Slack joining forces with Salesforce is still causing a stir. Professionals are increasingly seeing the impact Slack could have upon collaboration on the Salesforce platform. If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, some relatable use cases could help spark your imagination.
That’s why we wanted to hear from you – the Trailblazers – who can dream up creative ways Slack could supercharge your Salesforce operations.
Tell us the most exciting integration Salesforce could do with Slack.
Thank you for all of your responses – there were some exceptional ideas in the mix from our Dreamforce competition. Ideas have been categorized into ‘DevOps’, ‘Analytics’, ‘Admin Tools’, ‘Humor’, and more.
Before we jump into the results, let’s reflect on Slack innovations, that are picking up pace. Not even a month passed between Salesforce wrapping up the acquisition and launching Slack-First Customer 360, the first pre-built integrations between Slack and Salesforce, post-acquisition.
Then Dreamforce came along, Salesforce’s annual conference, that showcased these new innovations, and how they interact with other parts of the Salesforce platform for a seamless workflow (catch up on the major Dreamforce announcements, there were many!)
After categorizing and cleaning our competition submissions, here’s what the Salesforce community said (ranked by popularity order)…
Admin Tools for Slack
With Slack becoming more tightly tied to the Salesforce platform, it throws up plenty of considerations for admins to make with everything that happens ‘under the hood’. Keeping the two platforms aligned could become a challenge for already-burdened Salesforce Admins (a question in itself, does Slack become the Salesforce Admin’s responsibility?!).
Adding more functionality for Admins would be “a dream come true!” – examples include:
- Integrate Slack with Flow! The Salesforce app for Slack already creates an Apex Class (Send Slack Message) that can be used as an action in Flow Builder (and more ways to extend Flow actions). My guess is that there’s more potential here for other bi-directional actions beyond sending messages.
- User permissions: assigning permission sets or permission set groups directly on the Slack user, without going into Salesforce.
- Slack Lightning Components: a tighter and extended integration in order to develop Slack Lightning Components (which is currently possible using iframe). Even being able to create Lightning Components that are integrated to a specific Slack channel.
- Error handling: send Salesforce errors (eg. for Flows) to the Admin/s for more responsive error handling and resolution.
- Configure Salesforce to send messages to Slack channels based on record criteria (ie. when field X equals Y).
- Mention users either based on record ownership, or a lookup to a field on the user object.
Simplifying Your Tech Stack
Salesforce-to-Slack configuration: make more Salesforce-to-Slack configuration available with click-not-code. While you can get the Salesforce app for Slack up-and-running without code, it is best suited to specific use cases, with limited configuration potential; previously, customizing beyond this point required developer skillsets.
Using third-party integration platforms (like Zapier) was one option. However, with an extra platform in the mix (and an additional subscription cost), no wonder admins have been keen to ditch them and increase more declarative customization options for:
- Real-time notifications, @mentioning users, approvals.
- Sending customized notifications about closed deals, pipeline created, and more into our Slack without needing another tool to do it!
Slack for DevOps
DevOps is the term of the year, ballooning in popularity for many reasons (the new Salesforce DevOps center, Change Sets becoming inadequate for the complexity and pace of deployments). No surprise that DevOps is on everyone’s mind, even when it comes to Slack:
“Have the ability to create a ‘story’ in Azure DevOps or other DevOps tools using the @ command.” Ralph Medina
- JIRA was also called out as a prime candidate to be closely connected with Slack + Salesforce.
- DevOps Center and Slack integration, enabling deployments and CI/CD directly from within Slack.
- Salesforce’s project management with Slack-integrated DevOps for better communication.
Chatbots (Chat-to-Slack)
The phrase “Chat-to-Slack” cropped up a number of times, usually in relation to service use cases – but not limited to! We know that chatbots can adapt to serve multiple teams in the organization…
- Bot integrations for sales development, marketing, and other prospect/customer interactions. Even handling conversations as a channel until a Lead/Opportunity owner is assigned (replicating how Salesforce Queues work).
- For service, including Slack as the/one option for chat in OmniChannel.
Chat would be embedded into any website. On the internal user’s end, the salesperson/agent would communicate in Slack. This would be even better if social media channels could connect to Slack through Salesforce. Viorel Pascu, @TheViorelPascu
And Einstein Bots?
Einstein Bots combined with Slack Channels, to handle priority customer service routing (determined by service level/SLA). Conor Ebbs
Using Slack’s ability to create a Chat Bot (similar to Einstein Chat Bots) which would instantly deliver customers seeking support a response with knowledge articles. This is faster, rather than going through the whole process, where each case needs to be created via the already existing Einstein Bot. This would result in more efficient Case management, as many organizations already use Slack as their main communication channel. – Bharat Khurana, @bharatkhurana9
Record Search/Activity Management
Searching for Salesforce records from Slack is one core feature of the existing Salesforce app for Slack. How could surfacing record data go further?
Allow Slack users to edit either standard or custom object records using predefined commands directly in Slack. Even display a list view with the inline edit capability! That would be a huge win for Sales Development, Sales teams (and more), saving a lot of time actioning different records. – Andreea Doroftei
Syncing and relating activities to Salesforce records is another area with potential. Like we’ve seen with activity management in other places (Einstein Activity Management, Einstein Call Coaching) automatic call logging would be a natural fit.
