How to use Slack for customer support

Slack as a customer support platform

Slack is used by 750,000 organizations around the world. Slack is particularly popular for its vast array of integrations with almost any app you use at work. Slack engagement is much higher compared to any other chat platform. Users spend 9 hours per work day on Slack. So essentially Slack is where your team is. It is a hub for all communication and it helps to have one place where you can reliably find and communicate with your entire team and customers. When you add Jira Slack integrations, you can automate frequent actions into micro-interactions that perform the same action in a fraction of time. A simple example is updating the status of a request.- you no longer have to wait for a web page to load search for the specific issue you want to update and then perform the action. The issue that needs your attention comes to you in an actionable compact message format and all you need to do is push a button.

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Benefits of setting up a Slack based Helpdesk

Friction free ticketing 

1. Add an emoji to convert Slack messages to Jira tickets 
2. Automatically capture all Slack discussions in relevant tickets
3. Automatically answer repetitive requests
4. Collect feedback in instantly in Slack 
5. Automatically share ticket updates in Slack
6. List all open requests with status in Slack

Unified triaging

7. Triage all incoming requests in one channel 
8. Discuss and collaborate with relevant team members in Slack

Insights in Slack

9. Share ticket metrics and customer satisfaction
10. Streamlines approval workflow 
11. Provides better visibility on their requests 
12. Conversational ticketing is much visible and easy to track than traditional ticketing

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4 ways to support customers in Slack

In dedicated Slack channel for customers

The idea here is to create a dedicated channel for each customer and declare ownerships of the channels at different times of the day. Some companies like Fastly provide this model as a perk for their premium enterprise customers. Slack channels make life easier for your customers and your team. Instead of splitting the team across various platforms like email and phone calls, everyone can see every ongoing issue immediately. If a different team member from the product, engineering or other teams needs to help out, they can jump in right away and the customers can see that whole team is working towards solving their issue.

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In common Slack channel for all customers

This common Slack channel is created to solve all the customers requests and to update the latest information or discount about the products or services. In this channel all the customers and team members of different specializations have to be added to solve all kinds of customer requests. Customers get better visibility of their requests progress in the Slack channel.

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In direct message channel with Troopr

Slack connect lets you securely message anyone, no matter where they work. Invite someone by email and you will get a notification when they join your channel. With Troopr you can suggest articles through Confluence for customer requests if none of them solves the issue. Create Jira requests directly from your customer Slack conversations. After solving the request Troopr assists you in collecting feedback from customers directly in the Slack thread.

Getting started with Slack Connect 

1. Create the channel Click on the + button next to channels in your sidebar. Name the channel and click create.

2. Send an invitation to customers Send your customer an email invitation right from Slack, or copy the link provided and share it with your customer.

3. Wait for customers to accept the invitation When your customer clicks on the link, they’ll be taken to Slack, where they can accept the invitation and set up the channel at their end.

4. Get admin’s approval Get the Slack admins’ approval from both sides. 

Benefits of Slack Connect to customer support teams 

1. Provide a direct line of support to your customers

2. Enables cross-functional collaboration by bringing the right experts in the loop on both sides

3. Maintain all the customers’ context in one place letting the team members working on the next shift take over the work

4. Embracing the conversation features of Slack Connect means your customers' interactions feel more natural

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In a community workspace

You can create a dedicated workspace inviting your customers and support team to join and collaborate with each other. Slack opens doors for complete transparency, direct customer interaction and feedback, the ability for the customers to give feedback on the new releases. Customers with concerns and questions could get responses from other customers. You can also create a community for insights and tips, where you can add links to blog posts and product pages to turn prospects into customers. 

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Setting it up 

Connecting Slack to your ticketing system - it's free!

If you are a Service Desk agent and tired of redirecting your users to Jira service management  then Troopr is for you. Troopr helps users easily integrate Slack with Jira service management. After onboarding Troopr in Slack channels customers can create Jira requests with a single click. Support agents no longer need to login in the complex and tedious Jira help desk to pick the requests. They can also pick  requests from the Slack channels itself; any update in Jira requests in the Slack channel will automatically update into Jira service management.

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Connecting Slack to your knowledge base - it's free!

