Transforming Customer Support Delivery With Slack-Salesforce Integration

81%^[i] of businesses are now either meeting or exceeding customer expectations when it comes to delivering customer support. It means satisfactory customer support plays a vital role in keeping a business afloat. This is the reason brands seek to deliver an exceptional support experience to their customers.

The benefits of excellent customer support go beyond customer retention, offering endless business opportunities across domains including sales and marketing. But, companies need to be wary of their support spending. It is a problem if they are spending more than they are gaining through their support services. Let’s say the goal of a company is to retain customers through support. But when their support expenses are more in comparison to the customers they’re retaining, it’s not worth it.

That is why brands embrace innovative ways to cut their support expenses while delivering excellent support that exceeds customer expectations. Integrating Slack with Salesforce is one of the most practical solutions. Let’s find out how.

About Slack-Salesforce Integration

Slack is a powerful communication platform with over 10 million active users. Most brands leverage this platform to connect with their customers. If your targeted audience is already an active user on Slack, then it serves as a great customer onboarding and case deflection tool. But, it might not be the greatest platform for delivering customer support.

Salesforce, on the other hand, is one of the most popular platforms, widely used to deliver customer assistance. But with customers having to shuffle between two platforms to seek assistance, this might not be an ideal solution. The fundamental of delivering effective customer support is enabling customers with prompt and proactive assistance. But, using multiple channels to deliver support can hamper their efficiency.

That is why you need to ensure seamless integration between these two platforms. By eliminating the need for shuffling between two platforms, you enhance your support team’s capabilities and boost customer engagement.

What are the Challenges?

Some brands are still struggling to meet the expectations of their customers when it comes to customer support. Discussion forums, like Slack, are crucial to the success of an efficient customer support strategy. But the main challenge is that most companies run their support on a standard platform like Salesforce because discussion forums don’t provide adequate features for offering support services.

The standard Slack-Salesforce package provides limited communication including texts or account records. But, Slack users can’t create cases from Slack and send them across Salesforce.

So, they either have to navigate through two different platforms which increases the case resolution time. Or, customers have to navigate to the Salesforce platform to seek assistance, resulting in a significant drop in customer retention.

How Slack-Salesforce Integration is the Solution?

If your community is hosted on Slack and support is hosted on Salesforce then we have the perfect solution for you.

Enter-Heroku.

Heroku is an authorization utility by Salesforce that can help you integrate your Slack-powered community with Salesforce. This middleware enables your customers with a direct customer support experience.

Advantages of Slack-Salesforce Integration

Here’s what you can achieve by integrating Slack with Salesforce using Heroku as middleware-

1. Easy Customizations: With Heroku in place, there is great scope for easy customizations. The aim of this utility is to allow organizations to build engaging customer-centric apps. Thus, it simplifies complex use cases and workflows through easy customizations. For instance, you can change URLs later for convenience or make other customizations as well.

2. Reduced Support Expenses: With Slack, there is no limit on the number of users you can accommodate. So, as your community grows, you can allow your members and support team to create cases directly from Slack. It means you don’t have to purchase a Salesforce user license for new users. That is how it cuts down support expenses significantly.

3. Quicker Case Resolution: With seamless Slack-Salesforce integration, the cases can be sent across both platforms directly without having to log into both platforms. It fast-tracks the case resolution process and delivers a stellar CX.

Create Slack-Salesforce Integration in 4 Steps

The integration equips an organization with better and more efficient case management. Moreover, it is easy to create. Here’s how :

Step 1: Creating Your Connected App

1. To create your connected app, go to Salesforce Setup, Search ‘App’ in the quick find box and click App Manager.

2. Then, go to the Connected App section and click New. Fill out the required information to create your connected app as follows-

• Connected App Name: XYZ (enter the name you want)
• API Name: XYZ
• Contact Email: enter your email address
• Enabled OAuth Settings: Checked
• Callback URL: https://myapp.herokuapp.com/oauthcallback (it is customizable, and you can change it later)
• Selected OAuth Scopes: Full Access (full)

Don’t forget to click Save after filling in the information.

Step 2: Deploying Slash Commands

1. Login to your Heroku Dashboard and navigate to this link. Click ‘Deploy to Heroku’.

2. Now, fill the variables as follows:

• SF_CLIENT_ID: Enter customer key of your Salesforce Connected App.
• SF_CLIENT_SECRET: Enter customer secret of your Salesforce Connected App.
• SF_USER_NAME: Enter the username of your Salesforce integration user.
• SF_PASSWORD: Enter the password of your Salesforce integration user.
• Leave the rest of the variables blank including SLACK_ACCOUNT_TOKEN, SLACK_CONTACT_TOKEN, SLACK_OPPORTUNITY_TOKEN, SLACK_CASE_TOKEN, and SLACK_WHOAMI_TOKEN.

3. After deploying the app, navigate back to the Connected app in Salesforce and edit your OAuth callback URL. Use your Heroku app URL followed by /oauthcallback, like this: https://xyz.herokuapp.com/oauthcallback

Step 3: Creating Slash Commands in Slack

1. Login to Slack and navigate to Settings and Administration> Manage Apps, using the drop-down menu next to the account name.

2. Click on custom integration

3. Click on Slash Commands and then click on Add to Slack button.

4. Now, configure integration settings as follows:

• Command: /case
• URL: the URL of Heroku app you deployed followed by /case, like: https://xyz.herokuapp.com/case
• Method: POST
• Copy the token and then open a new tab on your browser. Login to the Heroku dashboard and paste the copied token into the Heroku SLACK_CASE_TOKEN configuration variable.

5. Click Save.

Step 4: Testing the Integration

Write the command in direct message in Slack: /case Subject: Description.
For instance: /case Test Case: Test Description

Open Salesforce and see if ‘Test Case’ is created.

Salesforce – Slack integration is your best bet if you wish to improve your customer support. With Heroku in place, you allow your support team to create cases directly on the slack on behalf of clients and push it to Salesforce. It results in a quick case resolution process and enables your clients with superior support experience.

References
[i] https://www.nextiva.com/blog/customer-service-strategy.html