Automatic call logging – for example, if you start a call in Slack with your team to discuss a potential deal, Salesforce could find the associated Lead/Opportunity record (use an id stored within the channel) and log that the call had taken place, the attendees, and even capture a summary (if Slack surfaces a text box).
Analytics
Tableau CRM has given many organizations’ analytics ‘game’ a boost. Getting the right people to look at your dashboards has been a long-standing challenge (whether built in Tableau, or using standard Salesforce reports). Could Slack be the best delivery channel?
There are more ways people imagine they can get their Tableau analytics in front of colleagues, in more meaningful ways:
- Make it easier to share Tableau content with a Tableau to Slack integration – for example, alert Slack users when certain thresholds are reached.
- Display interactive report/Tableau charts on a Slack channel.
- Report visibility and dynamic dashboard views, based on Slack channel.
And, let’s not forget about Salesforce reports and dashboards, too…
Just pull whatever data you want and share it via Slack, for example “my boss wants a report of all the newly generated leads of this month”. I could leverage an integration like this to directly pull the report out from our org and share it quickly on Slack.
Sales & Marketing (Lead/Opportunity Management)
Sales teams are a group of users that have earned a reputation for not gelling well with Salesforce, causing user adoption challenges for Salesforce Admins. Take Salesforce to where salespeople hang out. Slack instant messaging builds momentum – an adrenaline rush (!) – that salespeople enjoy.
- Automated daily briefs for sales reps.
- Embedded chats with channels, created according to Salesforce Account Teams.
When new Leads are created in Salesforce, that information gets posted into a Slack channel called #leads automatically, tagging the assigned member of our sales team. If it’s an especially hot lead, a 🔥 emoji can add a little drama. Our sales leaders can monitor any particularly exciting prospects. Our marketing team can peek in the channel and get a quick glance to see if we’re getting a high volume of inbound Leads, or assess their quality.
– Saifudin Travadi
Marketing
How about Salesforce’s marketing products?
- Pardot with Slack (already a fixture on the product roadmap) for immediate notifications on prospect interactions (somewhat like Salesforce Engage was created to do).
- Bot integrations, a native integration to Marketing Cloud.
Trailblazer Community
The Salesforce Trailblazer Community (formerly the Success Community) is all about giving each other a helping hand. The community forum uses Salesforce Chatter groups to host discussions, but we all know that Slack is far more instant, and better suited for ‘swarming’.
Already, we are seeing Slack workspaces popping up around the community. There were some great suggestions…
“Eliminate all the groups on the Trailblazer Community and instead have dedicated channels in Slack.” – Alina Makarova, @alinalimon2
“Link a user’s Slack account to their Trailhead account. This will be useful for assigning Trails for users to upskill on Salesforce, and showcasing your credentials.” – Pratiksha Rajendra Jadhav
Although Saptha’s idea is unlikely to occur within the Salesforce Trailblazer Community, with all the NLP (natural language processing) innovations that Salesforce is making to stamp out biases in technology (such as gender discrimination), implementing harassment detection could be possible…and so, why not leverage it?
“Be able to detect & report any kind of harassment on Slack (work/personal).” – Saptha Aswini Gidugu
Field Service
“A field engineer could contact the dispatch team/other engineers on Slack to seek assistance while actioning the Work Order onsite – or, to get approvals on service quotations.” – Deepak H Andeli, @deepakandeli
Mobile
The overall consensus is positive on the Slack mobile app. Eric didn’t hesitate in calling this out:
“Just imagine the possibilities with Slack and Salesforce right there, in the palm of your hands!” – Eric Dreshfield, @ericdresh
Humor
Genius.com! Rather than respond with .gifs using Giphy, a Genius integration can help you post the perfect song lyric.
Natural language processing can dig through all the lyric interpretations and symbolism and provide responses with deep meaning. Just type /genius into Slack to drop in the insight of Taylor Swift! For example…
Abby: Aw man, we got an NPS score of 1.3!
You: Haters gonna hate hate hate hate. You gotta shake it off, shake it off! – Chris from New York
Replace Chatter
Yes, I did say this rundown is ranked in popularity order – however, the frequent topic we heard most frequently was “replace Chatter”. To many people, this is an obvious response. Could the best ‘integration’ would be to add Slack within a Salesforce org, replacing Chatter?
- Bring Slack into the Salesforce interface to open chats/channels (somewhat like Salesforce Anywhere was aiming to do), and for record-level context.
- Chatter’s limitations don’t match what the future of collaboration hints at.
Or, don’t eliminate Chatter – enhance it instead…
“Enhance Chatter within the platform, for those that don’t have Slack as they use a different platform company-wide, like MS Teams.” – Penelope Gatlin, @penelopegatlin
Your Salesforce-Slack Wishlist
Which ideas did you click with? What would be on your Salesforce-Slack wishlist? Let us know in the comments!
Note: our team made every effort to reach out to respondents and ask if they wish to be credited, otherwise, ideas have been anonymized. If you would like to be credited for your response, please email support@salesforceben.com.
Comments: