Good communication is key for getting work done. Today, businesses must work together more than ever:

• 71% of teams expect smooth communication with partners
• 76% get frustrated when communication fails
• Long email chains slow down responses

Companies using better communication tools are 28% more productive than those with outdated systems.

But just sending messages isn't enough for real teamwork. Slack Connect bots help by making communication automatic and better. These smart tools improve how teams work together across different companies.

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What Is a Slack Connect Bot?

A Slack Connect bot is an automated helper that makes teamwork and communication easier between your team and outside groups using Slack Connect. It can send alerts, handle tasks, manage approvals, and connect data across systems, all within Slack. It simplifies collaboration and saves time by cutting down on manual work.

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How Does a Slack Connect Bot Differ From a Regular Slack Bot?

Slack Connect bots are a step up from regular Slack bots, with special features made for teamwork between different companies. They’re different in important ways, especially when it comes to how they work, how secure they are, and what they can do.

Here’s a quick comparison between Slack Connect bots and a regular Slack bot:

To better understand the differences, let’s look at an example:  

• A regular project management bot in Slack might connect to your company’s JIRA system, helping your team create and assign tasks internally. Within a single company - updates from such systems can be freely shared.

On the other hand, a Slack Connect bot, on the other hand, lets teams from two different companies work together on the same project. Only tasks shared between the two teams should be visible on the Slack Connect channel (and not those shared with other teams).

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What Are the Use Cases of a Slack Connect Bot?

Slack Connect bots are versatile tools that boost collaboration and simplify workflows between organizations. Here are some key use cases:

1. Project Management: A Slack Connect bot can link with tools like Jira or Trello to share updates, manage tasks, and improve communication between teams from different organizations working on shared projects. This keeps everyone on the same page without switching platforms.
2. Customer Support Automation: It can offer instant tier-one support in shared channels. They can respond to customer questions with helpful articles, gather diagnostic info, or create support tickets, ensuring quick responses and routing complex issues to the right team.
3. Onboarding New Partners: When working with new vendors or partners, bots can guide them through your processes, provide resources, and answer common questions, creating a smooth and professional onboarding experience.
4. Sales and Marketing Collaboration: A Slack Connect bot helps sales and marketing teams share leads, campaign updates, and materials across organizations, ensuring both teams stay aligned and informed.

These examples show how Slack Connect bots improve teamwork, save time, and enhance communication between organizations.

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How to Find the Right Slack Connect Bot?

When it comes to Slack Connect bots, their features can vary depending on what they’re built to do, but here are some common capabilities that make them super handy:

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Handling External Users differently

A Slack Connect channel contains users from multiple organizations. The App is installed by one of the teams. Members of other organizations are called “External Users”. A Slack Connect bot should be able to distinguish between the two sets of users.

As an example - a Welcome bot in a Slack Connect channel should only send a Welcome message to External users and not to Internal ones. Similarly - a ticketing bot for Slack Connect channel should report issues on behalf of external users and not internal ones.

AI And Automation to Handle the Repetitive Work

How much of your day gets wasted on repetitive tasks? Sending the same updates over and over or keeping track of to-do lists can eat up your time.

Slack Connect bots should handle these boring jobs for you. Good examples of these include:

• Automatically answering queries from external users from documentation
• Sending external users a welcome message when they join channels
• Automating reporting of open-issues every day (or week) for each client

Many teams save 15-20 hours every week by letting bots handle the routine stuff!

Everything in One Place

Does this sound familiar? "Wait, where did we put that file? Was it in Google Drive? Or maybe it was in that other app?" Having too many tools creates confusion for everyone.

What makes Slack Connect bots really useful is they can grab information from all your different tools—right into your conversations when you need it. Need the latest design files or project updates? The bot can fetch exactly what you need, right when you need it.

🤔 Ask yourself: Which three tools do you use most often with outside partners? These should be the first ones you connect to your Slack bot.

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Alerts on what’s important to Customers

Slack can be noisy and too many notifications are annoying. Nothing kills your focus faster than constant pings about things that don't matter.

Yet it is important to focus on messages and events that are important for customers on Slack Connect channels. A Slack Connect bot should be able to filter out important events and send customized alerts for the same. Examples include:

• A way for customers to notify about important issues
• Reminder alerts on pending responses to customers
• Alerts when a task is due to a customer and not finished.

Strong Security Made Simple

Working with outside companies always brings up security questions. How can you share enough to work together while keeping private information safe?

