More than building and shipping special software is needed in a competitive business environment. From individuals to enterprises, customers expect next-level customer service.

Innovating software-as-a-service companies have already set the standard in this area using tools such as Slack Connect, which lets multiple organizations collaborate in Slack so they can share messages and files. In this article, I highlighted how four SaaS companies use Slack Connect to provide speedy customer support.

Hugo

Building stronger customer relationships for distributed teams

The Hugo app identifies notes that are related to your upcoming meetings automatically. You can compare them side-by-side or import them into your agenda.

This sharable, actionable software connects teams through sharable meeting notes as part of Hugo's mission to redefine meeting culture. According to Darren Chait, Hugo's co-founder and chief operating officer, Slack was an obvious choice for an organization that builds products to enhance collaboration and communication.

Through Slack Connect, Hugo employees can collaborate with partners, contractors, and agencies as they do with in-house colleagues.

Hugo's distributed team members have also collaborated more effectively through channels, which allows them to focus on building stronger relationships with their customers. The Hugo team shares notes from customer meetings via Slack with contractors and agency partners, enabling partners to understand the customer like in-house employees do.

Branch

How Branch uses Slack to Optimize Customer Experience

Branch enables brands to build and measure engaging and relevant end-user experiences across all platforms, devices, and channels.

In the first six months after a deal is closed, the implementation phase is the most significant factor in whether the company will be successful with your product. As SaaS is a recurring revenue model, you usually need to keep customers for 2-3 years to break even, so you need to onboard them well to burn cash due to high churn.

Slack comes into play here. Take advantage of the customer's eagerness right after signing the deal. To do this, the Branch Customer Succes team creates a Shared Slack Channel with the customer, invites the teammates (sales, CS, Implementation team, Managers, Executive Sponsor, etc.), and has their customer champion invite their teammates. This gives Branch CSMs real-time access to the customer's team members who will be instrumental in getting your Branch adopted, and it provides their engineers quick access to Branch teams to keep the implementation running.

Spotdraft

Enhancing the speed and efficiency of customer service and response times

SpotDraft streamlines the contract lifecycle in organizations worldwide— saving customers hundreds of hours reviewing contracts and doing other mundane work. It is an end-to-end contract management solution under one platform.

SpotDraft's rapid growth has led to a growing team, an evolving product, and a growing customer base interacting primarily through Slack. Furthermore, Slack's high volume of customer channels can negatively impact customer experience and productivity.

Customer success and support teams manually tracked and responded to requests before Thena, with limited visibility into the overall customer experience for leadership.

Through Thena and Slack Shared channels, SpotDraft has streamlined customer communication, reduced customer response times, and enabled cross-departmental collaboration.

“Thena bridges the gap between Slack threads and support queries seamlessly by letting us assign queries and create tickets within the thread” - Chalormee Basu CSM, SpotDraft

With Thena, SpotDraft connected Hubspot with Slack to automatically generate tickets from Slack conversations, which helps the SpotDraft CS team eliminate the back-and-forth when creating a ticket this way.

Zendesk

Bringing customers and partners together for next-level collaboration

The Zendesk sales team uses Slack's shared channels to match partners with customers. Companies like Zendesk can build credibility by recommending the best partner to their customer base and giving the partner a business opportunity at the same time by speeding this process up with Shared Slack channels.

For SaaS organizations, striving for the best customer service has benefits, including improved communication between businesses and customers and internal communication between teams. Through Slack Connect, organizations and customers can connect in the same Slack workspace, eliminating information silos and increasing efficiency.

The article was originally published on Linkedin by Gözde Görce.