Why We Love Slack
After using countless apps within our studio for communication: HipChat, Teamwork Chat, Skype even Whatsapp; but nothing ever seem to meet our thirsty need. That is until we came across Slack.
Slack is an application that enables push and pull communication with your team and tools. It is especially useful for internal business-related communication and has the potential to boost your team’s efficiency.
As you can imagine, being an integrated and intertwined team we have a lot to discuss amongst ourselves, there’s a lot happening around us that keep our brains busy. We share ideas, thoughts, articles and products, keep ourself updated about our competition, our sales activity and a lot more. We need to be informed about events from a dozen tools, we use on a daily basis. They are deeply integrated in our actions, from development, to monitoring, sales and customer support.
The Slack Way
Slack does not only provide simple chat functionality based on 1 to 1 or group conversations, but it works with the concept of channels. The vast capability of the app with the use of Bots has surpluses our expectations and the pleasing UI makes it an eye-friendly app. You can create your own channels for the topics you wish. Discussions will happen within the right channel to keep context and don’t create an overall noise for the team.
Channels can be customized by topic, team, or even by functions. They can be both Public or Private so that access can be restricted. We even ask our clients to use Slack to communicate with the team, giving them Restricted access (of course) to the relevant channels. Now, even our clients are on the loop with how their project is progressing and how the odd hurdles with their projects are being crossed. They live it. Hell, we even had clients join us for drinks after reading a post that we are all meeting up at our local for a few pints after work. (Must say this was accidental as one go the guys mentioned drinks was on him on a private channel meant for client communication only) Nevertheless that situation was far from disaster, it turned out to be more lucrative. We were just a little surprised that’s all
Introducing BOTS
Bots used within Slack has become more and more clever as the day passes. It can function complicated tasks and communicate with other external apps we use with the use of just a few command lines. Checking Calendar entry to requesting progress on a given project has become more of a game than a daunting task. Now everyone in the studio starts their day off by opening Slack to catch up on what they missed and finishes it off by thanking Slack.
Integrations
Since we have a lot of external services we interact with on our daily business, it took a lot of effort to gather all relevant information. We now use Slack to centralise notifications from all our external services. With strong integration with our accounting system, CRM system and project management system, Slack enabled us to centralise all notifications in one platform. Now we don’t have to go through all the different systems anymore, we can raise a new invoice straight from Slack, get notification for failed payments and even track client relation all within Slack.
Conclusion
Being skeptical about introducing the team to yet another messaging app, we were hesitant to start using Slack. But after using it for about a week all we can say is “can’t believe we almost missed it!” And “how on earth did we survive without this nifty little thing all these days!”
