slack connect case study

The Future of Slack Connect with Salesforce Products

In this study, UC Berkeley students collaborated with Salesforce on an end-to-end study. The study focused on how Slack Connect can become the "glue" that holds Salesforce products together and provide a 360-view of Salesforce to its users. The methodologies utilized were interviews, focus groups, and desk research.

Goal: How can Slack Connect be the "glue" that holds Salesforce products together

Client seeks to learn:

How (and for what) are users currently using Slack Connect to support the work they’re doing in Salesforce?
Where are there opportunities for us to build out new features and functionality within Slack Connect to help our customers better or more easily harness the power of Salesforce?

Research questions:

For what jobs are our customers currently using Slack Connect alongside Salesforce products?
What are the Salesforce use cases that could be made better by Slack Connect?
Where has Slack Connect struggled to be successful?

What is Salesforce?

A B2B customer relationship management platform that helps unite marketing, sales, commerce, service and IT teams.

What is Slack Connect?

"Slack Connect allows you to work with people outside your company in channels and direct messages (DMs). By moving conversations out of emails, you can work securely and collaboratively with partners, vendors, or customers"

Participants: Salesforce and Slack employees (n=10)

Time frame: 3 months

Methodology: Participants were asked questions related to our research objectives, and followed up with asynchronous online discussion threads.

Skills utilized: Interviews, surveys, desk research, focus groups

My role: I worked with Salesforce mentors and teammates to draft up research objectives and interview questions. I interviewed participants and asked follow-up questions and clarifications. I also created Figma notes and organized the participants' thoughts into distinctive categories based on pattern recognition.

Analysis

My team and I organized our research into 6 key findings. We found that our participants used Slack Connect alongside with Salesforce products to gather customer feedback, give updates/announcements, arrange meetings, track project progress, make and approve requests, and collaborate on projects. In addition, these tasks are represented by transferring info from Salesforce to Slack (or vice versa). sharing links and documents, and communicating through DMs and channels.

Suggestions

For Slack Connect to succeed, we found that our participants told us that the layout has been overwhelming and adoption rate has been lacking. One user pointed out, "The problem is - if people do not use your Slack channel or organization to communicate, each of those things decrease the ability to participate in a conversation with you".

We created a few suggestions to the Salesforce team to improve the usability and productivity of the user.

1) Overwhelming: Design interface system that lists urgent/important content in a hierarchy. Having an easier way of pinning channels (e.g., favorites, prioritization, inboxes).

2) Adoption: Incorporate Slack Connect communication without having to download the app.

3) Manual Work: Having an automated workflow that allows duplicate information to be shared easily through the Salesforce ecosystem.

Limitations: Repeated participants, async collaboration, time limitation, lacking perspectives from non-SF employee/Slack Channel admin, async focus group

Reflection

I worked on this project with Salesforce for 3-months. In these 3 months, I gained valuable insights on how to conduct research through trial and error. Within desk research, I learned the importance of researching and incorporating background knowledge into the interview questions that I created. During interviews, I learned about the benefits of asking clarifying questions, and making sure that the user feels like they are heard and respected. The analysis process was new to me because we used a different way of organizing qualitative data. I found that having good organization and communication with my teammates is important to keep track of our participants' data and discuss patterns.