Slack CTO Cal Henderson told SiliconRepublic.com that online tools are becoming more important as they represent an organisation’s ‘digital HQ’ in the world of distributed working.
Slack has today (27 April) introduced a set of new products and integrations designed to make the platform easier to utilise in tandem with Salesforce.
Salesforce acquired messaging app Slack in 2021 and planned to integrate it into the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) tech. Since then, Slack has also launched a suite of tools for hybrid and remote workers as part of the company’s bid to capitalise on the digital-first workplace trend.
Today’s product launch is geared both towards workers who want to use Slack and Salesforce together more seamlessly, as well as developers who want to bring their own Salesforce apps directly into Slack.
The launch took place at Salesforce’s annual developer conference, TrailblazerDX. Ahead of that event, Slack’s CTO and co-founder, Cal Henderson, spoke to SiliconRepublic.com about what workers can expect to gain from the new updates.
According to Henderson, the new integrations – which include the integration of Salesforce’s core CRM product Sales Cloud with Slack – will enable sales teams to automate the process of working with a customer. “You can pull your Salesforce data like customer records, contacts and accounts, into Slack where you’re having the discussion about them,” he said.
The other two integrations are Service Cloud for Slack and Marketing Cloud for Slack. The former automatically assigns service cases to team members as they come in, and makes it simple to bring in the right experts to solve customer cases efficiently. While the latter enables teams to quickly collaborate and execute on marketing campaigns.
Henderson said the efforts to integrate the two platforms were necessary for distributed sales teams and workers who have become accustomed to working on a digital-first basis with their colleagues.
Since the pandemic, the concept of a company’s “digital HQ” has become increasingly as important as its physical office, Henderson said.
“The set of technology tools that you use is really the experience people have of your company,” he said, pointing out that even banking has become digitalised to such an extent that most peoples’ impression of their bank’s customer service comes from how effective its technology is.
“It’s not about the physical manifestation any more and I think that’s true for most knowledge workers, because that’s how they interact with their colleagues. It’s how they interact with their management or HR. Everything is digitally mediated.”
Henderson said Slack and Salesforce’s goal is to “play a very important role” in helping workers form customer relationships through tech as well as improve the efficiency of communication between distributed teams.
Updated, 11am, 28 April 2022: A previous version of this story said Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020. The deal was announced in 2020 but the acquisition took place in 2021.
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