How to Use Slack Reminders to Make Customer Support Easier

No matter what you do, conversing with customers in Slack is hard. There will always be conversations with different time zones, work schedules, and vacations. Responding promptly to customer requests while managing internal tasks is a balancing act that support teams often struggle with. Lost customer requests or missed follow-ups can significantly impact customer satisfaction and retention.

Customers might feel ignored, and employees might feel overwhelmed by the volume of queries. These scenarios lead to unhappy customers and frustrated employees — not a winning scenario for any business.

Customers dissatisfied with a company tell twice as many people about their poor customer service experience than those with positive experiences.

Source:  CCMC

The solution is simple: Use Slack reminders to schedule follow-ups on user requests so that no one gets overlooked.

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How Do Slack Reminders Enhance Customer Support Efficiency

Slack reminders are a simple yet effective way to improve customer support efficiency. They provide context-specific reminders for your team members so they can focus on what's important: keeping customers happy.

The following are some ways that Slack reminders can help enhance customer support efficiency:

1. Streamlines Workflows: As a business, you want to ensure that every customer request is handled promptly, whether big or small. But if you're not careful, it's easy for some inquiries to fall through the cracks. That's where Slack reminders come in!

They'll help you organize your workflow so that every inquiry gets the personalized attention it deserves—and with Slack reminders, all of your follow-ups are scheduled automatically, so there's no need to remember what needs doing when.

63% of consumers expect customer service agents to be able to empathize with their unique needs and expectations.

- Source:  Salesforce

1. Aids in Task Prioritization: We know that customer support is all about the team. You need to be able to work together, and you need to be able to trust each other—but that's not always easy when your team has so much on their plates.

Using Slack’s reminder feature, you can assign and prioritize tasks among team members, promoting a fair and balanced approach to workload dispersal in the customer support team.

1. Enhances Time Management: Slack reminders are a great way to ensure your team members meet their deadlines and keep track of their tasks. They can be set up to remind you or another member of your team about impending or overdue tasks so that you never have to worry about forgetting an important deadline or task.

This minimizes the chances of a customer experience going awry. In addition, it helps your business avoid potential legal issues by ensuring that all communication with customers is timely and comprehensive.

1.  Improved Response Times: When your clients are waiting for a response, it can be demoralizing. They might think that you're ignoring them, or they might just be frustrated by the inconvenience of waiting.

The idea of remembering to do something is enough to make you feel like you've forgotten to do it. A simple reminder system can help to alleviate these problems and improve response times to your clients' inquiries.

‍12% of Americans say they are most frustrated by customer service reps who move too slowly.

- Source:  Statista

Related Read: Learn How ClearFeed Reduces First Response Time by 20% with Slack Reminders

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How to Easily Set Up Reminders in Slack?

Type/remind me [message] [when] into your Slack or direct message to set a reminder. The message appears in bold with a counter underneath indicating the time remaining until your reminder goes off.

Another method to add a reminder is to select the option ‘Set yourself a reminder.’

The Reminder appears in the Later section, where you can edit or mark it complete.

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4 Ways Support Teams Use Reminders to Be More Productive

Slack reminders can be very useful in various circumstances, particularly for tasks that require memory or time management. Here are some potential scenarios when you may want to use Slack reminders:

1. Task Management: With the reminder feature, you can set an automated notification for any action item that needs completion. It's as easy as checking a box next to the task and entering how far before the due date you'd like the reminder to appear.
   If you or your team need to follow up with a client or colleague later, you can set a reminder to guarantee you won't forget.

‍Related Read: 5 Slack Task Management Apps You Should Be Using for Your Support Team

1. Meetings: Slack reminders will remind you of upcoming meetings, so you don't have to keep them in your calendar or on your mind. You can set reminders for one-time or recurring meetings, like weekly standups or monthly check-ins.
2. Recurring Tasks: Slack reminders are useful for any task that needs to be completed regularly. If your work requires daily tasks, like checking in on customer support tickets, responding to customer emails, or weekly tasks, like updating reports or checking in with clients, a Slack reminder ensures those tasks aren’t overlooked.
3. Sending Important Announcements: If you need to send an announcement at a specific time when most of your team members are online, you can set a reminder for it.

Related Read: How ClearFeed Makes Announcing New Product Updates More Simple

Slack reminders are, on their own, not that useful.  Sure, they're a great way to keep track of things you need to do, but what if you could leverage your reminders for more than just remembering?

ClearFeed helps support teams to enable AI-assisted reminders in Slack so that they get to see the bigger picture of customer management or support team productivity. With this feature, support teams ensure they never miss out on vital but hushed details, such as forwarded tickets and private messages from customers who may require quick responses for your business. Read on to learn more about how it works.

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How ClearFeed Improves Slack Collaboration with AI-Assisted Reminders

Reminders are simple: You enter a note, a time, and a date. Sounds simple enough, and it is! But did you know there are many features you can access to make Slack reminders the best they can be? We at ClearFeed love Slack and the feature set behind our reminders for support teams. Here’s a quick breakdown of what you can expect:

1. Prevent customer requests from slipping through the cracks by checking Slack communication and keeping track of open queries, unaddressed customer issues, and pending responses.
2. Emphasize unanswered questions intended for you, bring attention to unfulfilled promises you've made, and monitor unresolved replies. This guarantees efficient follow-up actions and significantly reduces the possibility of communication gaps.
3. Enable real-time alerts based on priority levels for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) breaches. These immediate notifications and daily summaries of pending issues maintain your team's adherence to established SLAs.
4. Set reminders for particular discussions in Slack and mute notifications based on your needs. This ensures conversations are adequately addressed without being overwhelming.

Want to give us a try and improve your support team collaboration with customers? Contact us today to learn how ClearFeed can help your business.