Slack Connect bots solve this with strong security features. With data encryption and security standards like SOC2, your information stays protected even when shared between different companies. Retaining Data only when necessary and giving administrators control over data retention.

Granular Permissions

When working across teams - only the required information needs to be shared. A Slack Connect bot should give users control over what data is shared in a Slack Connect channel - but stays private. Examples:

• An internal task, which is not accessible to external users, should not be shared
• The bot should facilitate internal notes (on Triage channels) which are not visible to customers - but visible to internal team members.
• However - links to external tasks - like a shared Product roadmap on Trello or Canny can be shared.

Engagement and Sentiment Metrics

How good are your partnerships with other companies? Without data, it's just a guess.

The best Slack Connect bots include tools that show you exactly how well collaboration is working. You can track patterns, find bottlenecks, and measure how partnerships help your business goals.

Introducing ClearFeed: Bridging Gaps Between Organizations

When teams work across company boundaries, communication can quickly become complicated. While Slack Connect offers a great foundation for cross-company collaboration, many organizations find they need additional tools to truly streamline these external relationships. This is where specialized Slack Connect bots come in to bridge the gap between basic messaging and truly efficient collaboration.

ClearFeed is an AI-driven Slack bot made for businesses that need to work with partners, clients, or vendors in Slack Connect.

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What Can ClearFeed Do For You?

ClearFeed makes teamwork between companies simple. When customers or partners ask questions in your shared Slack channels, ClearFeed can answer right away with helpful information. Your partners don’t need to wait hours for someone to respond.

Here’s what you can do using ClearFeed’s Slack bot:

1. Ticketing: Got a message in Slack that needs to be turned into a task or ticket? ClearFeed can do that. It converts Slack threads into requests or tickets and connects them to tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Jira, Linear, Clickup & GitHub. It sets up bi-directional sync between Slack threads and tasks so updates in one system are reflected in the other. This means your team can track customer or employee requests directly from Slack, without jumping between apps.
2. Internal Collaboration via Triage Channels: Want to make an internal note on a customer thread - but have nowhere to put it? That’s what ClearFeed’s triage channels are for. ClearFeed creates a shadow thread for each customer conversion on a Triage channel - where internal notes, not visible to customers, can be shared. Triage channels also make it possible for the whole internal team to be able to work on customer issues without joining each and every customer channel. Just join the triage channel!

3. SLA Alerts and Management: Being responsive is one of the top goals for any customer facing teams. ClearFeed makes this a breeze by tracking the state of each customer conversation and raising internal alerts when there’s lack of response on a customer thread. Teams can define SLA targets for response and closure time and get reports on the same.
4. Announcements and Welcome messages: When you work with multiple clients, it becomes difficult to send a message out in bulk - or to welcome new users from customer teams. ClearFeed can automatically join Slack Connect channels for you, and help you send welcome messages as soon as a channel is created or a new user joins. Users can also group channels and send announcements to specific groups when required easily.
5. Automated Answers from Knowledge Base: ClearFeed turns your Slack channels into a smart knowledge base. It indexes all your conversations and uses AI (powered by GPT) to help answer repetitive questions or assist your team in real time. It can even pull information from other sources, like Confluence and Notion, to give you a complete picture. So, instead of digging through old messages or documents, you get quick, accurate answers right when you need them.

6. Email-Slack Integration: Ever wish you could handle customer emails without leaving Slack? ClearFeed makes it possible by syncing email threads with Slack conversations, so you can reply to emails directly from Slack. Plus, it keeps everything in sync—attachments, updates, and even collaboration on email requests happen seamlessly in your Slack channels.

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Why Teams Love ClearFeed

Companies using ClearFeed save tons of time. Instead of sorting through messages manually or copying information from one system to another, ClearFeed does it for you. Your team can focus on solving problems instead of managing messages.

It also provides reports that show how well you're working with other companies. You can see how quickly your team answers questions, which partners need the most help, and where you might need to improve.

Plus, ClearFeed keeps everything secure. When you're sharing information with other companies, security matters a lot. ClearFeed makes sure the right people see only what they need to see.

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Getting Started Is Easy

You don't need to be a tech expert to use ClearFeed’s Slack bot. Setting it up takes just a few minutes, and your team can start using it right away. Even better, the companies you work with don't need to install anything special to benefit from it.

So if your company uses Slack Connect to work with clients or partners, ClearFeed could be the perfect tool to make those relationships stronger and save your team valuable time! Want to see ClearFeed in action? Book a demo with our team today!