If you are a support agent, HR or senior professional your time is extremely precious. Answering repetitive questions in Slack channels would take your valuable time away from working on more important tasks. Onboard Troopr to easily integrate Slack and Confluence. When employees or customers have questions, it's likely that the answers exist somewhere in your knowledge base but they may not know where to look. Having a Slack Confluence integration is a powerful way to put knowledge in place where questions are asked repeatedly. Troopr Slack bot for Confluence returns a link to the document and employees or customers get convenient access to their answers without having to leave Slack. This removes the need for human intervention for simple tasks like responding to repeated/common questions.

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Inviting your customers

Invite your customers to a dedicated or common Slack channel through the Slack connect feature. where Troopr is onboarded.

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Support experience for customers

Answering requests with knowledge base articles

Confluence is a popular Atlassian team wiki tool to manage information around your business in one place. It is easy to add content to Confluence, however accessing and surfacing knowledge from Confluence can be a challenge. This is unfortunate as this results in Confluence being underutilized and lowering ROI. With Slack becoming the center of communication for modern workspaces, it makes sense that this platform should play a key role in knowledge collaboration. 

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Automatically suggestions

Troopr automatically suggests matching articles for every message in the Slack channel from Confluence. It ensures that your employee queries are answered immediately

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On demand 

When Troopr answers does not resolve the request, you can trigger a search on the request on-demand and share the appropriate result as an answer in the channel.

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Filter requests

Troopr has a feature to filter Confluence articles This can be done by 

• Matching type
• Matching scope

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Matching type

Use loose matching to find articles where any of the keywords or phrases in the message match or use tight matching to match articles only when all keywords or phrases match.

Matching scope

Confluence pages will be found based on matches found in selected fields of the page.

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Tracking request 

Customers do not need to visit Slack again and again to check whether their request is resolved or not. Troopr sends them an immediate notification when their request is resolved.

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Advanced setup options

Customizable emojis

With emoji actions, Troopr lets people in your Slack workspace use multiple emojis to create or update Jira requests from Slack. These emojis are customizable.

Setting up agent channel for HelpDesk team

Agents spend a lot of time manually copy pasting customer requests from Slack to Jira which reduces their valuable time to solve other issues. Let Troopr take care of this tedious work by automatically updating customer Slack requests in Jira service management. Any updates or changes made in Jira service management will trigger an immediate notification in Slack. 

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Collecting customer feedback 

With Troopr HelpDesk, support teams can collect customer feedback instantly in a Slack thread after solving a Jira request.

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Updating FAQ from Slack

Most of the customers ask the same questions. Responding to them one by one in Slack channels is mandatory. 

For example: How can I create tickets in Slack?

This is one of the most common asked questions by customers. Instead of replying to them manually, most of the organizations save answers for this question in Confluence and instruct customers to search there, which can be time consuming task. 

Troopr automatically suggests matching articles for every FAQ in the Slack channel from Confluence. reducing work for both support agents and customers.

Tracking open requests

With Troopr, once Slack conversation is turned into a Jira request. customers can track the issue assignee, priority and status of the request by just typing the issue key in a Slack conversation.  

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Workflow steps

Slack workflow builder is a visual tool to automate everyday tasks without writing any code. You can simply choose how you want a workflow to start, then go through a step by step process to decide what happens next. Troopr integrates with Slack's workflow and enables users to easily build automations with Jira. 

Best practices

Setting up customer support helpdesk in JSM

Setting up a customer's support helpdesk in Jira service management has many advantages when compared to traditional supporting methods . In Jira service management all Jira requests are aligned properly with all information such as priority of the request, created date, request type, reporter, assignee and time to resolve. which makes it easy for the support teams to get better visibility of the request. Support teams can easily assign requests to different teams depending on the type of requests. JSM allows users to monitor the workload given to the team members and customer feedback can also be known in JSM with average rating and user reviews. With JSM, support teams can filter Jira requests by their status.

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Setting up knowledge base in Confluence

Doubts in the progress of the project have to be cleared only by the senior employees of the project or by the search engines both of these methods are time consuming. Senior employees are usually busy working on projects, solving someone’s query reduces their work efficiency, and it takes a long time to find the right answer in search engine pages. Troopr Slack bot for Confluence returns a link to the document and employees or customers get the convenient access to read the answers without having to leave Slack. This removes the need for human intervention for simple tasks like responding to repeated or common questions.