the Dreamforce Salesforce+ series, “The Future of Work” with ideas from Salesforce and Slack. Find out how Silverline can help you realize your digital HQ vision.

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