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 their requests while managing internal tasks is a balancing act that support teams often struggle with. Lost 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.
How to Set a Reminder in Slack?
Slack allows you to set reminders for yourself or a whole channel to help you stay organized and remember important tasks or dates. This feature can be used through the /remind command and proves particularly useful if you want to recall a personal task or broadcast a task or event to a group in a channel. The reminder will then appear as a message from Slackbot at the designated time. There are two major ways you can use this:
Personal Reminders: You can set reminders for yourself about anything, from a to-do list item to a deadline for a particular task.
Example: If you want Slack to remind yourself to file taxes by tomorrow, you can type /remind “file taxes” tomorrow.
Once you set the reminder, Slack will either confirm it directly or prompt you to specify a time, acknowledging your command as follows:
Channel Reminders: You can set a reminder for all members of a specific channel. This is especially useful for team meetings, deadlines, or highlighting important updates.
Example: If you want to remind your content team about a weekly meeting scheduled for every Tuesday at 10 AM, you can type: /remind #testing_content Weekly Meeting every Tuesday at 10 AM.
Note: Slack allows you to set recurring reminders effortlessly by including specific phrases in your command. You can add phrases like 'every day,' 'every Monday,' 'every weekday,' or even 'every two weeks' in your /remind command.
- For a daily reminder, you would type: /remind me to send a daily report every day at 5 PM.
- For reminders needed every specific day of the week, such as Monday, you would use: /remind me to plan the week every Monday at 9 AM.
- If you wanted to remind yourself of something every weekday (Monday to Friday), you could use: /remind me to check emails every weekday at 8 AM.
- For reminders every two weeks, you might command: /remind me to submit timesheets every two weeks on Friday at 5 PM.
These examples have two main components after the /remind keyword: one is the task you want to remember (e.g., 'send daily report'), and the other is the time and frequency in which you want to be reminded (e.g., 'every day at 5 PM').
How to List Reminders in Slack?
As Slack reminders can be personal or channel-specific, there are designated methods to view them. To check your reminders, visit the 'Later' tab, where all active reminders are listed under the In Progress section.
Within this section, you can mark your reminder as completed, make any necessary modifications should your plans change, or delete it when needed.
To display channel reminders, click View Reminders or enter the command /remind list within the specific channel. Next, Slackbot will present the reminders designated for that particular channel.
Slack Later: A New Way to Manage Reminders
In March 2023, Slack launched an enhancement to the reminder feature named "Later." This feature allows users to manage their reminders more efficiently, providing a single place to view, manage, and complete reminders. Now, whenever a user creates a reminder, it will appear in the "In Progress" tab, where they can monitor their active reminders and mark them as "Complete" once they've addressed the respective tasks.
Moreover, Slack integrated the "Save for later" feature into “Later,” further streamlining the user experience. Despite their setup differences, "Save for later" and "Reminders" serve a similar purpose—helping users remember tasks or important information after a period. As a result of this integration, any reminders or saved items now appear under the "Later" tab in the Slack app. This consolidation ensures an organized approach towards managing reminders, making it easier for users to keep track.
How Do Slack Reminders Make Customer Support Efficient?
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
2. Aids in Task Prioritization
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.
3. 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.
4. Improved Response Times
When clients wait 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
What Are Some Missing Features in Slack Reminders/Later?
Reminders and Later are great features that help Slack users become more productive. However, there are a few features that customer service teams wish they already had but don't. Read on to find out.
- Automatic reminders for messages requiring response: Slack cannot auto-set reminders based on customer messages that need responses, as it doesn't recognize the distinction between customers and agents or customer-generated questions.
- Message urgency recognition: Another limitation is Slack's inability to gauge the urgency of a message and adjust reminder delivery speed accordingly.
- Multi-recipient and external tool reminders: Slack does not provide the option to send reminders to multiple individuals or integrate with external tools like PagerDuty for streamlined notifications.
Would you love to get these features? No worries, we've got you covered!
Using Reminders on Slack Effectively with ClearFeed
Reminders in Slack can significantly aid in staying organized, especially when your job constantly warrants adaptability. Yet, if you're using these reminders solely for routine tasks, you might not be tapping into the full value of this functionality. Say hello to ClearFeed, a Slack-integrated app that empowers you to unlock the potential of reminders, enabling you to manage customer operations better and amplify customer experiences.
With ClearFeed’s Slack Alerts, you can:
- Keep an eye on all your Slack channels, reminding you of open requests and pending customer responses.
- Send reminders about unanswered questions directed at you and any pending responses from others.
- Configure SLA (Service Level Agreement) breaches in real time based on response priority and daily summaries of pending action items.
By utilizing these features, you can ensure teams stay on top of their communications and incoming requests, improving the overall efficiency of customer service operations. Want to see how we can help you? Get in touch with us today.
