Salesforce has announced ‘Slackforce Surfaces’, the latest evolution of its ‘Slack CRM’ project. The new capabilities mean you can now transform Salesforce data into interactive visualizations inside Slack.
The company made the announcement ahead of Dreamforce, the largest Salesforce event of the year, which is taking place in San Francisco, California this week.
What Is Slackforce Surfaces?
The introduction of Slackforce Surfaces means you can now ask Slackbot using plain language to create a live, interactive interface – like a dashboard, report, or executive HTML deck – using your work context.
That visualization, which lives inside Slack, then stays connected to the data used to create it, refreshing automatically as the data changes.
You can also ask Slackbot follow-up questions about the data in the conversation.
Salesforce says that, with Slackforce Surfaces, data stays current, and connected to the source. This means that, as the pipeline changes or a case gets closed, the surface automatically reflects it, meaning that decisions can always be made on the most up-to-date data.
Slack Surfaces pulls from anything which is connected to Slack – including Salesforce, your Slack history, and any other enterprise data tools – and creates visualizations built under existing permissions.
Salesforce stresses that Slack Surfaces are collaborative, with an interactive interface which entire teams can explore, filter, and comment on. Knowledge of how to create a dashboard or design an executive presentation is not required – simply ask Slackbot to bring the context to the surface, and pin it to a channel in Slack.
Start by telling Slackbot what you want, and it will build the Surface from the available context. There’s a vibes-based element to this process, it seems. According to Salesforce: “There’s no fixed template or prescribed format. Slackbot can determine how best to express the work – from an interactive dashboard or executive presentation to a microsite, calculator, or entirely new experience – and style it for the audience and purpose.”
The Surface then allows teams to explore data, investigate the records and messages behind it, and talk about what they’re seeing within Slack.
Salesforce says: “That’s the real benefit of Slackforce Surfaces: the conversation doesn’t end with an answer. It becomes a living interface your team uses to get the work done.”
Slackforce Surfaces is available today for customers on Enterprise+, Business+, Pro, Legacy, and Free Teams who have Slackbot enabled.
Salesforce says that the live data feature begins rollout in October.
Analysis: The ‘Deeply Unified Platform’ Revisited
Every update to Slack is another step closer to the ‘deeply unified platform’ which Salesforce has been building.
Salesforce itself mentions how six months ago, co-founder Parker Harris said that we might “never log into Salesforce again” – and that vision has now come to be known as ‘Slackforce’.
First there was Salesforce Channels, with Slack embedded directly into its CRM, in a step towards eliminating “fragmented workflows”.
Then, ‘Slack CRM’ brought traditional Salesforce platform capabilities into Slack, meaning you could run the CRM natively inside Slack.
So, with Slackforce Surfaces, are we really a step closer to achieving Parker Harris’s vision of never logging into Salesforce again?
Final Thoughts
The idea of never logging into Salesforce again seems as controversial now as it did when Parker Harris first made that comment. But what is certainly clear is that we can expect an escalation of integration between Salesforce products – particularly between Slack and CRM.
While we’re still logging into Salesforce today, the vision seems apparent: the creation of one, all-encompassing interface with everything you need to work directly within it.
