Slack Is a Black Box

This is a sentiment that is often echoed by teams that use Slack for Support. While Slack is a great place for having conversations and building strong relationships with customers, it creates some new challenges. It is not possible to measure the volume of requests that flow through channels, it is difficult to understand what requests are still open, and it is difficult to gauge the performance of individual support team members.

How can we get detailed service metrics from Slack for such use cases? Before we dive into this, a quick primer on service metrics

‍

Why Customer Service Metrics?

The primary objective of customer service metrics is to improve business performance by optimizing customer experiences. To achieve the same, customer service metrics focus on these three key points

1. Maximizing customer satisfaction and retention rates
2. Provide information to devise better strategies for business growth
3. Reduce overhead costs and optimize operational efficiency

This data has to be converted into actionable insights, and it is important to know which data to collect and analyze and what metrics to track. Customer service metrics can be classified into three categories:

• Productivity: Number of requests and messages
• Performance: First response, response & closure times and % of SLA breaches
• Quality: First contact resolution rate

The availability of these metrics makes it easy to:

• Have inside  information on how well the support process are handling customer requirements.
• Have a strong visual cue of how the customer service is improving e.g. graphs.
• Identify those areas that will increase customer satisfaction/retention.
• Set achievable and  measurable targets for the team.
• Have in-depth understanding of the team’s capacity and plan for resources accordingly.

‍

Metrics in Slack

Slack does offer some metrics that give an insight into how the platform is being utilized. These metrics cover the number of apps installed, files uploaded, and the number of messages written and viewed. In addition, Slack offers insight into the activity of the members and their activity timelines.

While these insights are useful for understanding engagement, they are not suited to understanding customer service. The distinction between a customer (or a service recipient) and a responder (an agent) doesn’t really exist. There is no notion of a customer request or the response time or closure time associated with it. It is not possible to understand the breakup of activity in a given channel by its members.

‍

ClearFeed Insights

We built ClearFeed to help vendors manage requests on Slack. One of our core features is providing insights on the same. Out of the box, ClearFeed provides the following metrics:

1. Number of Requests and Messages
2. Time to First Response, Response and Closure Time
3. % SLA Breached (First Response and Closure)
4. Number of Open/Closed/In-Progress requests

The most amazing thing is that most of these metrics are automatically available with minimal configuration. Just install ClearFeed and add it your specific channels of interest, and, presto, the insights are available.

‍

‍

How Does It Work?

While configuring ClearFeed , the vendor can customize ClearFeed's integration in the following ways:

• Admins specify who the responders on any channel are.
  (Eg: all workspace members on a Slack Connect channel are responders by default).
• They can also optionally specify SLAs and business hours.
• They can also, optionally, collate group channels into Collections.

‍

Once ClearFeed is added to a channel, it receives events from Slack for each message posted on that channel. ClearFeed uses AI to sense new requests from customers and automatically tracks every such request and reply from responders. Responders can also mark requests as closed from a dashboard or on the channel by using emoticons.

That's not all, these metrics can be broken down by customer, specific agent, time, and so on. They  can also be seen at a Collection level combined across multiple channels. Detailed documentation on the available metrics and user interfaces is available here.

‍

ClearFeed Insights in Action

In the last few months, we have successfully deployed ClearFeed at many organizations. AI generated notifications provided by ClearFeed are very effective at reducing response times - and the nice thing is that customers can track this using ClearFeed Insights. The chart below shows the response time chart available via Insights at one of the deployments after deploying the ClearFeed solution.

‍

‍

One-stop Solution for Slack-Based Support

Providing support on Slack is a great user experience - but presents a new set of challenges. ClearFeed provides a complete solution for teams using Slack for Support - with AI generated task and notification queues for customer requests, bi-directional and real-time sync with support ticketing systems and detailed service metrics. If this is something you need help with - write to us at hello@clearfeed.ai and we would love to discuss how our team and product can help yours.

‍

‍