Our Business Runs on the Combination of Salesforce and Slack

We are huge fans of Slack. I think we were one of the early companies to join the beta. It’s an easily-backed statement to say that our business runs on the combination of Salesforce and Slack. Sure, we use other tools; but none as much.

Slack is our principal means of communication throughout the company. I receive very few internal only emails – the majority are external with prospects or our partners. In fact, once a prospect becomes a client, most of our communication moves to Slack! That’s an incredible statement.

A Channel for Everything

First off, we have channels that everyone gets subscribed to: announce, general, random. We have team specific channels: devs, sales, operations, architects, poobahs (product owners and business analysts), marketing, leadership, and directors. We also have a significant amount of “interest” channels like: cooking, marchmadness, sportscenter, politics (always good to have a water cooler on the way, way, way far side of the office) and fastcars. As a distributed company, random conversation area is important, but the noise can overwhelm. Allowing our team to create spaces to talk is crucial for keeping CodeScience personal and friendly.

From a working perspective, we are a professional services company and work on an enormous amount of concurrent projects. To engage our customers, but also handle the sometimes colorful process of sausage making, we have standardized on creating two Slack channels for every client: clientname-internal, clientname-client. This approach allows us to have internal conversations with just our team members and a channel that includes our clients. The separation is essential to our culture: we provide white glove service to our customers and collaborative spaces for our consultants.

Bots and APIs Shine a Light

A variety of bots and API integrations keep our company focused on what’s truly important, including:

1) Every closed won opportunity from Salesforce gets posted to our announce channel, with details on hours, hourly rate, total value, and a description of the project. It allows the delivery team to know what is coming down the pike and prepare for the next big assignment. And even more importantly for our culture, the delivery team gets to celebrate our sales team and cheer them on to greater success. As a sales person, your team cheering you on is the 2nd best feeling in the world (c’mon – that commission check is always #1). If you want this service out of the box, check out Troops.

2) We utilize AskNicley for NPS surveys to our clients every month. The responses from AskNicely post to a channel. Nothing focuses a company on customer satisfaction like exposing the NPS surveys to every single employee. It’s amazing to see a group of highly-trained professionals jump up and down to celebrate a win or jump up and down to try and fix a score below an 8. Seriously – give this a try. It will change your company’s approach to customer satisfaction overnight. (AskNicely has an API integration to Slack.)

3) Any employee can nominate either a team member or client for extraordinary efforts in their performance to receive a “Minion of the Moment.” For CodeScientists, the recognition includes swag and an immediate $100. These nominations post in our #announce channel for everyone to see. It’s heartwarming to see the company celebrate the success of individual contributions. We use Zapier to connect Salesforce to Slack for this one.

Final Thoughts

If Salesforce is the platform, then Slack has become the glue to keep our distributed company and clients close and encourage our corporate values. Bots and APIs are essential tools to automate the process of recognition for many of CodeScience’s moments. How are you using technology to ensure your company culture flourishes?