So, you are using Slack with your prospects and customers and you’re loving it--great! However, you may be at a bit of a standstill with customer engagement. Have no fear, this happens. There are several basic strategies you should deploy in order to boost communication when working with customers in Slack; create smaller communities within channels, never break conversation flow, use native gestures.

There are 5 additional methods for improving communication with customers to keep in mind. They may involve a little more effort, but they are well worth the end result; build stronger customer relationships.

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1. Share Product Value with all users frequently

Most customer success teams are running a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) with their top customers. There are few challenges with this approach:

1. Due to the significant preparation effort required, it’s limited to only the top customers.
2. QBRs are done quarterly, so the cadence may be too infrequent; missing key milestones and growth opportunities.
3. The QBR is done with a small team on the customers side. Thus, the entire user community within the company is not purview to the product value.
4. QBRs are typically done in a meeting or call which is difficult to schedule in a way that ensures maximum participation.

When using Slack channels with your customers, you can share product value more easily and more frequently. Communication channels can be personalized by user role, product usage, and participation in the channel; allowing you to reach all users with focused messages, and without the need to find time to discuss when all members are available. An added benefit is that users can reply to those messages and foster healthy conversation.

2.Use Ask Me Anything (AMA) instead of Webinars

Ask Me Anything (AMA) is a method of community communication that started on Reddit, but can be easily executed in Slack. Simply announce that your CEO or Head of Sales or Product will be available for an AMA session on a certain day, users can post questions in their Slack channel, and the guest will reply to those questions in the Slack channel.  All questions and answers will be collected, curated, and then shared with all customers to be viewed at any time. This is a great way to drive engagement, as well as increase knowledge among customers in an interactive way.  

Here are some advantages to AMA over a webinar event:

1. Async - people do not need to block time

2. It is possible to segregate the communication with each customer. There are two benefits to this:

a. Company can share company sensitive info

b. If negative feedback is provided, it is contained within the company channel and not leaked across all companies participating

3. Having it all done in a written form allows you to easily build a summary with all questions and answers that can then be shared with all customers after curation

Recommended articles: Top 3 Slack Challenges for Customer Support Teams

3. Boost your review score by asking the right people

All B2B vendors believe that reviews in sites like G2 can have a high impact on new business, which they absolutely can--especially positive reviews. In most cases, these outreach to customers for feedback is done blindly. In many instances, vendors are asking all of their users to post a review. This approach is causing the rating to be done by people that are not really using the product, and thus it does not accurately reflect the satisfaction level.  

With Slack channels with each one of your customers you can reach out selectively to users that are active in the channel and are heavily using the product.  That way, you’ll get reviews that are done by top users of your product.

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4. Know the End User and not just the admin

One of the challenges that B2B vendors face during pilots, on-boarding and on-going service is that the customer contact person is an admin and not the actual user. Their view of the product is skewed toward their needs as the admin, and may completely overlook the end user’s needs.You need all users to participate in the conversation in order to get the best insight possible into your product, and this will in-turn lead to less communication failures down the line with users.

5. Encourage vibrant customer channels

A common Slack misconception is that the volume of messages may overwhelm customer support teams. To mitigate this, they either do away with Slack channels completely, or turn every message into a ticket and shift the conversation to 1:1 email or in-app exchange.

As every sales person knows, having more conversations and more people engaged from the customer side is positive. You should always work on driving engagement and expanding the number of people active in conversation.

It is important that your customers are getting the most out of your product, and if they are not pleased, they can reach out to you with no hassle. By utilizing the strategies mentioned here, you can rest assured your customers will be fully engaged in conversation and free of worry.

Looking to increase customer engagement and gain valuable insight into your support flow? Worknet can do both! Reach out to support@worknet.ai to kickstart your journey with Worknet to revolutionize your customer support with AI.

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