How to use Slack for customer support

One of the key drivers to long-term business growth is your ability to retain and nurture existing customers. In this blog, we are going to discuss how forward-thinking companies are using Slack to deliver better support and wow their customers.

1. Slack as customer support

2. Two different Slack customer support models

3. Integrating Troopr with Slack to solve customer problems faster

4. Get started

Slack as customer support

With Slack, your customer support team has an incredibly powerful way to communicate with their customers. This is made possible with Slack’s “Slack Connect” feature.

What is Slack connect

Slack connect allows you to connect securely with outside organizations to work with your customers, partners or vendors by moving the conversation to a shared Slack channel. You can also use apps in the shared channel to streamline processes, track customer requests and automate various other routine tasks.

Getting started with Slack Connect

1. Create the channel

Click on the + button next to channels in your sidebar. Name the channel and click on create.

2. Send an invitation to customers

Send your customer an email invitation right from Slack, or copy the link provided and share it with your customer.

3. Wait for customers to accept the invitation

When your customer clicks on the link, they’ll be taken to Slack, where they can accept the invitation and set up the channel at their end.

4. Get admin’s approval

Get the Slack admins’ approval from both sides.

Benefits of Slack Connect to customer support teams

1. Provide a direct line of support to the customers

2. Enables cross-functional collaboration by bringing the right experts in the loop on both the sides

3. Maintain all the customers’ context in one place letting the team members working on the next shift take over the work

4. Embracing the conversation features of Slack Connect means your customers' interactions can feel more natural and human

Two different Slack customer support models

Dedicated one-to-one support

The idea here is to create a dedicated channel for each customer and declare ownerships for the channels at different times of the day. Some companies like Fastly provide this model as a perk for their premium enterprise customers. Slack channels have made it easier for customers and your team. Instead of splitting the team across various platforms like email and phone calls, everyone can see every ongoing issue immediately. If a different team member from the product, engineering and other teams needs to help out, they can jump in right away and the customers can see that the team is working towards solving their issue.

Community support

The community support model is about creating and facilitating customer community engagement. You can create a dedicated workspace inviting your customers and support team to join and collaborate with each other. Slack communities open doors for complete transparency, direct customer interaction and feedback, the ability for the customers to give feedback on the new releases. Customers with concerns and questions could get responses from other customers. You can also create a community for insights and tips, where you can add links to blog posts, product pages to turn prospects into customers.

Both of these models have their own benefits. The former is a dedicated one-to-one model being able to provide premium support and proactively share updates to select customers. Whereas the latter enables a self-service platform for the customers to discuss and support each other.

Integrating Troopr with Slack to solve customer problems faster

Troopr is a Slack-first ticketing platform. Troopr works by automatically capturing the Slack conversations and converting them into tickets in Jira Service Desk. Jira Service Desk empowers the support team to track and manage tickets so that the customers can quickly get the help they need. Jira Service Desk is free for 3 agents and unlimited customers. The customer support agents can label, categorize, and assign the tickets to a team member or loop in experts from other departments to solve the customer problems faster.

To get started, add Troopr to your workspace. Then invite Troopr to the shared support channel. This will serve as a central hub where all your customer tickets will be assigned and addressed.

Quickly create and triage tickets

Any time a customer asks a question, Troopr automatically captures it as a ticket. Every ticket on Slack comes with a Slack thread that is seamlessly synced with Jira Service Desk. The customer support agent or customer can share support documents, media files or comments in the Slack thread. These are updated to Jira Service Desk.

Likewise, if the agents make any updates to the ticket in the Jira Service Desk, it is captured in the Slack thread for the customer to get a view of what’s going on with the request.

Measuring volume and performance

Now that all the requests are captured and tracked in Jira Service Desk, measuring key metrics is simple. You can track ticket volume without having to rely on manual counting. Also as we have set up expectations around response times for the channels, and measure performance in Jira Service Desk.

Get started

With Troopr, you can streamline Slack ticketing at both ends. Both the customer and support agent will benefit from using Troopr and resolving the ticket where they are already working.

These simple processes mentioned above can get your support team on their way to build stronger relationships with your customers in Slack.