Lesson Info
6. Building Integrations In Slack
Lessons
Lesson Info
Building Integrations In Slack
Now I want to show you what it looks like to actually tie in some integrations and automations. So again, I want you to see this as sort of opening your eyes to what's possible with Slack, even if this particular thing isn't something that you need to do. But keeping in mind that one of the goals here is I want Slack to be the central communication hub, so you're not looking all over the different places to figure out what you need. And it will streamline the way that you actually share that information with the people that you're working with. So we have a company called Leverage, and we have a team of professionals that can do any task for any project for any business. So we have almost 200 people, that everything from graphic designers to copywriters to Facebook ads people to Instagram specialists. And when people go to our website, they can join our newsletter. So what happens is that if somebody joins our newsletter on Slack, or I'm sorry, not on Slack, on MailChimp, it will post ...
it onto a MailChimp channel, but it does something really cool, so it goes through Zapier, which I mentioned before is an automation platform, and Zapier has a lead scoring tool. So what happens is somebody signs up, Zapier scores the lead, and for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, basically, based on the information in their email address, what it can figure out about that person as an individual, and the company they might work for, it can say, like this is a really hot lead 'cause they're from a really big company, or this person belongs to an industry where revenue per employee is very high, they have 11 pieces of tech on their website, whatever it is, and in that case, it found that that person was a hot three star lead. So we have it go through Zapier, we see them come into the MailChimp channel, and they're a hot lead. So I could just leave it there if I want to, and say okay, well this person's interested in our information, and they're an important lead, or I could automate something based on that and say if we see somebody that's a three star or above, then I want to automatically send them a message and say, hey thanks for your interest. Let's have a conversation to find out what we can help you with. So that's one channel. That's the MailChimp sign up channel. So that's where they start. Now let's say that person signs up for the newsletter, they're on our website, and they actually go and they sign up for the service. So now we're going to see a post in our finance channel, because of Chargifi. So Chargifi is what we use to manage all of our subscription billing. It's a really great tool for that, and we can see that that person actually signed up. We get their name, their email and phone number, and what plan they signed up for. All of this is generated by Chargifi and put into the finance channel, and you can see from the top here too, there's six people in that finance channel. So there's me, our bookkeeper, my partner, a couple other people, and they can all see that. But, as I was showing you before, I'm not tagged in that, there's no name on that, so I don't necessarily need to get a push notification that that happened. I can just see it if I want to. But so you start to connect the steps. So they signed up for the newsletter, and then they actually signed up for the service. Now in our case when somebody signs up for our service, they are asked to book a welcome call using a tool called Calendly. So Calendly is my favorite tool for scheduling things, so you might be familiar with things like ScheduleOnce, or TimeTrade, or Doodle. With Calendly, anybody can go to a website, they can see in real time your availability, and they can sign up for an appointment, it'll put it into their calendar. So we have a Calendly integration with our welcome and onboarding channel. So they signed up for the service, they paid, and then they booked their welcome call. So in the onboarding process, we see that so-and-so has a meeting scheduled, so Florence is someone on our team. She has a meeting scheduled with that person that just signed up, so again, we're sort of watching the customer journey as it happens in real time. Now the importance of this, for us is that we have several people on our team that do welcome calls. So if this comes into the channel, we can see that somebody signed up, and somebody might see that and say, "Oh yeah, I know who that person is, "let me do the call with them, "'cause I might know something inside." Or, that person might say, "Yeah, you know, they got booked, "but I just got called into some emergency appointment, "and I can't do it, could somebody else do it?" and all the information is right there. So that's when they actually book it. But now on the day of, that they actually are going to do their welcome call, that's when this will post from Google Calendar, and have a summary of all of the calls of the day. So now we're tying in from Google Calendar, and this is in that channel. So, and then as you can see there at the bottom, once they've actually done their welcome call, they're going to post the video recording of it into the channel and take notes on it, so that everybody can discuss it. So I realize that that's a bit of a specific example, but as you can sort of see, it's a really fascinating way that you can tie all this information in together. And then what that means, as I was saying, it's a central communication hub, so at some point, if I have to find out about this particular client that we have, I can search for their name in Slack, and it will show me all of the touchpoints that we've had with them and the entire way that it went through, so I don't have to go look in Google Calendar, I don't have to look in Chargifi, or in Calendly to figure out where these things happened. And that's one of the really, really powerful things with Slack. So that's a basic overview. A slightly basic, and then slightly advanced overview of how Slack can work for you, and again the important thing to understand here is that you do need to have a separate tool from your email for communicating with that internal team, whatever it might be, but while there are alternatives to Slack, I really do personally think that Slack is the best tool for this and as you can see from this tutorial now, this will show you how you can get started and really get people working. And the one thing I would suggest very importantly, is that you don't want to let people slip into using other means of communication. You don't want them to start using Slack a little bit, and then email, and so going back and forth and going with text. You really need to make a commitment with the team that you're working with to use Slack exclusively. And I would say give it a week or so, and people will start to see the benefits. They will start to see how it's much more manageable and doesn't lead to that sort of overwhelm. So, that's the course on getting started with Slack. Thank you so much for tuning in, good luck.
Ratings and Reviews
Jose R
Definitely a good overview of some of the many possible uses of Slack. We are now using Slack in two professional organizations to improve communication among members and I will be recommending it for a third in the very near future. This training is a great start!